Author: Anthony Shadid
Publication: Washington Post
Date: February 12, 2007
URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/11/AR2007021101328.html
Sunni-Shiite Tension Called Region's 'Most
Dangerous Problem'
Egypt is the Arab world's largest Sunni Muslim
country, but as a writer once quipped, it has a Shiite heart and a Sunni mind.
In its eclectic popular culture, Sunnis enjoy a sweet dish with raisins and
nuts to mark Ashura, the most sacred Shiite Muslim holiday. Raucous festivals
bring Cairenes into the street to celebrate the birthdays of Shiite saints,
a practice disparaged by austere Sunnis. The city's Islamic quarter tangles
like a vine around a shrine to Imam Hussein, Shiite Islam's most revered figure.
The syncretic blend makes the words of Mahmoud
Ahmed, a book vendor sitting on the shrine's marble and granite promenade,
even more striking.
"The Shiites are rising," he said,
arching his eyebrows in an expression suggesting both revelation and fear.
The growing Sunni-Shiite divide is roiling
an Arab world as unsettled as at any time in a generation. Fought in speeches,
newspaper columns, rumors swirling through cafes and the Internet, and occasional
bursts of strife, the conflict is predominantly shaped by politics: a disintegrating
Iraq, an ascendant Iran, a sense of Arab powerlessness and a persistent suspicion
of American intentions. But the division has begun to seep into the region's
social fabric, too. The sectarian fault line has long existed and sometimes
ruptured, but never, perhaps, has it been revealed in such a stark, disruptive
fashion.
Newspapers are replete with assertions, some
little more than incendiary rumors, of Shiite aggressiveness. The Jordanian
newspaper Ad-Dustour, aligned with the government, wrote of a conspiracy last
month to spread Shiism from India to Egypt. On the conspirators' agenda, it
said: assassinating "prominent Sunni figures." The same day, an
Algerian newspaper reported that parents were calling on the government to
stop Shiite proselytizing in schools. An Egyptian columnist accused Iran of
trying to convert Sunnis to Shiism in an attempt to revive the Persian Safavid
dynasty, which came to power in the 16th century.
At Madbuli's, a storied bookstore in downtown
Cairo, five new titles lined the display window: "The Shiites,"
"The Shiites in History," "Twelve Shiites," and so on.
A newspaper on sale nearby featured a warning by its editor that the conflict
could lead to a "sectarian holocaust."
"To us Egyptians," said writer and
analyst Mohammed al-Sayid Said, the sectarian division is "entirely artificial.
It resonates with nothing in our culture, nothing in our daily life. It's
not part of our social experience, cultural experience or religious experience."
But he added: "I think this can devastate the region."
The violence remains confined to Iraq and,
on a far smaller scale, Lebanon, but to some, the four-year-long entropy of
Iraq offers a metaphor for the forces emerging across the region: People there
watched the rise of sectarian identity, railed against it, blamed the United
States and others for inflaming it, then were often helpless to stop the descent
into bloodshed.
"This tension is the most dangerous problem
now in the region," said Ghassan Charbel, editor of the Arabic-language
daily al-Hayat.
The schism between Sunnis and Shiites dates
to the 7th century, Islam's earliest days, when a dispute broke out over who
would succeed the prophet Muhammad. Shiites believe the descendants of Muhammad's
daughter, Fatima, and son-in-law, Ali, were deprived of divinely ordained
leadership in a narrative of martyrdom and injustice that still influences
devout Shiite readings of the faith.
Over centuries, differences in ritual, jurisprudence
and theology evolved, some of them slight. But the Shiite community -- as
a majority in Iraq and Bahrain and a sizable minority in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia
and Kuwait -- is shaped far more today by the underprivileged status it has
often endured in an Arab world that is predominantly Sunni. For decades, the
Saudi government banned Shiite rituals; a Sunni minority rules a restive Shiite
majority in Bahrain; Lebanese Shiites, long poor and disenfranchised, often
faced chauvinism that still lingers.
Episodes of sectarian conflict litter the
region's history: Shiites revolted in medieval Baghdad, and rival gangs ransacked
one another's tombs and shrines. The conflict between the Sunni Ottoman Empire
and the Shiite Safavid Empire in Persia was often cast as a sectarian struggle.
The 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran was portrayed in parts of the Arab world
as a Shiite resurgence.
But rarely has the region witnessed so many
events, in so brief a time, that have been so widely interpreted through a
sectarian lens: the empowering of Iraq's Shiite-led government and the bloodletting
that has devastated the country; the lack of support by America's Sunni Arab
allies -- Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia -- for the Shiite movement Hezbollah
in its fight with Israel last summer; and, most decisively, the perception
among many Sunni Arabs that Saddam Hussein was lynched by Shiites bent on
revenge. In the background is the growing assertiveness of Shiite Iran as
the influence of other traditional regional powers such as Egypt and Saudi
Arabia diminishes.
In Lebanon, where the Hezbollah-led opposition
has mobilized in an effort to force the government's resignation, the sectarian
divide colors even a contest over urban space. Some Sunnis are angered most
by the fact that the Beirut sit-in -- in their eyes, an occupation -- by Shiites
from the hardscrabble southern suburbs is taking place in the sleek downtown
rebuilt by a former Sunni prime minister, Rafiq al-Hariri, who was assassinated
in 2005.
