46 | the world today | april & may 2017

It’s politics, not piety, stupid Seeing the Middle East as Sunni v Shia is too simple, writes Alex Spillius

Review

religious practice. Central to their theory is that authoritarian leaders, whether monarchs, supreme leaders, military generals or perennially elected politicians, have fanned the flames of sectarianism as a means of self-preservation.

In the chapter on Syria, Paulo Gabriel Hilu Pinto charts how the protests against Bashar al-Assad started in March 2011 with peaceful calls for democracy and fair government from a cross-section of Syrian society – Sunnis, Alawis, Druze and Christians.

From the outset, the Syrian president’s tactic was to

Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle EastEdited by Nader Hashemi and Danny PostelHurst, £20.00

The former US president Barack Obama and Republican Senator Ted Cruz don’t agree on much.

On the causes of violence in the Middle East, however, they do concur. In his final State of the Union address last year, Obama stated that instability in the region was ‘rooted in conflicts that date back millennia’. Cruz, an arch conservative from Texas, had previously declared that ‘Sunnis and Shiites have been engaged in a sectarian civil war since 632’.

The views of Jon Stewart, the liberal TV comedian, and Bill O’Reilly, a right-wing pundit on Fox News, also rarely overlap. But Stewart told his Daily Show audience that the last time Sunnis and Shia co-existed was in AD 950. O’Reilly, more crudely, observed that the ‘Sunni and Shia want to kill each other. They have fun … they like this.’

More highbrow pundits and commentators, such as The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman and the BBC’s Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen, or academics such as Joshua Landis, are also among those who describe the conflicts in Syria, Yemen or Iraq as essentially sectarian, intractable bloodbaths rooted in Islam’s 7th century schism between the followers of the

Prophet Mohammed. The purpose of Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East, a collection of essays edited by two Middle East experts, Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel, is to show that blaming sectarianism for the current disorder in the region is a misleading over-simplification.

The intensity and scale of sectarian turmoil in the Middle East today is unprecedented, they argue, a recent phenomenon with modern causes and explanations.

In a joint interview with the two authors for The World Today, Postel, assistant director of the Middle East and North African Studies Programme at Northwestern University in Chicago, said that explaining a conflict by its supposedly ancient roots ‘makes you sound like you have a deep historical understanding of the region, but the irony is … you are misreading history quite badly’.

Sectarianism has become a convenient catch-all in large part because of ‘intellectual laziness’, says Hashemi.

One contributor to the book criticizes Jeremy Bowen for his description of Saddam Hussein as the ‘Sunni strongman who fought Shia Iran’. Given that Saddam was a dictator who killed anyone who got in his way whatever their creed or ethnicity, and who once collaborated with the Shah’s Iran and invaded Sunni Kuwait, Ussama Makdisi, professor of history

at Rice University, asks: ‘What does this phrase actually mean?’

Postel, a former journalist, and Hashemi, a Canadian of Iranian descent, have collaborated before on books on Iran’s Green Movement and the Syrian conflict.

As they became embroiled in the Syria debate, they realized that sectarian tension was becoming an excuse for western, and especially American, inaction and indifference towards the Middle East at a time of unprecedented instability. Another book was required.

Hashemi, director of the Centre for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver, said: ‘These views fall back on longstanding stereotypes. They show a cultural negativity towards non-western people, who supposedly have a difficult time coming to terms with modernity, whose problems don’t have a rational explanation and which are all rooted in ancient history.’

They coined the term ‘sectarianization’, because they concluded that today’s conflicts have been subjected to a process whereby tensions are exploited by state and non-state figures holding strong, power-seeking agendas. As they argue in a forceful introduction, this is much more about politics, not piety.

Where faultlines between the sects do exist, they have much more to do with prosperity or political prominence than simple

Iraqi women walk past a mural decorating a concrete blast wall in Baghdad

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the world today | april & may 2017 | 47

It’s politics, not piety, stupidSeeing the Middle East as Sunni v Shia is too simple, writes Alex Spillius

Review

events in Iran, Shias asserted their rights and their political identity. General Zia ul-Haq meanwhile tried to shore up his political base by appealing to Sunni Islamists.

Another turning point was the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, where social and political tensions long restrained by a dictatorship were rapidly unleashed and transformed into a gory sectarian civil war. That, in turn, helped Sunni extremism spread into Syria.

Historically, there may not have always been sweetness and light between Sunnis and Shias. More narrow and extreme forms of Islamism, dating back to the 1930s, have exacerbated sectarian tension.

But there have been long periods of peaceful co-existence, as the richly textured histories of Baghdad, Beirut, Damascus and Aleppo attest. Ardent doctrinal disagreement and sporadic aggression is very different from today’s paroxysm of violence.

None of this will get Hashemi or Postel a guest slot on the O’Reilly Factor any time soon. But they hope that their book reshapes the debate on the Middle East in a manner that jettisons easy explanations and begins to look for well-informed solutions, however challenging those may be. It deserves our attention.

Alex Spillius is a media consultant and former diplomatic and Washington correspondent of The Daily Telegraph

portray a popular rebellion as a Salafist plot against the Alawite-led regime. Deploying a ‘selective use of repression’ he aimed to give the protesters the singular identity of Sunni terrorists.

Some Sunni clerics ‘took the regime’s bait’ and spread tensions further. Regional forces entered the fray and within a couple of years the conflict was fully ‘sectarianized’. In the Islamic State group, Assad found the enemy he wanted.

Similarly, Toby Matthieson sets out how Bahrain’s Arab Spring protests were non-sectarian at first. But in a febrile atmosphere the Bahraini authorities were able to fan sectarian flames, portraying the street protests as a Shia plot to overthrow

the Sunni ruling elite. In Yemen, the region’s

newest conflict, there was ‘nothing inevitable about the sectarian dimension of the conflict that is currently destroying the county’, according to the political scientist Stacey Philbrick Yadav.

She describes how key transitional institutions brokered by the Gulf Cooperation Council after the 2011 uprising paradoxically ‘helped to produce the sectarianized conflict they now aim to resolve’, by favouring one group over another.

When the rebellion began there was common ground between the Sunni Islah opposition party and the followers of the Zaydi form

of Shia Islam in the north, as they both sought improved political accountability. That has now been obliterated. She writes that the process of polarization was aggravated from an early stage by the Saudis, who justified their involvement in Yemen’s internal affairs as a necessary bulwark against Iranian expansionism, even though there was scant evidence of that.

Progressively, both combatant domestic groups adopted more divisive language and began to ‘effect punishment along sectarian lines’.

‘These conflicts became sectarianized and took on a life of their own,’ says Hashemi. This is the great danger for the Middle East – the sectarian genie is well and truly out of the bottle.

The authors map today’s multiple convulsions not to the year 632 but to 1979 and the response by Saudi Arabia and other Sunni authoritarian regimes to the overthrow of the Shah.

To stop radical political Islam from spreading, the Iranian revolution was portrayed as a distinctly Shia, Persian phenomenon based on a corruption of the Islamic tradition. No expense was spared in a propaganda war which deeply affected Sunni-Shia relations regionally. Pakistan, with its vocal Shia minority, was an early battleground where this tension played out in the final two decades of the 20th century. Emboldened by

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