by CHRIS TOENSING
[from the July 2, 2007 issue]
National chauvinism -- specially vis a vis Arabian culture and people -- has always been a serious flaw of Iranian culture, Iranian intellectuals, and their long-laid claims to universal validity. This is a great article with it's focus on Arab Shia or as the article suggests Persian ghosts in Arab lands (remaining unclaimed by Arab Nationalism and Pan Arabism -- as well as Iranians). Many references to Vali Nassr's Shiaa Revival (thanx Bahman) as well as other recent books on the topic.
In the middle months of 2006, as Iraq plunged into what increasingly looked like civil war, a new parlor game captivated the cognoscenti. Which Iraqi Muslims are Sunnis and which ones are Shiites? And which ones are on America's side? The questions could be asked of people throughout the Islamic world--particularly given the undercurrent of intra-Islamic strife during last summer's Lebanon war, when Saudi Arabia led Sunni Arab regimes in denouncing the "adventurism" of Shiite Hezbollah and Iran--and the answers seemed far from trivial. So the smart set was both bemused and appalled to learn, via the investigations of
Congressional Quarterly gumshoe Jeff Stein, that the FBI's national security bureau chief mistook Hezbollah for a Sunni party and that Representative Silvestre Reyes, new Democratic chair of the House Intelligence Committee, thought Sunni Al Qaeda just might be Shiite.
As if on command, the nation's newspapers and magazines generated a flurry of "refresher courses" on the two main branches of Islam. The primers, though sometimes adopting a lighthearted tone, usually closed on a serious note. The general upshot was to tacitly ascribe the real difficulty in Iraq (and the region as a whole) to an epic quarrel between Sunnism and Shiism over "the soul of Islam." The cover story in the March 5 edition of Time was exemplary for its forthrightness: "Why They Hate Each Other: What's really driving the civil war that's tearing the Middle East apart." One could find the proximate cause in any number of events following the US invasion, Time writer Bobby Ghosh conceded. "But the rage burning," he continued, "has much deeper and older roots. It is the product of centuries of social, political and economic inequality, imposed by repression and prejudice and frequently reinforced by bloodshed." And though "the hatred is not principally about religion," it dates all the way back to 632 AD, when the Prophet Muhammad died before designating a successor and a vocal minority championed his cousin and son-in-law Ali. Ali eventually served as the fourth caliph, but enmity between the partisans of Ali (in Arabic, Shiat Ali, the expression eventually rendered in the West as Shiites) and Sunnis was cemented after 680, when the son of the governor of Syria killed Ali's son Hussein at the battle of Karbala in modern-day Iraq. For the Muslims who came to be known as Shiites, the caliphate had been unjustly wrested from the blood relatives of the Prophet.
There is something convenient, of course, about the invocation of a primordial discord among Iraqis to explain "what's really driving" the ever-widening cataclysm in Iraq. If they have hated each other since 632, after all, it cannot be anyone else's fault--and certainly not America's--that they are killing each other now. (One is eerily reminded of Robert Kaplan's claim in Balkan Ghosts that the war in Bosnia was driven by ancient hatreds--a claim that gave one influential reader, President Bill Clinton, a pretext for delaying intervention on behalf of Bosnian Muslims facing ethnic cleansing.) Some ardent war supporters, like Charles Krauthammer, have espoused this narrative as one more prophylactic against admitting errors of their own. "We have given the Iraqis a republic," Krauthammer archly observed, "and they do not appear able to keep it." Depending on one's perspective, the Sunni-Shiite split can be a reason for the US military to stay indefinitely (to prevent mass slaughter) or for Defense Secretary Robert Gates to tell Iraqi officials "the clock is ticking" on the US deployment (because Americans' patience with the war is wearing thin) or for the troops to depart as soon as possible (because Iraqis are bent on internecine squabbling no matter how much the United States "gives" them). More than one erstwhile Republican chest thumper in Congress, seeking to justify opposition to President George W. Bush's "surge," has taken the blame-the-Iraqis trail blazed by Democrats seeking "phased redeployment."
Middle Eastern affairs outside Iraq's borders, meanwhile, resist comprehension through the prism of sectarian tensions. A more circumspect hawk than Krauthammer, David Brooks recently lamented that not even civil war in Iraq can distract "self-destructive" Arabs determined to blame Israel for everything. While Hezbollah is resented by many Sunnis in Lebanon and feared by Sunni Arab states, the Shiite party (along with its Iranian patron) has long been popular among ordinary Sunnis from Algiers to Cairo to Gaza City--and never more so than while standing its ground against Israel (and its American patron) in the summer of 2006. Surveying the scene of Washington's "two alliances," with a Shiite-dominated government opposed by a Sunni insurgency in Iraq and with Sunni Arab governments confronting feisty Shiites in Lebanon and Iran, Edward Luttwak discerned a strategy of "divide and rule, the classic formula for imperial power on the cheap. The ancient antipathy between Sunni and Shiite has become a dynamic conflict, not just within Iraq but across the Middle East, and key protagonists on each side seek the support of American power." Luttwak holds this strategy to be the accidental byproduct of the Bush Administration's ideological crusade in Iraq; he is right about that, even if he is smugly cavalier about the consequences. But in the Middle East, a sizable swath of public opinion, given voice by Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah himself, believes the consequences to be intentional.
