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Muslim world's great divide

TheStar.com - Muslim world's great divide

U.S.-led invasion of Iraq set a Shia revival in motion
It's rattling Sunnis and making waves across the region
Nov. 21, 2006. 05:23 AM
OLIVIA WARD
FEATURE WRITER

On the eve of the American invasion of Iraq, the ancient city of Karbala was awash in Shia pilgrims, the black robes of the women sending up sprays of dust. And the language that prevailed in the street of the second-holiest shrine of Islam was not Arabic, but Farsi — the language of Iraq's neighbour, and often bitter enemy, Iran.

"It's true we fought a war and we all suffered terribly," said Zainab Emami, an Iranian woman with a deeply lined face and startlingly blue eyes. "But as Shiites there are no boundaries between us. Only the politicians have tried to divide us."

Her words were prophetic. For the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq has evoked both old and new divisions, turning the country into an earthquake zone, with aftershocks rebounding throughout the Middle East.

"When the U.S. government defeated Saddam Hussein it helped to set in motion a Shiite revival that will upset the sectarian balance in Iraq, and in the region, for many years to come," says Vali Nasr, author of The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future.

As Iraq's Shiite majority struggles for power it has long been denied, nearby Lebanon emerges from a war with Israel that has also torn open old wounds, with the Hezbollah militia staking a new claim to speak for the country's Shiite majority.

Aided by Iran, Shiites are seeking power, and changing the landscape of Sunni domination for the first time in decades. It is a landscape that Iran increasingly influences, through the radical regime of the ambitious Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

"It is important for the Iranian regime to fulfill its political agenda in the Middle East by connecting all the Shia groups to each other," says Mehdi Khalaji, a visiting fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and former seminarian at Qom, the centre of Iran's clerical establishment. "The destiny of the Shiites is connected to the destiny of Iran."

The colonial carve-up of the Middle East strengthened the hand of the Sunnis, with an Arabian ruler, King Faisal, on the throne of Iraq. In Saudi Arabia, the extremist Saud clan founded a royal dynasty that has entrenched Wahhabism in the country and exported it throughout the region, marginalizing the Shiite minority.

Iran's large Shia population fell under the influence of the West, after a coup that restored the Shah in 1953. But the Islamic revolution that followed 26 years later, under the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, radicalized Iran's leadership and established a strict religious regime.

Sunni leaders of the surrounding countries viewed it as a threat, and hardened their attitudes to Shiites as well as tightening their political control. The U.S. strengthened its alliances with Sunni leaders to combat a feared Iranian influence. When Iraq won the catastrophic Iran-Iraq War, with losses totalling more than 1 million overall, Sunni power in the region was consolidated.

Now, experts say that is beginning to unravel. Iraq's meltdown into chaos and sectarian violence is part of a power struggle rather than a religious war, they point out. But the balance of Sunni-Shia power in the region has been jolted, something Shia moderates, who are in the vast majority, say is overdue — and regional leaders fear will endanger their regimes.

"When the ethnic-religious break occurs in one country, it will not fail to occur elsewhere too," Syrian President Bashar Assad told Germany's weekly Der Spiegel.

Already changes are surfacing. Shiites in Saudi Arabia have turned out to the polls in record numbers, following the Iraq invasion. Those in Lebanon and Bahrain are feeling a new sense of power. Although Shiites form a minority in the Muslim world, Nasr points out, they have an impressive presence in the Middle East, representing an overwhelming number of Iranians, about 70 per cent of people in Persian Gulf countries, and 50 per cent of those "in an arc from Lebanon to Pakistan."

And, says Khalaji, Iran's leadership is making the most of the new landscape.

"Khamenei has achieved a build-up of a very large network covering different groups in the region. It has transformed the unorganized traditional Shiite clerical establishment into a systematic, highly effective political and financial network."

A "primitive but complicated" system ships money to and from Iran outside the banking system, using ports and transit points in the region, Khalaji says.

And, Khalaji and other experts say, even moderates like Iraq's Grand Ayatollah Ali Hussein al-Sistani — hailed as the Shia stabilizing force in Iraq — have financial interests in Iran and are compelled to co-operate with its regime. Meanwhile, Iran is winning friends by supporting a network of social welfare institutions throughout the region.

"By contrast, secular democratic forces have no institutions, no economic base," Khalaji says. "They have no way of expressing themselves. So in Shiite communities you see strong, rich, powerful radicals and poor, disadvantaged moderates. The real catastrophe is that it has empowered the radicals at the expense of the majority, who are moderate."

Experts say that ironically, the strengthening of Shia radicalism has decreased the chance that the moderates, who have longed for a fair share of power, will be able to gain it through peaceful transition. Whether that happens, and whether the "birth pangs of the new Middle East" are also a harbinger of death, depends on Iran's ability to temper its radicalism in dealing with the West, and Washington's adherence to diplomacy rather than military retaliation.

Much also depends on Iraq: "If (it) were to collapse, its fate would most likely be decided by a regional war," Nasr wrote recently in the journal Foreign Affairs. "Iran, Turkey and Iraq's Arab neighbours would likely enter the fray ... the whole Middle East could be at risk of a sectarian conflict between Shiites and Sunnis."
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November 21, 2006 at 10:07 AM in Muslim background | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home