A Concise History of Sunnis and Shi'is

by John McHugo

  VI

  By the second half of the nineteenth century, the penetration of Western ideas among the elite in Muslim majority countries was growing. The thought of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838–1897), who addressed the question of how Muslims should react to the spread of Western political, economic and cultural hegemony, is of particular interest to us because of the way he also tried to move beyond sectarian differences between Sunnis and Shi‘is. Therefore, before we leave the nineteenth century behind, it is worth pausing for a moment and attempting to encapsulate his influential teaching – and that of his most significant pupil.

  He is one of the fathers of Islamic modernism and, it could be said, of Islamism.19 The name ‘al-Afghani’ means ‘the Afghan’ in Arabic. Al-Afghani claimed to come from Afghanistan and to have been raised a Sunni, but in reality it seems he was born into a Twelver family of Sayyids (descendants of the Prophet) near Hamadan in Iran. He received a religious education in the Shi‘i shrine cities of Iraq. He also visited India, where he began to learn about Western thought, of which he gained a good knowledge. While there, he developed a lifelong hatred of Western imperialism, especially that of Britain. Rousing the Muslim world from its torpor and corruption became his life’s work.

  His thought flowed from two passionately held convictions. The first was a sense that the West could destroy Islam if Muslims did not reform their religion; the other was an intense pride at the heritage of the civilisation that Muslims had created. Many younger intellectuals and religious reformers were his disciples. These included Muhammad Abduh (1814–1905), who would become the head of the Muslim religious establishment in Egypt at the end of the nineteenth century.

  The perceived failures of Islam were the fault of Muslims themselves, he taught, especially corrupt and self-seeking rulers and scholarly elites. Islam had suffered from stagnation and servile conformism, as well as from all kinds of deviance. This is what had left Muslims defenceless before the West. It was now time for Muslims to revive their faith and act upon it.

  While he was certainly influential in the growth of nationalism in a number of separate Muslim countries, he taught that Muslims should have the same feeling of solidarity that binds a nation. He wanted Muslims to unite by developing social solidarity and helping each other, as well as the non-Muslim inhabitants of their countries. Unlike many other scholars, he taught that Muslims could revolt against an oppressive ruler.

  Al-Afghani admired the Germans for having overcome the Catholic/Protestant split and forged a united nation, despite the immense strife and bloodshed of the Reformation. Muslims should emulate this example and overcome the Sunni-Shi‘i divide. He called for Shi‘i Iran and Sunni Afghanistan to unite. In the last decade or so of his life, he tried to develop a political formula to reconcile the Sunni Ottomans and Shi‘i Iran.

  Nevertheless, by claiming he was from Afghanistan rather than Iran, al-Afghani deliberately hid his Shi‘i origins. For a period, he taught at the Al-Azhar mosque in Cairo, the foremost institution of learning in the Sunni world. To do so, he must have adopted the Sunni forms for saying the daily ritual prayers and abandoned the slightly different ones of Twelver Shi‘is. On the other hand, his choice of texts for his class was unusual, and included books by Abbasid-era rationalist philosophers. At that time, scholars teaching at the Al-Azhar did not normally choose such books for their classes, but al-Afghani had studied them in the Iraqi shrine cities where they were an important element in the curriculum for aspiring Twelver mujtahids.

  His pupil Muhammad Abduh noticed a contrast between his tutor’s lectures and those of the other scholars. The latter taught by rote, and did not welcome critical discussion. Al-Afghani, by contrast, demanded that his class engage with the text and discuss it. This was the teaching methodology used in the Shi‘i universities of the shrine cities.

  On one level, the reason al-Afghani concealed his Shi‘i origins was probably because he did not consider them important in the context of his desire to unite all Muslims against the colonial powers. But the fact that he found it necessary or at least advisable to conceal his Shi‘i origins tells us that Sunni Muslims in Cairo and Istanbul would have been much less likely to heed the views of a Twelver. If he had been frank about these origins – let alone if he had presented himself as an Iranian Twelver rather than an Afghani Sunni – he would have made his task of uniting Muslims to resist the imperial spread of the West even harder to accomplish.

