Background To The Current Outbreak Of Sectarianism In Iraq
The division between Sunni and Shia in Iraq is nowhere near as profound as western commentators — particularly American journalists would have you believe.
As a religion of law, Islam is and always has been inherently involved with governance and is thus innately political. For the majority of Muslims, Islam is “the blueprint of a social order” [Gellner], which:
- Postulates a community of believers (the umma).
- Contains and transmits a body of legal prescriptions.
- Contains and transmits a body of moral injunctions.
For present purposes it is sufficient to understand that the dispute between the Shia and the Sunni is primarily one of governance. a legal one about who is the legitimate successor to the prophet Mohammed. At the time of Mohammed’s death the majority of Muslims favoured Abu Bakr as his successor passing over Ali ibn Abu Talib (Imam Ali). A minority of the Muslim community felt that Ali ibn Abu Talib was the rightful successor and remained loyal to him and to his successors. Indeed the term Shia literally means “the Party” or “the faction” and in early days the Shia were referred to as “Shi’at Ali,” — “The Party of Ali.”
Sectarian bitterness between Shia and Sunni in Iraq intensified under Ottoman rule. The Ottomans were devoutly Sunni and highly militaristic. Their empire wasn’t a state in the way in which we think of a state, rather it was a series of interlocking military commands. that saw itself as a frontier state dedicated to protecting the Muslim heartlands. It saw itself as being surrounded on all sides and under threat on its western frontiers by Christian Europe, to the north by Christian Russia, while the rise of the Saffavid dynasty in Persia (Iran) their military rivalry with the Ottomans and their declaration of Shiism as the state religion intensified the Ottoman feeling of being surrounded. This led to Ottoman oppression of the Shia within their domains.
The dismemberment of the Ottoman empire by the victorious allies at the end of World War I led to the British taking over Iraq.
The British adopted their standard technique for governing their colonial subjects of “divide and rule.” They deliberately fostered divisions by favouring the minority communities such as the Sunni, Iraqi Christians, Iraqi Jews, Assyrians, Shabaks,and Mandaeans, while discriminating against the Shia and the Kurds, and often treating them very harshly.
The British colonial policy of “divide et impera” by fostering sectarian and or ethnic bitterness was notably less successful in Iraq than elsewhere. Iraqis had then and have now, a strong sense of being specifically Iraqi, and referred to themselves as “Iraqis” and the country in which they lived as “Iraq.”
Thus while the British colonialists did manage to deepen ethnic/sectarian divisions to an extent the policy failed to prevent the rise of secular nationalism and their expulsion in 1958. The nationalists successfully appealed to a specific national identity which transcended communal considerations and developed a powerful support for national unity. However the fact that most of the officer corps, civil service, and the business elite were Sunni, meant that under Saddam Hussein the Ba’athist regime quickly turned to discriminating in favour of the minority communities much as the British done.
Saddam Hussein’s secular regime deliberately used emphasising ethnic and religious differences as a strategy of rule. The Saddam regime reserved its worst treatment for the Kurds, who with intermittent support from Iran, Israel and Washington engaged in armed struggle for autonomy.
Saddam’s regime also suppressed a Shiite uprising in the South of the country after the 1991 Gulf War. The Shiites and the marsh Arabs rose at the urging of the American government who promptly abandoned them to their fate.
(more…)