"Politics is perception," said Jamil
Mroue, a Lebanese publisher whose father was Shiite and mother Sunni.
Sentiments today remind him of the tribal-like
fanaticism that marked another sectarian conflict, Lebanon's 15-year civil
war -- which, among other divisions, loosely pitted Christians against Muslims
before it ended in 1990.
"It certainly conjures up the feelings
of the civil war, when Lebanon started disintegrating, except on a mega-scale,"
Mroue said. He called it "very scary, because I know that there is a
possibility of being moved by this tide."
"At the end of it," he added, "people
are going to look back and say, 'What the hell was this all about?' "
In overwhelmingly Sunni countries such as
Egypt, where politics were long defined by Arab nationalism or political Islam,
visceral notions of sectarian identity remain somewhat alien. It is not unusual
to hear people say they realized only as adults that they were Sunnis. Before
that, they identified themselves simply as Muslim. Even in Lebanon, despite
its communal divisions, intermarriage is not uncommon, and there is a long
tradition of Sunnis becoming Shiites so their daughters can receive a more
equitable share of inheritance, as allowed under Shiite law.
Across the region, Hezbollah and its leader,
Hasan Nasrallah, in particular, still win accolades for their performance
in last summer's war in Lebanon.
"You have to give him credit for fighting
the Israelis," Abdel-Hamid Ibrahim said of Nasrallah as he stood at a
rickety curbside stand in Cairo, boiling water for tea. Overhead were pictures
of two Egyptian icons, the singers Um Kalthoum and Abdel-Halim Hafez. "Closest
to my heart," he said. Next to them was a portrait of Nasrallah. "A
symbol of resistance, the man who defeated Israel," it read.
"Hasan Nasrallah, he's the man who stood
in front of the Israelis himself," said Muhsin Mohammed, a customer.
"Who was standing with him?" Ibrahim
asked, nodding his head. He pointed to the sky. "Our Lord."
Both scoffed at the sectarian tensions.
"There's a proverb that says, 'Divide
and conquer,' " Mohammed said. "Sunnis and Shiites -- they're not
both Muslims? What divides them? Who wants to divide them? In whose interest
is it to divide them?" he asked.
"It's in the West's interest," he
answered. "And at the head of it is America and Israel." He paused.
"And Britain."
That sense of Western manipulation is often
voiced by Shiite clerics and activists, who say the United States incites
sectarianism as a way of blunting Iran's influence. In recent years, some
of the most provocative comments have come from America's allies in the region:
Egypt's president questioned Shiites' loyalty to their countries, Jordan's
king warned of a coming Shiite crescent from Iran to Lebanon, and last month
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia denounced what he called Shiite proselytizing.
The charge drew a lengthy retort from Nasrallah.
"Frankly speaking, the aim of saying such things is fomenting strife,"
he said in a speech. He dismissed charges of Iranian proselytizing or the
emergence of a Shiite crescent.
"People in the region always complain
about a Shiite crescent. You always hear, 'Shiite crescent, Shiite crescent.'
That's just a crescent. What about the full Sunni moon?" said Nimr al-Nimr,
a Shiite cleric in the eastern Saudi town of Awamiya, who spent five days
in police detention for urging that a Shiite curriculum be taught in his predominantly
Shiite region.
Shiites make up less than 15 percent of Saudi
Arabia's population, many of them in the oil-rich Eastern Province. The austere
Sunni religious establishment considers them heretics. One cleric, Abdul Rahman
al-Barak, considered close to the royal family, has called Shiites "infidels,
apostates and hypocrites."
"There are conflicts in Palestine between
Sunni sects -- Hamas and Fatah -- in Somalia, in Darfur. None of that is sectarian,"
said Hassan al-Saffar, the most prominent Shiite cleric in Saudi Arabia. "There's
a campaign against Shiites. Why is all this anti-Shiite sentiment being inflamed
at a time the United States is trying to pressure Iran because of its nuclear
ambitions?"
In Cairo recently, Hassan Kamel sipped sweet
tea in a cafe beside the shrine to Imam Hussein, the prophet's grandson, who
was killed in battle in 680 in what is now Iraq. The shrine is believed to
hold his severed head. Across the street was al-Azhar, one of the foremost
academic institutions of Sunni Islam, founded, ironically, by the Shiite Fatimid
dynasty that ruled Egypt for 200 years until 1169. On the shrine's wall was
a saying attributed to the prophet and often intoned during Shiite commemorations:
"Hussein is from me, and I am from Hussein." Kamel pointed to the
doors, topped with a Koranic inscription; Shiites and Sunnis like him worshiped
at the shrine together, he said.
As cats scurried across the cafe's grimy floor,
he wondered aloud about past conflicts that have splintered the Middle East.
"Egyptians, all their lives, without
exception, have endured so many crises, catastrophes and problems," he
said. He listed wars in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973. "But they have a gift.
It's a gift from God. They have the ability to forget."
Then he talked about the rest of the region,
and whether this bout of strife and tension would pass, too.
"They might forget, they might not,"
he said. "Right now, no one knows what's coming."
Correspondent Faiza Saleh Ambah in Jiddah,
Saudi Arabia, contributed to this report.