  Yet Sunnism and Shi‘ism are trends that can overlap, as well as sects. Muhammad Abduh, who would become his star pupil, would go on to become not only the head of Egypt’s religious establishment but also the great modernist reformer in Sunni Islam. His work adapting the Sharia to the circumstances of the modern world had an immense impact on Sunni Islam that is with us still.

  One of his more controversial opinions was that Islam can permit the paying of interest on a loan if this contributes to the public good. This meant reinterpreting the Qur’an, where riba, frequently translated into English as ‘interest’, is specifically forbidden. Muhammad Abduh seems to have done this by invoking the principle of maslahah, interpreting the Sharia in the way most beneficial to humanity, which is used by Sunni scholars. Yet is it altogether fanciful to see Abduh’s approach to this question as being rather like that which a Twelver mujtahid might have taken? A mujtahid would have felt able to accord reason a much greater role in interpreting the literal meaning of the sacred text than most Sunni scholars would have done.20 Whatever the case, there are clear signs of the influence of Twelver Shi‘i thought in some of Muhammad Abduh’s writings, and there is no doubt that these reflect al-Afghani’s influence.21 In the early editions of his major work risalat al-tawhid, ‘the Theology of Unity’, he subscribed to the old Mu‘tazili view that the Qur’an was created by God, rather than being the uncreated speech of God.22 This was extremely controversial – in fact, anathema – to most Sunnis. Yet it reflected the general Shi‘i view. His editors dropped this from the later editions of the work, which were published after his death and which reached a much wider audience.

  Muhammad Abduh gave Sunni Islam a mechanism that would help it to adapt itself to the modern world. He advocated a reversion to the teachings of the pious ancestors, al-salaf al-salih, and doing away with the accretions that Islam had acquired across the centuries. For him, these pious ancestors included the great thinkers of the Abbasid age to whom al-Afghani had introduced him, and whose logical thinking and aptitude for debate would enable him to put Islam in tune with the modern world at the same time as attacking popular superstitions. He saw this as far preferable to the previous practice, which was to follow rigidly the teaching of the doctrinal law school to which a particular Muslim belonged. Yet others who came after him would limit the concept of alsalaf al-salih to just the first three generations of Muslims, with an effect that was often the opposite of the one Abduh had intended. Rather than making Sunni Islam more open to rational debate, reducing the importance of the doctrinal law schools would pin the Islamic belief and practice of many Sunnis down to the strictest and narrowest possible construction of how those first generations had practised their faith. That is what the word ‘Salafism’ generally means today.

  VII

  In the long nineteenth century there was relatively little friction between Sunnis and Shi‘is. Muslim societies were preoccupied with the new challenges they faced as a result of the nineteenth-century version of globalisation. Disdain for members of the other sect continued, as did discrimination, but the idea of unity among Muslims transcended sectarian divisions and was increasingly attractive. It provided a focal point for identity and was thus a counterweight to the new, Western idea of nationalism. At the same time, many Muslims embraced nationalism, and saw no contradiction between this and practising their religion. Even though the Ottomans looked askance at the spread of Twelver Shi‘ism in Iraq, they were able to live with it. After all, Shi‘is could be taxed and conscripted into the army just like Sunnis – and j
ust like Christians and Jews. That was what mattered to the Ottomans most of all.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Between the Two World Wars

  I

  By the end of the First World War the Muslim world lay almost completely prostrate before the Western powers. In the Middle East, Britain and France gained new territories under League of Nations mandates. France’s share was Syria and Lebanon, while Britain acquired Palestine (which included Jordan) and Iraq. Britain also became the dominant power in Iran.

