The system capacity and performance of multicarrier code-division multiple-access (MC-CDMA) communication systems can be significantly enhanced by jointly employing MAP-based multiuser detection (MUD) and channel decoding techniques. In this paper, a group-oriented soft iterative MUD based on the combination of smart antennas and iterative MAP-based MUD is presented. The proposed method is featured as a novel technique for further increasing the system capacity and performance. In this method, all the users are first grouped into several groups according to their impinging direction of arrivals (DOAs). All users with similar DOAs are classified into the same group and then low-complexity MAP-based iterative MUD is employed in each group. Because spatial filtering cannot suppress all the interference between the groups, interference cancellation among the groups is used prior to MUD within each group. It is shown that the proposed group-oriented soft iterative MUD algorithm can significantly reduce the computational complexity compared with the conventional optimal MAP-based MUD schemes. It is also demonstrated that the performance of the proposed algorithm can approach that of a single-user coded MC-CDMA system with an antenna array in additive white Gaussian noise and frequency selective fading channels.