A Concise History of Sunnis and Shi'is

by John McHugo

  The Ottoman authorities had cooperated with the Shi‘i notables of eastern Arabia and enlisted them in their project to govern the area. They even appointed a local Shi‘i, Ahmad bin Mahdi bin Nasrullah, as district governor of Qatif in 1875. His time in this post lasted only three years and he was the last local figure to hold a significant administrative appointment in this area;18 even so, under Ottoman rule Shi‘is were able to flourish and became wealthy. When Ibn Saud took control of the area in 1913–14, some emigrated to Bahrain and Iraq, another group advocated armed resistance, and others called for an accommodation with him. One Shi‘i notable who called for resistance was publicly executed.19

  Life was clearly not easy for the Shi‘is of Hasa in the years immediately after their inclusion into what became Saudi Arabia; but matters would get worse. The Ikhwan were a religious brotherhood of Wahhabi fighters who had been the mainstay of Ibn Saud’s fighting force. In 1927 they demanded that the Shi‘is of Hofuf, the great inland oasis of eastern Arabia, be forced to convert to ‘true Islam’. Their places of worship should be destroyed, and Wahhabi preachers should be sent to enlighten them. Ibn Saud acceded to the Ikhwan’s request. Perhaps fortunately for the Shi‘is, he fell out with the Ikhwan about a year later and had to crush them ruthlessly. Thereafter, the conversion of the Shi‘is was not seen as a priority, but Wahhabi attempts continued. What had happened showed the degree to which the Shi‘is were treated on sufferance. A local uprising against Saudi rule even occurred in 1930, and was defused by mediation.20 Although the Shi‘is were often left in relative peace, and many Shi‘i notables continued to collaborate as they had with the Ottomans, the system the new kingdom established meant that they were inevitably excluded from its elite. No better formula could have been devised to arrange for them to maintain and develop a strong sectarian identity that marked them apart from other Saudis.

  Wahhabism also began to expand outside Ibn Saud’s domains. Word of Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s teachings diffused gradually across the Muslim world as a result of the encounters pilgrims to Mecca and Medina had with Wahhabi preachers. This had been especially the case during the brief period when the holy cities were occupied during the First Saudi State, but to a certain extent it continued afterwards. Now, with the Hejaz officially recognised as part of Ibn Saud’s kingdom, the word began to spread once again.

  Ibn Saud’s seizure of Mecca and Medina came shortly after a moment of huge psychological shock for many Sunni Muslims: the abolition by Turkey of the Ottoman Caliphate in March 1924. In December that year, Ibn Saud took Mecca. Twelve months later, he entered the port of Jeddah. He soon received British recognition of his conquests as a fully independent ruler. There was no other Arab country (except Yemen) that could be said to be fully independent at that time. This was also the time of widespread dismay among Arab nationalists everywhere at the fact that Greater Syria and Iraq had been cheated of full independence and partitioned between Britain and France. Ominously, the new League of Nations had compromised its integrity by acquiescing in this carve-up. Abdullah and Faisal, the two sons of the Sharif Hussein, had been made the kings of Jordan and Iraq by Britain, thereby causing many nationalists to be disillusioned with the Sharifian cause.

  IV

  It is therefore not surprising that some nationalists in Arab countries formed a grudging respect for Ibn Saud, and even a broadly positive view of his achievements. This is despite his having no interest in Arab nationalism; furthermore, the Wahhabism of his new kingdom was widely disparaged. But in the late 1920s a major Sunni religious scholar endorsed Wahhabism for the first time. This was Rashid Rida, who was born in 1865 near Tripoli (then part of Ottoman Greater Syria) and became the pupil and biographer of the eminent Egyptian religious scholar Muhammad Abduh, the disciple of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. Rashid Rida is seen as continuing the strand of Islamic modernism that began with al-Afghani, but he was much more conservative in his teaching than Muhammad Abduh. He has been described as advocating a return to a medieval, sectarian past,21 although he also believed that the justice inherent in Islam would produce a better solution for religious minorities than secularism. His argument was that those who ‘worshipped their own communities’ but were not guided by a religious ethic could easily let their communal solidarity slide into a hatred of other communities. In his view, such a slide had occurred in the Middle East because of the decline in Islam. As an example, he cited the ethnic hatred that had followed the revolution of the secular Young Turks in 1908.22