  The creation of these new and completely arbitrary divisions was greeted with dismay by most of the inhabitants of these lands. The new entities of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Palestine (out of which Israel would be created in 1948–49) were left with formidable problems in establishing a sense of nationhood. Religious differences were often significant. The peace settlement between Turkey and Greece included an exchange of populations in which Turks and Greeks were defined solely by their religious identity as Muslims or Orthodox Christians.

  In British-mandated Palestine, Jews were seen by Britain as an ethnicity defined solely by religion. By contrast, the overwhelming majority of the population, the native Arabic speakers, were initially dismissed as the ‘existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’.1 The Arabs of Palestine were predominantly Sunni Muslim (with a tiny Shi‘i element) and a large Christian minority. They would now rally behind the banner of Arab nationalism and the principle of national self-determination as they sought to defend themselves from colonisation by the European Jews. Sunni-Shi‘i divides existed in three of the mandated territories: Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. Yet in none of these was it seen as sufficiently important to be a marker of ethnicity in drawing up the mandates.

  At street level, Muslim solidarity and appeals to past glories often meant much more than calls by intellectuals for the establishment of a secular, pluralist Arab nation. When volunteers were raised to support the tiny Syrian army that forlornly tried to halt the French invasion in 1920, their cause was called al-jihad al-watani, ‘the patriotic jihad’.

  The same congruence of the new, nationalist sentiment with appeals to Islam’s martial rhetoric reappeared only a few years later, when the Great Syrian Revolt of 1925 broke out. It would spread over much of the mandated territory before it was finally crushed in 1927 by reinforcements rushed to Syria by France. It followed earlier opposition to France among the Alawis of the Nusayri mountains and in the countryside of Aleppo. Perhaps because these areas had already been subdued, they were not greatly affected in 1925. But the great revolt spread from the Hawran to Damascus and its surrounding countryside, Hama and much of the southern half of Syria before France was able to reassert control.

  Syria’s great revolt cut across religious lines. It began among the Druze of the Hawran plateau over specific local grievances, especially questions of honour such as the mistreatment of Druze envoys by the French authorities. As the Druze drove the French out of much of the Hawran, they were joined by some local Muslims and Christians. Guerrilla fighting spread to the countryside around Damascus, the predominantly Sunni Muslim city of Hama, and then Damascus itself. The revolt also spread into parts of southern Lebanon, where there was concern at the possibility of a combined uprising among Druze and Twelver Shi‘i peasants. There was a massacre of Maronite villagers at Kawkaba, committed by Druze.2 The Maronites were a Christian sect that had thrown in its lot with the Crusaders many centuries before. They had had close ties with Catholic France for centuries. During the mandate, they were perceived – with considerable justification – as supporting the French.

  The French policy was always to attempt to split off religious minorities from the Sunni majority. Sometimes they had an element of success but, except among the Maronites, this was always limited. Although the rebellion was crushed, France was forced to compromise with Arab nationalism in its aftermath and allowed a parliamentary republic to be set up under its control. When that republic became independent after the Second World War, the new independent Syria received enthusiastic support from its Shi‘i minorities, Alawis, Druze and Ismailis, who together probably made up a little over 16 per cent of the population, It would really only be in the 1970s that sectarian politics would begin to have a major impact in Syria.

  The French split Lebanon off from Syria and established it as a separate state. There was a strong desire for independence among the Maronites who predominated in large areas of Mount Lebanon. These were poor areas and not a viable independent state. Many of the areas surrounding the Maronite heartland were inhabited by Druze, Sunni Muslims, Twelver Shi‘is and others. Nevertheless, the French were determined to create a Maronite-dominated state and expanded the Maronite heartland to include the other areas that form part of Lebanon today. No single sect had a majority. This was a potentially explosive mix, because the vast majority of Lebanese Sunnis and Shi‘is, as well as a substantial number of Christians, would have preferred to be part of a united Greater Syria. A state was created with a fragile mixture of religious minorities and a constitution that entrenched sectarian differences; this meant that the Lebanese continued to focus on their religious sects as the prime focus of their identity. The Lebanese state was little more than the arena in which the different communities played out their power struggles, and scrambled for state patronage. It was therefore hard for a feeling of genuine Lebanese patriotism to emerge. It also meant that Lebanon was a weak state with weak institutions, although it was a democracy.

