This paper examines the distribution of charity by a Shi‘i political organisation – the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), formerly called the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). Notwithstanding the case of the Lebanese Hizbullah (Judith Harik, 1994 & 2005) and the still understudied Iranian bonyads (Suzanne Maloney, in Parvin Alizadeh, 2000; David Thaler et al., 2010), the literature is overall silent on the charitable dimension of Shi‘i political groups. One contribution of this paper is therefore to provide another case study of the practice of charity, one which ISCI conducted in exile until the 2003 regime change in Iraq mainly for Iraqi refugees and at home afterwards. In both cases, the organisation’s social and philanthropic role has been intertwined with its primordial political function, structurally and in practice. While the politicised conduct of charity has been thought from a clientelist perspective (Nizar Hamzeh, in Alterman and Von Hippel, 2007) based on the distribution of material rewards, I prefer to conceptualise it in terms of loyalty (Yossi Shain, 2005) and analyse the symbolic construction of identity and collective solidarity through charitable work. Because of the visibility it confers on the service provider, charity is a platform for an organisation to project and reformulate the vision it holds of itself towards its constituency. ISCI has linked the representation of its role to a narrative related to Iraq as a way of compensating continuous negative perceptions about its pro-Iranian orientation and lack of national credentials. It has combined welfare services with the display of symbols of solidarity related to the recent history of Iraqi Shi‘ism (in particular the Najaf-based religious leadership of the 1960s and 1970s) and to the shared experience of persecution at the hand of Saddam’s regime between the organisation’s leadership and common Iraqis. In exile, the practice aimed to support ISCI’s claim to be the legitimate representative of the Iraqi people and to confirm the rightfulness of its struggle against the illegitimate Iraqi regime. In the post-2003 Iraqi context, the charitable institutions affiliated with ISCI used similar religious and political symbols to engage in intra-Shi‘i competition over charity, while also integrating a more universal discourse about human development. To analyse the politicised representation of ISCI’s charitable function, the paper relies exclusively on primary material coming from within the organisation and affiliated charities (newspapers and other outreach material, websites, interviews conducted by the author, and personal observations).