{"id":34827,"date":"2019-03-09T06:24:27","date_gmt":"2019-03-09T06:24:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=34827"},"modified":"2019-03-09T06:24:27","modified_gmt":"2019-03-09T06:24:27","slug":"how-iran-fueled-islams-sunni-shiite-divide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=34827","title":{"rendered":"How Iran fueled Islam\u2019s Sunni-Shiite divide"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\nDUBAI: The centuries-old sectarian Sunni-Shiite divide is arguably so entrenched that many \u2014 even Muslims \u2014 would be hard-placed to pinpoint the source of the largest cultural dispute in the history of Islam.<\/p>\n

\nAs author John McHugo pointed out in an exclusive interview with Arab News, the origins of the 1,400-year divide were\u00a0 \u201cvirtually unknown\u201d in the West outside specialist academic circles until the Iranian revolution of 1979, which prompted several, varying narratives of the clash between Sunnis and Shiites. Today, the divide is frequently seen as an important aspect of the conflicts that have been ravaging Syria and Iraq over the past few years, and of the power politics playing out elsewhere in the region.<\/p>\n

\nYet McHugo feels the dispute remains widely misunderstood. \u201cWe live in a time of appalling violence across large swaths of the Arab world and many other Muslim countries. When people ask how this has come about, they often find themselves presented with an answer citing the Sunni-Shiite divide.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nThis was the catalyst for the scholar of Islam to pen his latest book, \u201cA Concise History of Sunnis and Shi\u2019is,\u201d in which he aims to combat the myths about the divide.<\/p>\n

\nMcHugo explained how the schism between the sects of Islam is more toxic today than ever before, resulting in decades of war in Middle Eastern countries including Syria, Iraq and Yemen, but said the dispute is as much political as it is religious.<\/p>\n

\nMcHugo said many trace the divide back to the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 AD. \u201cYou could argue that the divide goes back to the last hours of Prophet<\/p>\n

\nMuhammad\u2019s life and people were wondering who would take leadership after his passing,\u201d he said. \u201cAlthough it goes back that long way, I wouldn\u2019t say there has always been conflict. If an ancient feud between Sunnis and Shiites is truly the fault line that has divided the Muslim world ever since the death of the Prophet Muhammad, why did it receive so little attention before the late 1970s?<\/p>\n

\n\"\"<\/p>\n

\n\u201cNevertheless, an ancient religious dispute, a focus for primordial hatreds, can appear to fit the bill for today\u2019s many disasters in the Middle East.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nPeople in the West, McHugo said, have to be very careful about making these judgments. \u201cVery often Sunnis and Shiites have been able to coexist in harmony. Look what happened in Iraq after the First World War: We found Sunnis and Shiites coming together to resist British occupation.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cWe start off from the assumption that there is conflict \u2014 of course there are conflicts. It would be stupid to deny that Saudi Arabia and Iran are rivals at the moment, but that is often expressed in terms of the Sunni-Shiite divide. This is royally misunderstood.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nMcHugo recalled studying Arabic and Islamic studies at Oxford University and the American University in Cairo in the early 1970s. \u201cWe had to do a paper on Islamic beliefs and institutions and a typical question might be: \u2018What is the Sunni-Shiite divide all about?\u2019 It was all frightfully academic and, more likely than not, the opinion was that this wasn\u2019t something important today and it was fading into history.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nBut then came the Iranian revolution in 1979, which launched a radical Shiite Islamist agenda. \u201cSuddenly you had every journalist wanting to show insight into this Sunni-Shiite divide,\u201d McHugo said. \u201cThen they would start writing about what happened in the 7th century \u2014 and you suddenly had these two narratives being portrayed and the impression was that you had this sort of struggle going on all this time on the differences between the two branches of the religion about which is the supreme form of Islam.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cBut when the Iranian regime happened, what Shiite cleric Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the Iranian revolution, wanted was to get all Muslims behind his Islamic revolution, Sunnis as well as Shiites.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nMcHugo, who worked across the Middle East for more than a quarter of a century, said that since many recent conflicts led to reports emphasizing the sectarian divide, tearing communities apart from Lebanon and Syria to Iraq and Pakistan, he felt a \u201clight needed to be shone\u201d on the subject.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cIt was 2014 when I spoke to my publisher saying that the divide was misunderstood. I found myself getting increasingly angry about it all \u2014 that is when I decided to explain to the public to make them understand how people in the region think and feel.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nMany people have \u201cblithe assumptions\u201d about the Sunni-Shiite divide. \u201cBecause we tend to see so much in the Middle East through a prism of violence, people in the West think of the Middle East as being very violent, which I think is a real distortion.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cFor hundreds of years people have lived peacefully and when there are conflicts or crisis there is always a reason \u2014 population explosion hasn\u2019t helped, to give one example \u2014 but we have got one pair of spectacles about the way we see the Middle East.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Ayatollah Khomeini wanted to get all Muslims behind his revolution.\u00a0 (AFP)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\nMcHugo explains how members of the two sects have co-existed for centuries and share many fundamental beliefs and practices. But they differ in doctrine, ritual, law, theology and religious organization.<\/p>\n