  As a young man Rashid Rida had become disillusioned with Sufism. He could also be scathing about Shi‘ism, and wrote that it was ‘full of fairy tales and illegitimate innovations’. Reviving an old charge, he also claimed that its doctrinal differences with Sunnism were the work of the first Jewish converts to Islam, who had inserted alien ideas into the new religion.23 He was the originator of the term Salafi,24 meaning a Muslim who restricts himself to looking at these first three generations of Muslims in order to establish the rules of the Sharia. Because of the importance of the Companions for Sunnis, and the fact that most of them were rejected by the Shi‘is, this would have made it easy for Rashid Rida to move closer to the Wahhabi position on Shi‘ism.

  Nevertheless, as was seen in Chapter Eight, Rashid Rida almost welcomed Shi‘i proselytisation among Iraqi tribesmen who did not know the tenets of their nominally Sunni religion. He called for unity among Muslims and saw an end to intra-Muslim sectarianism as essential. He suggested that Sunni and Shi‘i should cooperate in the areas where they agreed and apologise to each other for their disagreements. And if a member of one sect made false and disparaging statements about the other, the scholars of his own sect should correct him. Yet he did not always practise what he preached. He had a habit of rushing to judgement to condemn Shi‘i leaders if they said something that angered him.25 His anger could also be turned against Christians and Jews. Enraged at the Zionist programme to transform predominantly Arab and Muslim Palestine into a Jewish state he descended into anti-Semitism. He brought the lies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (a forged document first published in Russia, alleging a Jewish conspiracy of world domination) into Arab and Muslim discourse, very probably for the first time.

  Rashid Rida had once supported liberal constitutional ideas because they accorded with the Islamic principle of consultation and would lead to the upholding of the Sharia by consent. But he was shocked by the French invasion of Syria in the summer of 1920 and the hypocrisy of the League of Nations, which was meant to uphold self-determination for the Arab peoples in the former Ottoman provinces as ‘a sacred trust of civilisation’.26 Instead, it had placated the regional ambitions of Britain and France, as well as the Zionist lobby.27 This led to a deepening of his hostility to the West, and would also have been a step on his path to anti-Semitism (as a younger man, he had actually written in defence of Dreyfus, whom he saw as a victim of Western racism).28 It was also what led him, a few years later, to defend Ibn Saud and the Wahhabis. Their motivations were of the best, he argued, and their teaching was consistent with the Sharia since they followed the religion of the first Muslims. In fact, he asserted, Ibn Saud was maintaining and defending the essential principles of Islam better than anyone since the time of the first four caliphs. His endorsement included a savage attack on Shi‘is, whom he accused of being Iranian agents.29

  In his view the Wahhabis’ concerns about saint worship were justified: they saw Muhammad as having the highest status of any man who had ever lived, but they were categorical that he was not a super-human being. They had also established a new Arab and Muslim kingdom that could help defend Islam from Western penetration. For Rashid Rida, Islamism and Arab nationalism were two sides of the same coin. Shi‘ism might be a branch of Islam, but it was a very inferior branch.

  V

  This was a time when many people felt that the new world they were entering was cutting them adrift from their roots. There had already been Muslim revivalist movements. As was seen in Chapter
Seven, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab lived and preached before the impact of the West reached Arabia. His message therefore cannot be seen as a reaction against Westernisation. But he was followed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by charismatic movements that tried to push back against the advances of the West and Westernisation. Examples are the movement led by the self-styled Mahdi in the Sudan and the Senussi Sufi Brotherhood that fought the Italians in Libya. Such campaigns were traditional in their style, and relied on propagating their messages among tribes in a primarily desert environment. But in the 1920s there was a completely new development: a Muslim revivalist movement in urban Egypt.

