Why sunni shia fight

The bleeding in Syria or Yemen would not stop if Sunnis and Shiites would suddenly agree on who was the rightful successor of Muhammad.

Looking at the sectarianized conflicts of the Middle East through the lens of a 7th century conflict is therefore both simplistic and misleading. Ian A. Merritt Friday, April 1, This lazy narrative of a primordial and timeless conflict needs to be replaced by serious analysis. And that should be one that looks at what the Sunni-Shiite sectarian contest has become in the 21st century: a modern conflict in failed or failing states fueled by a political, nationalist and geostrategic rivalry.

These sectarian conflicts have become proxy wars between Iran and Saudi Arabia, two nationalist actors pursuing their strategic rivalry in places where governance has collapsed.

What is happening is not the supposed re-emergence of ancient hatreds, but the mobilization of a new animus. The instrumentalization of religion and the sectarianization of a political conflict is a better way of approaching the problem, rather than projecting religion as the driver and root cause of the predicament. Sunnis and Shiites managed to coexist during most of their history when a modicum of political order provided security for both communities.

In other words, the two communities are not genetically predisposed to fight each other. Intermarriage was common. So was George Antonius, the great historian of Arab nationalism. In Iraq, carved by the British out of three Ottoman provinces, a poor, largely rural, Shia majority, a Sunni minority, and the Kurds were the predominant groups.

Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, tried to co-opt them all; all were oppressed. In , when Saddam was overthrown, Iraqi Shia celebrated by invoking the martyrdom of their revered Imam Hussein at the hands of the Sunni Umayyads at the battle of Kerbala in In Bahrain, the Sunni Al Khalifa dynasty rules over a Shia majority denied its rightful place in the system, but Manama blames Tehran for fomenting unrest.

Saudi Arabia similarly accuses Iran of causing trouble in the Shia-dominated east. In both cases the accusation masks genuine local problems. Over the past four years the vicious war in Syria has amplified sectarian sentiment so that Alawites are now identified en masse with Bashar al-Assad and Sunnis with the opposition. But disputes exist of course within sects while other ties transcend religious identity. Al Jazeera's Mehdi Hasan put together a very nice video debunking the myth that Sunni-Shia sectarianism is all about ancient religious hatreds and explaining how modern-day power politics, beginning in , is actually driving much of the sectarianism we're seeing right now:.

RealityCheck : The myth of a Sunni-Shia war. Hasan's video is especially worth watching for his illustration of just how modern the Sunni-Shia political division really is. Now here come the caveats: This is not to say that there was never any communal Sunni-Shia violence before Nor is this to say that Iran and Saudi Arabia were the first or only countries to cynically exploit Sunni-Shia lines for political gain: Saddam Hussein did it too, and so have some Islamist groups.

I want to be careful not to overstate this and give the impression that Sunni-Shia lines were completely and always peaceful before , nor to overstate the role Saudi Arabia and Iran played in turning Sunni and Shia against one another.

But it is very much the case that Sunni and Shia differences have only quite recently become such a defining issue for the Middle East, and certainly that they have become so violent. And it is very much the case that the Sunni-Shia divide has widened for mostly political reasons, due to the deliberate and cynical manipulations of Middle Eastern leaders, and not because Middle Easterners suddenly woke up one day and remembered that they hated one another over a seventh-century succession dispute.

For much of the Middle East's modern history, the Sunni-Shia divide was just not that important for the region's politics. In the s and '60s, the leading political movement in the Middle East was Arab nationalism, for which Sunni-Shia distinctions were largely irrelevant. And in the s, for example, the biggest conflict in the Middle East was between two Shia-majority countries — Iran and Iraq — with Sunni powers backing Iraq.

Shia Iran has been a major supporter of Sunni Hamas though that has abated somewhat recently. And so on. Things first began to change in , when the United States led the invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein. Obviously, Iraqis were aware of Sunnism and Shiism before , and those distinctions were not totally irrelevant to Iraqi life. But for much of Iraq's modern history, Sunni and Shia lived peacefully side by side in mixed neighborhoods and frequently intermarried.

For decades after decolonization, Iraqis defined themselves first by their ethnicity as Arabs or Kurds or by their nationality as Iraqis. Religious distinctions were just not as important. The change came because of regional power politics, which the US-led invasion upset. Saddam was hostile to both Iran and Saudi Arabia despite Saudi support for his s war against Iran , and those two countries saw him as a wild-eyed threat.

He held the Middle East in a precarious sort of balance among these three regional military powers. When the US toppled Saddam, it removed that balance, and opened a vacuum in Iraq that both Saudi Arabia and Iran attempted to fill so as to counter one another.

Because Iraq is mostly Shia Saddam had been Sunni , Iran tried to exploit sectarianism to its advantage, backing hard-line Shia groups that would promote Iranian interests and oppose Sunni powers like Saudi Arabia.

It also put pressure on the new Iraqi government to serve Iranian interests, which came to be equated with Shia interests. In this way, political maneuvering in post-Saddam Iraq that was not primarily about religion came to be expressed as about religion. It helped deepen the Sunni-Shia split there so severely that this divide today defines Iraq.

That's just the story of Iraq, but the same story is playing out across the Middle East, and a lot of it has to do with that same Saudi-Iran rivalry. It is true that Saudi Arabia is an officially Sunni theocracy and that Iran is an officially Shia theocracy. But they don't hate one another because of religious differences, and in fact both countries have in the past defined themselves as representing all Muslims.

Yet they can't both be the true representative of all Muslims, and that's the thing to understand here: The two countries have mutually exclusive claims to leadership of the Muslim world. The sectarian difference is largely coincidental. This conflict began in , when the Iranian revolution turned secular Iran into a hard-line Shia theocracy. My colleague Zack Beauchamp explains :. After Iran's Islamic Revolution toppled the pro-Western shah, the new Islamic Republic established an aggressive foreign policy of exporting the Iranian revolution, attempting to foment Iran-style theocratic uprisings around the Middle East.

That was a threat to Saudi Arabia's heavy influence in the Middle East, and perhaps to the Saudi monarchy itself. It "brought to power a man who had explicitly argued that Islam and hereditary kingship were incompatible, a threatening message, to say the least, in [the Saudi capital of] Riyadh.

It's important to understand that the Saudi monarchy is deeply insecure: It knows that its hold on power is tenuous, and its claim to legitimacy comes largely from religion. The Islamic Republic of Iran, merely by existing, challenges this legitimacy — not because it is Shia but because its theocratic revolution was popular and anti-monarchist. The Saudis saw this as a declaration of war against their very monarchy and a serious threat to their rule, and indeed in some ways it was.

This rivalry has been with the Middle East ever since with the Saudis supporting Saddam's war against Iran and with the two countries supporting different sides in Lebanon's civil war, for example.