The grim realities of intercommunal civil war and sectarian cleansing in Iraq are inescapable. Despite the "surge," Shiites are regularly blown up in marketplaces and mosques, often in the name of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, and young Sunni men are still falling victim to Shiite death squads. The 2 million Iraqis who have fled their country tell reporters and aid workers of being marked for murder because of their sectarian affiliation. There is no doubt, as well, that Sunni-Shiite tensions across the region are higher than at any time since the Islamic Revolution in Iran--and perhaps before. One obvious reason is the Iraq War, with its empowerment of self-consciously Shiite religious parties in Baghdad, many of whose leaders whiled away their long exile in Iran before tailing US tanks back to the Tigris, thus pushing the hot buttons of Sunni Arab governments and the street at the same time. Another is the corresponding rise of Iran, much of whose hard-line leadership harbors the original revolutionary aspiration to lead the Islamic world, not least in its quest for the nuclear fuel cycle. But does something else lie beneath it all?
Vali Nasr, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, has an affirmative reply. The success of his bestselling and increasingly influential book The Shia Revival has earned him multiple invitations to testify before Congress, a place on the program of a June 2006 Council on Foreign Relations symposium on the "Emerging Shia Crescent," easy access to op-ed pages and even a profile in the Wall Street Journal. According to the Journal, evangelical leader Richard Land, a rally captain of Bush's electoral base, stopped Nasr after a Washington briefing to tell him, "That was the most coherent, in-depth and incisive discussion of the religious situation in the Middle East that I've heard in any setting." Added penitent neoconservative Francis Fukuyama: "The problem with the current Middle East debate is it's completely stuck. Nobody knows what to do. Vali Nasr offers a plausible alternative that may gain traction."
That alternative consists of a diagnosis of the region's ills and a prognosis for US grand strategy. The malady is what Nasr calls the "age-old scourge" of the Sunni-Shiite conflict within Islam--or, more precisely, the thousand-year oppression of Shiites by Sunnis, manifested at both the official and popular levels. Throughout history, most Muslim rulers, including the overseers of the powerful Umayyad, Abbasid, Ottoman and Mughal empires, have been Sunni. One formidable Shiite dynasty of the past, the Fatimid, was eventually vanquished by Sunnis, while another, the Safavid, spent most of its existence battling the Sunni states on its frontiers. (A third, the Zaydi imamate in Yemen, was isolated from the Muslim heartland.) The Shiite clergy in Sunni-dominated lands holed up in the mountains of southern Lebanon and in the shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala, desert towns that were fairly remote until they were linked to the Euphrates by canals in the nineteenth century. There the clerics mostly refrained from becoming involved in affairs of state, awaiting the appearance of the Prophet Muhammad's descendant, the Mahdi, who they believed would unify Muslims under righteous religious and political authority once more. Nevertheless, since the sack of Abbasid Baghdad by invading Mongols in 1258, allegedly facilitated by a Shiite vizier named Ibn Alqami, the scribes of Sunni courts have tainted Shiites with the odor of perfidy. Medieval Sunni writers also spun the apocryphal tale that a Jew named Abdallah ibn Saba first advanced the notion of the Shiite imamate with his insistence that Ali, assassinated in 661, would one day return triumphant. Nasr relates a few examples of how this state hostility filtered into the minds of the Sunni masses. In Lebanon, Shiites are said to have tails; in Saudi Arabia, Shiites are held to discourage potential dinner guests by expectorating in the soup pot.
Today, Sunnis outnumber Shiites roughly nine to one, and most majority-Muslim states, while nominally secular, are Sunni-identified. A great virtue of Nasr's book is to illuminate how Sunnis' majority status has subtly distorted the way Westerners talk and think about historical and political trends in the Middle East and South Asia. Many Western travelers to the Ottoman Empire absorbed the prejudices of Cairo and Istanbul, where Shiites were seen, at best, as a curiosity, practitioners of strange, impassioned rituals that contrasted markedly with the austere Islam of the urban Sunni elites. It was not until 1959 that the rector of the al-Azhar mosque/university, the most prestigious center of Sunni religious learning, issued a fatwa recognizing mainstream Shiite jurisprudence as a fifth school of Islamic law alongside the four Sunni traditions. In the United States, from the 1979-81 Iranian hostage crisis until quite recently, one could see the residue of old stereotypes attached to Shiites in the use of the word "Shiite" as a synonym for "fanatical" and even in such unfortunate popular slang as "holy Shiite." What persists, as Nasr shows, is the tendency to conflate Islam and Sunnism. The "Islamization" that has swept countries in the Arab world and South Asia since the 1970s is really the spread of Salafi strains of Sunnism, by which Muslims are enjoined to emulate the practices of Muhammad's original followers--a category that, in many Salafi minds, excludes the Shiites by definition. Where there are sizable Shiite minorities, as in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, "Islamization" has had a sharp sectarian edge.
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Richard Rorty. Photo: Suhrkamp Verlag