  It was led by a young teacher called Hasan al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood. A devout Muslim, he was devastated by the abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate. He saw this as a hammer blow to Islam, especially as Turkey itself had abolished the institution as a step towards making itself into a fully-fledged secular state. The abolition left many Muslims in Egypt feeling that they no longer had a protector on the world stage. In Cairo, the scholars of Al-Azhar mosque denounced the last Ottoman caliph as illegitimate, since he had accepted the separation of sultanate and caliphate when the Turkish republic was declared. They called on the Muslim community to find a replacement. Rulers including Sharif Hussein of Mecca and the king of Egypt indicated they would be prepared to put their names forward. The king of Afghanistan and the Zaydi Imam of Yemen (who, of course, was a Shi‘i) were also suggested.

  There was even an element of shock among Shi‘is. In India, some Shi‘i leaders supported the Khilafat movement, which in the years immediately after the First World War aimed to exert influence on Britain and Turkey to preserve the institution of the caliphate. Iraqi Shi‘i scholars accompanied their Sunni colleagues to a conference convened in Jerusalem in 1931 to discuss the restoration of the institution. While the Shi‘is did not consider the Sunni Caliphate legitimate, they shared the wider concern that its abolition was a threat to Muslim identity and to Islam itself.30 But no practical steps were taken to restore the institution, and the matter soon seemed almost forgotten. Underneath the surface, however, a trauma had been inflicted on many Muslims. In time, this would manifest itself. Hasan al-Banna’s call to activism was one of the first signs of that manifestation.

  The Muslim Brotherhood’s call was an emotional appeal for a return to Islam. Hasan al-Banna was a populist visionary and orator. He produced attractive slogans that encapsulated his audience’s gut reactions to the problems of foreign domination. But these slogans were vague and ambiguous. ‘Islam is the solution’ and ‘the Qur’an is our constitution’31 were (and are) two well-known catchphrases of the Brotherhood. Those who saw them could decide for themselves what they meant – hence their appeal. Hasan al-Banna believed that all Egyptians should come together to fight colonial oppression under the banner of Islam. ‘Humanity,’ he wrote, ‘is in dire need of the purifying waters of true Islam.’32 He was scathing about Western capitalism, which he saw as the cause of the maladies affecting Europe in the 1930s. By contrast, Islam offered the values of thrift, respect for private property and a sense of fairness in commercial dealings.

  He was also a formidable organiser. The Brotherhood began to spread as he reminded Egyptian Muslims of the tenets and practice of their faith. He encouraged them to take their religious practice more seriously. He and his companions began to build new mosques in places where there were few, and to establish social work and education programmes. As time passed, the Brotherhood became the largest mass movement in Egypt, especially as many ‘liberal’ politicians became discredited through corruption or the unpalatable compromises they found themselves forced to make in their negotiations with Britain. The Brotherhood also began to set up branches in other Arab countries.

  Following the assassination of the police chief for Cairo, and then Prime Minister Nuqrashi Pasha, who had declared the Brotherhood a terrorist organisation and tried to close it down, Hasan al-Banna was himself assassinated in February 1949 by men who are presumed to have been sent by the Egyptian secret service. This made him a martyr for his followers. The era during which nationalism would be the dominant force in politics still had over a quarter of a century to run, but by the time of his death he had established political Islam as a permanent feature in Egyptian politics.

  The arrival of the Muslim Brotherhood showed that Islamism was a serious alternative to nationalism in the sruggle for hearts and minds. Islamists, however, had a long way to go before they could hope to seize the initiative. As the Second World War loomed, few would have expected them to be able to do so. There were still sectarian tensions in Iraq. Nevertheless, there was little to indicate, outside Saudi Arabia, that one day there would be a widening of the gap between Sunnis and Shi‘is.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Tides Ebb and Flow

  I

  Four decades separate the start of the Second World War from the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Much changed over that period, and the trends that triumphed were not always those that seemed to be gathering momentum at an earlier point. Albert Hourani, one of the foremost scholars of the history of the Middle East in the English-speaking world during the second half of the twentieth century, used to tell his students that Britain’s domination of the Middle East had seemed so overwhelming to him in 1945 that he could not imagine it would end in his lifetime. Yet by the time of his death in 1993, not a single British imperial outpost remained in the region. The last British troops who had been stationed permanently in the Gulf left in 1971. The forces of Arab nationalism had, seemingly, triumphed.

