Selected readings:
- The Myth of the Sectarian Middle East
- Coexistence, sectarianism and racism – an interview with Ussama Makdisi
- Boundary making and sectarianisation in Syria 2011-2013
- Making and unmaking of the greater Middle East
- Revolutionary uprisings against ‘neoliberal sectarianism'
- Secularists, Secularism and the Syrian Uprising: Part 1, Part 2
Sectarian war?
Claim: "most of the wars in the Middle East are religious based wars."
The biggest war in 20th century Middle East was the Iran-Iraq war. Predominantly Shi’a soldiers from both sides fought against each other. How was that sectarian?
The "mihna", an 18-year period (833–851 CE) of religious persecution instituted by the 'Abbasid Caliph al-Ma'mun where religious scholars (such as Sunnis and Shias) were punished, imprisoned, or even killed unless they conformed to Muʿtazila doctrine, until it was reversed by al-Mutawakkil.
Sunnis and Shias were persecuted? Sectarian war?
The Ottoman-Saudi war (1811-1818) was fought among Sunnis. Mohamed Ali of Egypt fought Wahhabis. All were Sunnis. The Saudis, who would form the nation a century later considered it as the first struggle for independence from the oppressive Ottoman Empire, and continued to view Turkey with suspicion. The current state of Saudi-Turkey relations are still influenced by this hostile past. To the present day, both Saudi and Turkish nationalist writers accuse each other of engaging in systematic campaigns to rewrite history. Sectarian war?
I think you are a typical example of those who got sucked in the sectarian narrative propagated by the dominant ideology, without questioning it or have read an alternative point to fatcs on the grounds. It is something convenient, especially for the Western audience who already forgot the background of all what is happening and reinforces their perception about the Other, the barbarian migrant.. and for the major Western regimes (the Atlantic ones) to extricate themselves from being major players and responsible in destroying Iraq and supporting authoritarian regimes over decades.
First you need to distinguish between sect and religion. Second you need to distiguish between the surface and the social forces and actors on the ground, their objectives and the powers backing them. The great divide in the Middle East is not sectarianism. Here are a few questions:
How come that most of the Syrian Sunni bourgeoisie/capitalists stayed in Damascus?
When was the last time we heard Al-Asad of Syria (or his spokesmen and women) saying he was waging a war for Islam?
When was the last time we heard general Hafter in Libya shouting Islamic slogans?
Do you know the proportion of the sunni soldiers in the Syrian army? In 2011, the majority of the Syrian military were Sunni, but most of the military leadership were Alawites. So the Sunni soldiers were fighting the Sunni rebels. Sectarian?
How come that the Sunni Kurds waged a long and fierce battles against the Sunni "Islamic State"? Between 10,000 and 11,000 Kurdish fighters died in the process.
How come that, besides the Houthis, Sunnis are killing each other in Yemen? The UAE Armed Forces and Saudi forces fought Al-Qaeda.
How come that Al-Sadr, a Shi'te in Iraq, has opposed Hizbollah's and Iran’s involvement in Syria? Hizbollah is Sh'ite, is it not?
The Ba’athist police state in Syria has played an ambivalent role in the region: supporting Hezbollah in Lebanon, sheltering the Hamas [Sunni] leadership for many years, but effectively resigned to Israeli occupation of its southwest and siding with the US against Iraq (Sunni regime].
Sadr’s bloc; made of his forces, a majority of elected Sunnis, and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP).
In 2017 Al-Sadr called for Bashar Al-Assad to step down.
How come that the same Al-Sadr allied himself with the Iraqi Communist Party in 2018?
See also the events of 2022
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-62719497
How come that Qatar and Turkey, Sunnis, are having proxy wars with Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Each pair is supporting opposite sides?
How come that a Suni group has just taken over the Sunni government in Adan, Yemen?
How come that the "Islamic State" (Sunni) fought against the Syrian rebels, who are Sunni?
How come that the Islamic State has been fighting the Taliban (also Sunni)? Taliban – Sunni – has been fighting IS – another Sunni.
A much later report from Small Wars Journal said that in "..2013 and 2014 the 7th Division of the Iraqi Army, 99% Sunni, fought IS (also Sunni) virtually alone, until it was almost completely destroyed."
How come that Iran had supported Sunni fighters in Afghanistan while Saudi supported other Sunnis in the same war?
How come that in 1971 West Pakistan (Sunni) committed ‘a genocide’ against the Bengalis (also Sunnis) for the latter’s call for self determination?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_Bangladesh_genocide
How come that Iran has supported the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas, both are Sunni organisations.
(Look, for example, for "The Middle East's Great Divide is not Sectarianism" 11 March 2019)
When Taliban took Kabul in 2021, the only country that really knew what was happening was Iran, because officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) were with the Taliban as they walked in, according to Iranian sources close to the IRGC.
