::::All experts on this topic agree he was a secular leader and that his islamism was a pretext.  Your claim that secularism was a pretext is not supported by any reliable source of which I am aware.  If you have one, please cite it and we can add a sentence or two to the article indicating that one source thinks otherwise.  And you probably already know this, but "Arab" is not the same as "Muslim."  Anyway you still haven't defended your change to the article, which had nothing to do with this discussion  the discussion about Saddam's islamism is engaging perhaps but irrelevant to the change you were making.