OTHER THAN THAT WE'D BE PALS

The Shi'ite-Sunni divide: Part 2: Slowly building bridges (Sultan Shahin, 8/27/03, Asia Times)

It is common knowledge that the militant Pakistani organization Sipah-e-Sahaba, that is accused of targeted killing of Shi'ites, has for years been financed by the Wahhabi rulers of Saudi Arabia. Iran is said to be financing Tehrike-Nifaze-Fiqhe-Jafria, a militant Shi'ite organization in Pakistan. These two organizations have kept fanning the flames of growing Shi'ite-Sunni enmity in Pakistan.

As for the Arab world, renowned US-based Islamic scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr says, "A great deal of money and effort has been spent in the last few years to fan the fire of hatred between Shi'ites and Sunnis in the Persian Gulf region, with obvious political and economic fruits for the powers-to-be."

It was not too long ago that Arabs conferred "near-unanimous legitimacy" to Saddam's invasion of Iran in the 1980s on the specious plea that the growing Shi'ite power in the neighborhood was a danger to the Sunni Arab rulers of the Gulf region. The eight-year-long Iran-Iraq war, that did more than anything else to widen the Shi'ite-Sunni divide, was supported to the hilt by the Western powers.

It is this unholy alliance of secular Arab nationalism of Saddam's Iraq, the Wahhabi Islamic fundamentalism of Saudi Arabia and Western imperialism with its massive media resources that has created the present perception of a vast Shi'ite-Sunni divide. It is not for nothing that the Western media seldom mention an Iraqi as Muslim. There are no Muslims in Iraq, only Shi'ites, Sunnis or Kurds; just as there were no Muslims in Kosovo, only ethnic Albanians.

The fact that the widely predicted Shi'ite backlash against the decades-long Sunni domination of Iraq has not materialized may mean that the imperialist project of divide and rule has not succeeded in that country, at least so far. Now it is for Shi'ites and Sunnis in other parts of the world to build on the Iraqi example and seek to bridge the gulf separating the two sects to promote harmony and peace undeterred by the bigotry of extremists and the machinations of imperialist powers.

If only we had sense enough to fan the flames. But it seems germane that we betrayed the Shi'ite uprising after the First Iraq War, a cause which would have served such purposes well. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 27, 2003 9:35 AM