Historically, the colonial powers too, mainly France and Britain, supported one sect against another. Then the nationalist revolutions of the 1950 and 1960s did not do away with sectarianism because the modernisation project , unlike in the West, stopped half way, for internal and external reasons I can go through in another reply if you wanted.
In short, you did away with the fundamental divide that ignited the Arab uprisings. No single uprising from the first in Tunisia to the ongoing ones in Algeria and Sudan raised the banner of Islam or sectarianism. Interestingly enough, the coalition of the Sudani opposition advocated in their constitutional proposals not to include the word Islam.
The decision taken by Ankara (Sunni) in 1990 to support the western and Arab coalition against Iraq (ruled by Sunnis/seculars) following the invasion of Kuwait.
It is hardly surprising that the nation-state model so often fails – there have been about 200 civil wars since 1960.
See also Ali Abuddallah Saleh alliance with the Houthies.
See also the Turkish regime’s relations with the Syrian one: from opposing it during the uprising and the war to rebuilding relations in 2022.
After a decade, on 19 October 2022 Hamas leaders met Assad in Damascus to normalise ties.
See also the 1860 civil conflict in Mount Lebanon and Damascus.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_civil_conflict_in_Mount_Lebanon_and_Damascus
Hamas’ relationship with the Syrian regime.
In 2022 “Bahrain has, under the umbrella of the Chinese-sponsored Saudi-Iran rapprochement, moved towards normalising relations with Iran — despite the fact that Iran has long had a territorially revisionist approach to the archipelago kingdom and backs the country’s opposition groups.”
In 2023 “Saudi Arabia appears to have begun applying this binary geopolitical logic to relations with its long-term regional antagonist Iran, allowing China to broker a rapprochement that has restored diplomatic ties between the two states after a seven-year break.”
In June 2022, “reports surfaced in the Qatari press that China was co-ordinating naval collaboration between Saudi Arabia, Iran, the UAE, and Oman in the Persian Gulf.”
State actions and interests that confirm Fred Halliday’s arguments and approach to the region. It is about states rather than ‘sects’ or religion.
From my discussion with an Italian – Aldo
Facebook messenger, Summer 2021
Saudi Arabia is a mix of theocratic rule and capitalism, dictatorial but cannot be categorised as fascist. We don’t see the Saudi monarchy claiming the superiority of the Arab race and working on invading the whole region to subjugate it.
The Shi’a-Sunni sectarian war is a convenient description that the dominant media outlets have propagated for the Western audience to exonerate the imperialist invasion and the destruction of Iraq, from which ISIS emerged. It is an easy and lazy explanation of the events, instead of blaming the Asad regime and the counter-revolution forces, regional and international, that helped put the brakes on the Arab uprisings. After all, Libya is in turmoil although it doesn’t have the two main sects. “Sunnis” have been killing each other. And one of the main reasons it is in turmoil is thanks to NATO’s intervention.
Arabs are unfit to carry out change or a revolution on their own, Western “humanitarian intervention” is always a cover to prevent a real change, and if necessary, preserve the old regimes (e.g. Egypt).
In Egypt a “Sunni” regimes has been killing fellow “Sunnis”.
“Muslims killing each” is I think misses the point because whether in Syria, Libya, or Yemen, the conflicts are not religious. Otherwise, we would say that not long time ago European Christian were killing each other for 5 years in the biggest slaughter in such a short period in human history.
Just some examples:
— Some Alawite (Shi'a) generals and officers defected from the Syrian army at the beggining of the uprising and joined the Free Syrian Army.
— The Sunni bourgeoisie in Damascus is not fighting Assad.
— The main force which has been fighting ISIS on the ground is a Kurdish one. The Kurds are Sunnis and ISIS fighters are Sunnis, too.
— Many Syrian Sunnis who have been displaced because of the war have fled to "Shiite" areas. They haven't been killing each other.
— The root causes of the Syrian war was the neoliberal capitalism that Al-Asad’s regime embarked on, neglecting the country side and enriching his family and friends in the process.
— The rest is geopolitics. Example: The Northern Alliance in Afghanista, although it included some Shiites, was mainly led by a Sunni-Tajik, Ahmed Shah Masoud. The Aliance was supported by Iran, among others such as Pakistan and the US. Masoud was assassinated by Taliban, a Sunni organisation.
We should not forget the nature of the system put in place by the US administration in 2003. Commonly called the muhasasa system, it defined political representation based on communal belonging through ethnic (such as Arab or Kurd), sectarian (Sunni, Shi’a) and religious (Muslim, Christian and other) affiliations.
More here:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-middle-easts-great-divide-is-not-sectarianism/amp
Serious analyses, including a collection published by the London School of Economics, where I teach, have called the uprisings The Arab Thermidor, in which the fundamental aspect is the political economy of the the authoritarian states, not “sectarianism.”
