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Splitting Islam - A Shi’ite-Sunni strategy for surviving the War on Terror
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| Contributor | RP |
| Last Edited | RP Sep 27, 2005 03:31pm |
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| Category | Editorial |
| News Date | Monday, September 26, 2005 09:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | The American Conservative
In any event, it is the neoconservative agenda that has propelled us into Iraq, adding fuel to the global Islamist insurgency while achieving virtually none of its proclaimed aims and driving the United States straight toward a giant debacle and failure.
Neither the liberal, the traditional conservative, nor the neoconservative solutions offer much hope for a way out of our dangerous condition vis-à-vis the global Islamist insurgency. The time has come to think about this threat in a new way—or perhaps in a way that is actually rather old
The contemporary analogy is the division between Sunnis and Shi’ites in the Islamic world. The ongoing sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shi’ites in Iraq provides a daily reminder of the intensity of the division in that country, but the division, suspicion, and conflict between the two versions of Islam is a feature of many other Muslim countries as well, especially Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. Sunnis normally regard Shi’ites as heretics and inferiors; Shi’ites normally regard Sunnis as hypocrites and oppressors.
Iraq represents a test case and potential crucible for the Sunni-Shi’ite split. It is easy to imagine the current sectarian suspicion and violence in Iraq descending into an actual civil war between the Sunni and the Shi’ite communities—more accurately, between the Sunni Arabs and the Shi’ite Arabs, since the Sunni Kurds are trying to separate themselves from both Arab groups. What would the global Islamist movement look like then? It would have a rather different meaning and attraction than it does today. An Islamist identity might still appeal to some Muslims, but it might well become less salient than the warring Sunni and Shi’ite identities. This would be even more likely to be the case if the Sunni-Shi’ite conflict in Iraq spread to its neighbors. Indeed, if the Sunni-Shi’ite conflict became not only intense and widespread but also prolonged, perhaps as much so as the Sino-Soviet conflict during the last three decades of the Cold War, the global Islamist movement might have almost no meaning or attraction at all. In the Muslim world there might be Sunni Islamists and Shi’ite Islamists, but each might consider their greatest enemy to be not the United States, but each other. |
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