  The Lebanese constitution allocated parliamentary seats to the different religious communities on what was called a ‘confessional’ basis, in rough proportion to their numbers. This was tweaked to favour the Christian groups, who had an overall majority of seats. In 1931–32 the only census ever conducted took place in Lebanon. Christians, when considered together, were only 52 per cent of the population; Sunnis were 22.5 per cent; and Twelvers a little under 20 per cent. Different posts in the government were also allocated to the different sects. Under the Lebanese national pact of 1943, which paved the way to independence from France, the president of the republic had to be a Maronite and the prime minister a Sunni, while the Twelver Shi‘is were given the office of the speaker of parliament.

  The way in which politics developed in Lebanon was very different from events in Syria, which could justifiably be described as the heartland of Arab nationalism. The Druze became enthusiastic Arab nationalists from an early date, as their role in the rebellion of 1925 demonstrates. In time, Syria’s other Shi‘i minorities, the Alawis and Ismailis, also took up the new, nationalist creed, with a similar degree of passion.

  II

  The name ‘Iraq’ is ancient. It was the Arab name for the area comprising the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, and extended into what is now Iran. In the aftermath of the First World War a new entity called Iraq was created as a British Mandate. It covered slightly different territory and was essentially composed of the old Ottoman provinces of Baghdad, Basra and Mosul. This is what we mean today when we refer to the country we know as Iraq. Its boundaries with the French Mandate of Syria were completely arbitrary: quite literally a line in the rocks and sand of the desert.

  According to a British census in 1919, Shi‘is constituted roughly 53 per cent of the population of Iraq. An Iraqi government survey conducted in 1932 put the figure at 56 per cent.3 The majority of the remainder were Sunnis, but they were split between ethnic Arabs and Kurds (although there were some Kurdish Shi‘is). The Sunni Arabs were slightly less than 20 per cent of the population, and the Kurds roughly the same. There were also Jewish, Christian and Yazidi Iraqis, as well as ethnic minorities such as Turkmen, who were divided between Sunnis and Shi‘is, and Syriac-speaking Christians. However, these made up no more than a few percentage points of the total population. Iraq was thus an overwhelmingly Muslim country, but with a Sunni-Shi‘i division among that Muslim majority, and an ethnic Arab-Kurdish split among the Sunnis.

  What is interesting from our perspective is the extensiv
e degree of cooperation between Sunnis and Shi‘is in the years immediately after the First World War. Britain deliberated over how best to safeguard its interests in Iraq, while Sunnis and Shi‘is struggled to escape from British control. This cooperation is encapsulated in an observation by Gertrude Bell, the famous British political officer who was one of the officials involved in setting up the Iraq mandate. The Arab nationalists had, she wrote in a letter to her father on 1 June 1920, ‘adopted a difficult line in itself to combat, the union between Shi‘ah and Sunni, the unity of Islam.’4

  This should have come as no surprise. The secret society al-‘Ahd, which had been set up in 1913 by Arab nationalists in the Ottoman Empire, had Shi‘i sympathisers in Iraq. When the 1916 revolt against the Ottoman Turks by Sharif Hussein of Mecca (Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi) began, al-‘Ahd put the Sharifian nationalists in touch with the leading Shi‘i mujtahids in Iraq. The mujtahids saw themselves as more than the religious leaders of the Shi‘i community. They aspired to play an important political role in the new Iraq, which they hoped they would come to dominate because of the greater numbers of Shi‘is. Although the Sharifians would frustrate this desire, they were able to do so only because they persuaded a sufficiently broad section of Shi‘i society to back the principle of an Arab kingdom under a son of the Sharif Hussein.