But once “sectarianism” was repeated everyday on European TV and papers, it stuck in the mind of the people as the truth and the only truth.
According to the historical facts from Vietnam and Indonesia, from US-backed coups from Iran to Latin America, from Afghanistan to Iraq, the number of people killed and the democratic movements/governments overthrown, puts the US as the biggest terrorist state.
However, given that the dominant liberal ideology monopolises concepts of “freedom” and “democracy”, the dominant narrative is that the American state is not terrorist. Furthermore, since the American regime and its allies (Italy, Britain, Israel and others), is an ally of some dictatorships, it is also complicit in those crimes committed by states such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. But ‘state terrorism’ (state violence) according to the bourgeois discourse does not apply to ‘democratic states’. In fact, imperialist states consider their actions, i.e.violence retaliation. Thus they are victims of non-state actors. Here we have historical and power relations facts, including the political-economy of violence, turned upside down.
The last of these crimes was the coup in Bolivia.
The Sunni-Shia presence in the countries you mentioned does not make the conflict sectarian as it has been portrayed by the capitalist media. That is why serious academic studies do provide a very different analysis based on authoritarianism, state institutions, counter revolution, etc. But who reads serious academic studies or research nowadays. The comparison with the Thirty Years War in wrong.
I would fundamentally disagree with that approach. The class issue has been always predominant. One has to read the history of the region in the 20th century from the Iranian revolution that was not based on religious power to Iraq, Syria and Egypt before it. You could “pacify” Iraq with an agreement between the main sects, but as we have seen recently the class character of the uprising in Iraq did not have a sectarian outlook. The same thing in Iran where hundreds of people were killed before the pandemic. They protested not with religious slogans, but protested for jobs and other social and political issues such as corruption.
This approach of agreement between sects is similar to the argument about gender equality approach that puts more women in high positions of the state or the IMF and keep the capitalist social relations intact. There is Sunni bourgeoisie and a Shiia bourgeoisie. The richest man’s power in Iran, Rafsanjani, in not based on religion, but on wealth. I can go on and on with examples like these.
The agreement of power sharing between sects is a liberal view that opposed what Paul Bremer did in Iraq when he destroyed the state instead of uniting Sunni and shiia bourgeoisie in sharing power.
Hizbullah in Lebanon is in a power sharing agreement in Lebanon. We know the consequences of that agreement. We have a failed state in the country. Hizbullah is pursuing neoliberal capitalist policies in its projects and among its shiia community.
I have used the word fundamental, but I do not exclude other factors like religion, regionalism, nationalism, etc.
One of the greatest Lebanese thinkers and activists, Mahdi Amil, wrote about confessionalism, but he grounded it in the crisis of the bourgeoisie that it was unable to create the material grounds that marginalise sectarianism or do away with it.
If our reference is the Western societies, then the story of the nation state and capitalism and the path those Western states took, tells us that sectarianism and ethnic conflicts were suppressed with unification. The process sometimes was through violence by the state sometimes through marginalising ethnic communities. (See Thomas Mann's The Dark Side of Democracy)
In some countries like Spain the nation state is not very solid. The Catalan example is a case in point and during a crisis it might lead to a division. There are other examples.
In the Arab case, division and sectarianism has persisted because of the failure of state capitalism to unify the countries in one nation. The colonialists played one sect against the other. France in Syria, for example.
Then they helped install friendly monarchs. When the 1950 ‘revolutions’ came, the Arab bourgeoisies in Iraq, Syria and Egypt were weak.
As for people’s religiosity, I think there is a lot of misrepresentation of Arabs and Muslims. The Arab-Muslim character is contradictory in this respect. One could be a believer, but has never prayed. One of my brothers and a cousin drink alcohol and sleep with women when they find the opportunity. The same cousin who when he had been made unemployed for 8/10 years, he confessed to me that he thought of going to Afghanistan!
In 2001, the Tunisian Government distributed condoms to students for free. The same applies to many women. So, it depends on the country, the region and the city.
In Iran more than 70% of the youth do not pray.
People on their daily lives make all sorts of rational decisions when it comes to budgeting, teaching their kids to get a good job, learn scientific subjects at school and on TV. But at the same time they believe in Allah, fate and afterlife.
Men and women watch half-naked Lebanese pop singers on TV. How religious is that?
Two years ago, and published by BBC Arabic, the mayor of Beirut put on the streets girls wearing shorts as traffic policewomen. I have never seen or heard of such a thing in a Western city.
Not a single religious slogan or banner was raised when the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Libya, etc began.
The word “religious” itself has be qualified. Conservative a bit better to use. Then there are many different colours and shades of conservatives.
