Then, over the winter, he stopped eating at home. He started carrying a weapon. And he began attending a mosque. His opinion of the American occupation hard-ened, and he started calling himself a Mahdi fighter.
His father tried punishing him, and once kicked him out of the house. His brother begged him to stay indoors. But he was killed 10 days later, leaving the question of why he was willing to risk his life.
Many Iraqis, even those sympathetic to the insurgency, dismiss the Mahdi fighters as thugs.
"They are not an army," said Yahya al-Obaidi, 33, a Sunni shop owner in Baghdad, where Mahdi fighters staged an attack on Tuesday. "They're just a bunch of dis-organized men."
Adnan Hussein said his brother was "a brick in the wall" of other young men looking for meaning in their lives.
In contrast to the Sunni fighters of Fallujah, who are bound by a fierce patriotism and Arab nationalism, the Mahdi militia members seem to fight more out of personal loyalty to Al-Sadr. Muhammad said she backs Al-Sadr because he "wants to be useful to the poor people who have suffered so much."
Residents of other Baghdad neighborhoods say that easy-to-get jobs would deflate much of the fervor that has built up around Al-Sadr. The cleric seemed to acknowledge as much when he told mediators in private talks last week that he was ready for his army to be used as a type of "social organization" for public works projects, and not for fighting.
In the home of Muhammad Hussein, though, the grief is still fresh. The television has not been turned on since Hussein died. His father, 77, most days does not get out of bed. His brother Adnan is looking for a way to take his lutes and teaching to Syria.
He is still trying to understand his brother's choice.
"It was his own world," he said. "It was wrong. But there was something inside him that needed it."
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