\nMcHugo opens his book explaining the origins of the divide, highlighting that the sectarian split could be traced back \u2014 not because of religious differences from the mainstream \u2014 but because of two different perceptions of who should exercise religious authority among Muslims after the Prophet\u2019s death.<\/p>\n

\nBut McHugo believes the \u201cdivide is less important than it is often portrayed today\u201d because the dispute is paired with politics. \u201cI think that whenever there is a problem between the Sunnis and Shiites we should look at the causes of that problem and often you will find that problem is not to do with religion, it is to do with other political factors.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cFor instance, if you take what has been happening in Syria, you have Muslim forces fighting the regime of Bashar Assad, who has been using Iranian support. So what happened is, what started off as an Iranian revolution, turned into a kind of proxy war.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cThat is what I\u2019m hoping to make people realize \u2014 that the violence we see today in many Arab countries is because of the politicization of Shiite Islam and then the turbocharging of sectarian violence which followed on as a result of the Iraq invasion in 2003 up until 2005, when some people carried out a cultivated act of sabotage and sacrilege when they blew two major Shiite shrines in Iraq with the express intention of starting a sectarianism war. And here we are now, in 2019, still recovering from that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nThe author said Sunnis are 85-90 percent of the world\u2019s 1.6 billion Muslim population, and Sunni Muslims are present in more countries and regions throughout the world, whereas most Shiite Muslims live in four countries: Iran, Pakistan, India and Iraq. Saudi Arabia has one of the largest proportions of Sunni Muslims in the world.<\/p>\n

\nLooking at the future of the Sunni-Shiite divide, McHugo sees signs of hope. \u201cI think a positive thing was the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman inviting Iraqi politician Muqtada Al-Sadr, who is a Shiite cleric, and I think that\u2019s very good indeed.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cAs time passes, we see more and more people coming out of the woodwork and opposing secular politics. But I think it will take a while for this oil tanker to be turned around. People\u2019s perceptions take a while to change. I don\u2019t want to lie \u2014 there is a lot of sectarian hatred that has been sown, particularly since 2005.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nIran has been a \u201cvery, very bad boy here,\u201d said McHugo. \u201cThis is in terms of trying to spread its influence, but it does that through both Sunnis and Shiites.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cFor instance, you have Hezbollah in Lebanon, which it has backed, but it has also backed the Islamist group Hamas, which is a Palestinian Sunni Islamist fundamentalist organization.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cThen you have internal tension in Iran and you have the Revolutionary Guards who seem a state within the state and control a large part of the Iranian economy that leads to corruption. There is still this revolutionary impulse in Iran and this has still not gone away.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nMcHugo said he hopes his book will clarify a \u201csimplistic narrative which is in danger of taking firm hold in the West\u201d \u2014 that Sunnis and Shiites have \u201cengaged in a perpetual state of religious war and mutual demonization that has lasted across the centuries; and that this is the root cause of all that is wrong in the Middle East today.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cThis is a very convenient narrative. It deflects attention from the immediate causes of the increase in sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites over the past few years. Where bloodshed between Sunnis and Shiites occurs, it is usually entwined with political issues.<\/p>\n

\n\u00a0The way to stop today\u2019s bloodshed is to sort out those political problems. Unfortunately, that runs up against the vested interests of any player.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DUBAI: The centuries-old sectarian Sunni-Shiite divide is arguably so entrenched that many \u2014 even Muslims \u2014 would be hard-placed to pinpoint the source of the largest cultural dispute in the history of Islam. As author John McHugo pointed out in an exclusive interview with Arab News, the origins of the 1,400-year divide were\u00a0 \u201cvirtually unknown\u201d…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34827","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34827"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34827\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}