Muqtada al-Sadr, a leading shi’ite in Iraq, made an alliance with the communists a year or so ago. At the same time, he is a conservative with a conservative project for Iraq. I don’t know whether he would break with capitalism or not. He used the Shi’s rhetoric of equality and defending the downtrodden.
That applies not only to Italy. Consumerism (of goods, movies, games, cheap travels and holidays for the masses, etc) as predicted by Gramsci, and the repackaging of what “freedom” means in neoliberalism (even exporting its concept of “human rights” and “democracy” to “liberal” others) have made illiteracy pervasive despite the abundance of knowledge. That is one of the successes of the form of capitalism of the last 40 years.
The apparent Shi’a-Sunni rivalry is
1. a geo-strategic war of influence between states. Old powers, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Egypt, have seen new ones, UAE, Qatar and Turkey, joining the fray in the context of a threat of revolution. After all how to explain Sunni states opposing each others: Saudi Arabia and UAE vs Qatar and Turkey?
2. States whip the fervour of nationalism. That’s what is at play, not sectarianism. Lebanon despite of what’s happening has not descended into a civil war.
3. The Islamic State (Sunnis) fought long battles against both the Syrian rebels (Sunnis) and the Jihadists (also Sunnis). The main force that defeated the Islamic State was the Kurdish (nationalists, leftists and Sunnis). In the last protests in Iraq that took place during the pandemic Iraqi Shi’ites were chanting slogans against Iran and demanding that Iran stop interfering in Iraq. Many Tunisians, including people in the government, (Sunnis) supported the Syrian regime (Alawite).
4. Why were not such form of conflicts when the Arab nationalists were in power? No one was talking about sectarianism. Up until the late 1970s it was the US and its allies that were supporting the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and other forces to counter Arab nationalism.
5. The current rivalry is not between countries but between regimes. Without toppling those regimes through revolution, cannot be a solution. That process had begun in 2010 because the fundamental contradiction is between the state/regimes and the people.
But as you said, you are already “convinced” that the character of the conflict is sectarian. There is no point to discuss it more.
And how does one explain that the majority of the Syrian army was Sunni soldiers and fought against a Sunni majority?
The examples that prove the geopolitics are many. Here is one more: Iran (Shi’a) funds Hamas (Sunni).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran–Palestine_relations#Support_for_Hamas
Iran supported a Sunni faction in Afghanistan
The Norther Alliance that was fighting the Taliban was Sunni-dominated alliance that got the material support of Iran and Turkey.
My focus is on the so-called sectarianism that the Western media propagated since the aftermath of the invasion of Iran and with the war in Syrian.
That invasion by a ‘secular’ state (US) and what followed killed hundreds of times more than what capital punishments in Iran and Saudi Arabia have.
And the number killed by the Syrian regime (called ‘secular’ by the Western media and politicians) way beyond what capital punishment has killed on the whole region since formal independence.
Speaking about Shari’a and hudood is another subject that is not really related to the causes and consequences of the ongoing conflicts.
I can go through the shari’s in the Arab countries and it is not black or white. It depends on the country. That’s another subject altogether. Example: only in the last two years that an article related to homosexuality in the Lebanese constitution was removed. Guess what? It dated back to the French colonialists who wrote it. Before that there was no laws forbids homosexuality. It was not accepted, but not forbidden by law.
Addressing the neoconservative Hudson Institute on 20 October 2023, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stressed the importance of ‘sheltering democracy’ – a nod to Ronald Reagan – from those who seek to destroy it. The twin crises in the Middle East and Ukraine, she said, ‘call on Europe and America to take a stand and to stand together . . . Vladimir Putin wants to wipe Ukraine from the map. Hamas, supported by Iran, wants to wipe Israel from the map’. Der Leyen, a liberal, unintentionally, refutes a liberal argument of the Shi’a-Sunni divide. Iran supports a Sunni organisation. Some have even argued that that divide is a centuries-long one.
The Houthis [a Shia movement] have declared their support for Hamas [a Sunni movement] and have said they would target any ship travelling to Israel.
Hezbollah has been supporting Hamas against Israel albeit limitedly. Nasrallah called the war in Gaza a "purely Palestinian battle" in a speech in November 2023.
In comparison, the Tutsi minority carried out a genocide against the Hutu in Rwanda in 1994.
“The UAE also provides invaluable services to another American foe [besides Russia]: Iran. Ports in Fujairah facilitate the crude shipments which allowed Tehran’s oil exports to jump by 50% in 2023. Abu Dhabi orchestrates sizeable re-export flows, while Dubai provides shadow banking and import arrangements. Official statistics show the UAE conducting around $25 billion worth of trade per annum with Iran, earning it second place on the latter’s bilateral ledger, without factoring in an estimated $10 billion worth of illicit exchanges.” https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/capitals-emirates
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