  Yet already by 1971 that nationalism was in decay, and there were the first signs that religion was making a triumphant comeback as the primary focus of identity. Two events that are inextricably connected with this are the Six Day War of 1967 and the 1973–74 oil price rise. In 1967, Israel defeated the armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria comprehensively and occupied much extra territory. Gamal Abdel Nasser, the president of Egypt who was the Arab nation’s great champion, was shown to be a colossus with clay feet. This led to slow-burning disillusionment with Arab nationalism. People turned in increasing numbers to religion for a solution to the dilemmas (and, frequently, the despair) that confronted them. The significance of the 1973–74 oil price rise was that it made oil producers such as Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia wealthy in a way that had previously been almost unimaginable. It also meant that Saudi Arabia was now able to spend lavishly on promoting its own brand of Wahhabi Islam with its hostility to Shi‘ism.

  II

  Throughout the period 1939–79, Iraq’s elite remained predominantly Sunni. It tended to look down on Shi‘is and despise them, although many individual Shi‘is became part of that elite, and the strongest currents in political life were secular throughout this period. Nevertheless, the elite feared the Shi‘is because they made up most of the country’s population – and most of its poor – and there was the risk of revolution from below.

  One manifestation of Shi‘i frustration was widespread support for the Iraqi Communist Party. In the six years from 1949–55, Shi‘i representation in the upper echelons of the party rose from 21 to 47 per cent. The adoption of communism by many Shi‘is did not necessarily indicate their acceptance of Marxist-Leninist ideology. It reflected their desire for a new, equality-based social order and their dislike of the links between Sunnism and pan-Arabism. Behind this lay the fear of the possible absorption of Iraq inside a massive pan-Arab state which would be led by Sunni cliques in the way that Iraq was.1 The men who ran Iraq saw communists and populist Arab nationalists as the great dangers to stability, not the emergence of religion-based politics.

  Before the end of the monarchy in 1958, some Shi‘is were able to progress through parliamentary politics and become fully fledged members of the political elite. There had never been a Shi‘i prime minister of Iraq before the Second World War. During the post-war monarchy, however, there were four Shi‘i prime ministers. Some of them we
re able to establish patronage networks of their own, and to embody the aspirations of the new, young, educated Shi‘i professionals who were increasing in numbers. Iraq’s third Shi‘i prime minister, Fadhil al-Jamali, was himself a strong Arab nationalist who appointed a cabinet of which half the members were Shi‘i. This was a symbolic moment for many Shi‘is but, like most Iraqi governments under the monarchy, the new administration was short-lived. It fell for two reasons. One was conservative opposition by the landed interest to reforms proposed by al-Jamali, an opposition that united Sunni and Shi‘i landlords. His intended changes to the civil service also threatened the positions of the entrenched and predominantly Sunni groups that dominated it. His opponents hinted that he was showing favour to Shi‘i co-religionists. They succeeded in forcing his resignation. He had encountered a wall of anti-Shi‘i prejudice that remained solid throughout the period of the monarchy. That would also be the case under the revolutionary regimes that followed.

  In 1958, the monarchy came to an end in a bloody coup in which the king, much of the royal family, and the prime minister were killed. It was also the end of parliamentary life in any real sense. Henceforth, Iraq would be under the control of groups of army officers with revolutionary agendas.

  A great deal changed in Iraq over the years following the end of the monarchy. Socialist policies were increasingly implemented after President Nasser of Egypt adopted them. He had led the army officers who overthrew the Egyptian monarchy in 1952 and provided the model for other Arab revolutionary leaders during this period. State planning and public ownership of new industries were seen as the way forward, and a new emphasis was placed on education, healthcare and other social services.