A Concise History of Sunnis and Shi'is

by John McHugo

  Ruhollah Khomeini died on 3 June 1989, less than a year after the end of the Iran-Iraq War. This last period of his life saw two events that are greatly to his discredit and deserve to be mentioned because of the light that they shed on him. Each also illustrates different aspects of the Iranian Revolution.

  The first concerned Salman Rushdie, the British novelist from an Indian Muslim background. In September 1988 he published his satirical novel The Satanic Verses, which uses the techniques of magical realism. The book is about the problems immigrants experience when trying to settle in Britain, and the frosty attitude of the host culture. But the plot includes a dream sequence revolving around a story preserved by the Abbasid historian Muhammad bin Jarir al-Tabari. This concerns some verses that the Devil temporarily tricked the Prophet Muhammad into including in the Qur’an. Had these verses remained part of the holy text, they would have allowed idol worship. Airing this episode in a novel was bound to be controversial for Muslims, since some can find the story that al-Tabari recorded a stumbling block to their faith. Yet, quite apart from this, other features of the book are deeply offensive to many Muslims, and it is not hard to see why. There were demonstrations against the novel in Muslim communities in Britain, and these soon spread to Pakistan, Bangladesh and Kashmir, the countries from which those communities originated. Some of these demonstrations turned violent.

  Six months later, in February 1989, Khomeini issued an order sentencing the author as well as ‘those publishers who are aware of [the book’s] contents’ to death. The order continued: ‘I call on all zealous Muslims to execute them quickly, wherever they find them, so that no one will dare insult the Islamic sanctities. Whoever is killed on this path will be regarded as a martyr, God willing.’

  Nothing could have been more calculated to ensure that Iran would remain an international pariah. Violent attacks were made on Salman Rushdie’s Norwegian, Japanese and Italian translators over the next few years. The Norwegian was killed, and the other two injured, while Rushdie himself went into hiding. Khomeini’s stance demonstrated two things: the first was that the revolution’s radicalism still survived ten years after the fall of the Shah. So long as the supreme faqih continued to support that radicalism, no Iranian government would be able to turn aside from it. The other point, which is often overlooked today, is that Khomeini’s death sentence on Rushdie was a call to all Muslims of whatever sect. The overwhelming majority of those who had demonstrated against The Satanic Verses before he issued his order were Sunni Muslims. Khomeini hoped they would now fall in behind his lead.

  Khomeini frequently attacked the Saudi monarchy; as his thought developed he came to see monarchy as un-Islamic. However, he always stressed his belief in the unity of Muslims, something that we have seen was set out by implication, if not more strongly, in the Iranian Constitution of 1979. He took steps to reduce discord between Shi‘is and Sunnis and make it easier for Sunnis to see Twelvers as their brothers in faith. Thus, he opposed sabb, the ritual cursing of the three caliphs who had preceded Ali. Consequently this ritual that goaded Sunnis did not become a feature of the Islamic Republic. He also had the shrine of Abu Lulu closed down. The cult of Abu Lulu had grown among some Iranian Shi‘is. He was the Persian Christian who had been taken to Medina as a slave during the very first Arab conquests, and had assassinated the Caliph Umar.

  The period immediately after the Iran-Iraq War would lead to another serious blot on Khomeini’s reputation. The most deadly opponent of his Islamic Revolution had been the Mujahideen-e khalq, a group that had blended Marxism and Islam and had been prominent proponents of armed struggle against the Shah. In a travesty of justice by any standards – including, it should be emphasised, the standards of the Sharia – Khomeini had them condemned for apostasy and hanged by slow strangulation. An estimated 4,000–5,000 people died.

  Khomeini died less than four months after issuing his death sentence on Rushdie. He had made his brand of Twelver Shi‘ism and its velayat-e faqih triumphant within Iran, but that triumph had come at a price. Dr Michael Axworthy, who headed the Iran Section of the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office from 1998 to 2000, asserts that, by the time of Khomeini’s death, ‘the principles of religion had become wholly subordinated to the requirements of power’.19 Opposition to velayat-e faqih would continue among many Shi‘is worldwide. In Iran itself there would be much resentment at the strictures on daily life that it had led to, as well as dismay at the way in which principle was so often overridden by expediency. The regime’s use of torture, for instance, was in reality even worse than under the Shah. Expediency, placating populism, and putting means before ends, were all characteristic of Khomeini and his followers, and they led to disillusionment. That sometimes extended to disillusionment with Islam itself.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  From the Iranian Revolution to the 2003 Invasion of Iraq

  I

  After the Iranian Revolution, the Middle East and the entire Muslim world could never be the same again. Monarchs, military rulers and other autocrats felt genuine fear as they contemplated what had happened. Their security services, like those of the Shah, had focused chiefly on left-wing activists such as communists, socialists and (in Arab countries) Ba‘athists. Not only were these subversive forces still around, but a new threat had appeared: a movement of newly urbanised Muslim masses stirred up by an ideology that had Islam as its root. It took the autocrats some time to recognise that this new force was the greatest threat they faced. Left-wing activists were also slow to understand that reality.

  In Saudi Arabia in 1979, left-wing organisations had joined Shi‘i Islamists in the Eastern Province in widespread protests. Communists and Ba‘athists published their own versions of events, in which they refused to acknowledge that the Shi‘i activists had been the leaders of the popular discontent. As late as 1986, a spokesman for the Saudi Communists in exile in Lebanon condemned as ‘backward’ the Organisation for the Islamic Revolution in the Arabian Peninsula (OIRAP), one of the most important political groups behind the protests. But he was the one who was being left behind by history. OIRAP retorted that the events had coincided with the commemorations of the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, not a communist anniversary. The real ‘vanguard’, they added, were the Islamists, and it was they who had persuaded people to take to the streets.1 They were right.

  In the Middle East, rulers found it prudent to stress their own credentials as good Muslims. This was a trend that had begun before the Iranian Revolution; now it accelerated in response to a genuine religious revival. There were increasingly public manifestations of piety. More men could be seen with the callous on the forehead known as the zabib, or raisin, which is caused by the same patch of skin repeatedly touching the ground in regular prostrations for prayer. At the same time there was a dramatic increase in the numbers of women covering all their hair and wearing identifiably ‘Islamic’ dress. Behind the new stress on Islam as a badge of identity lay an uneasy resentment: the West, despite all the progress it had offered, despite all its achievements, had proved to be a false messiah. This was coupled with anger at many Western policies that had been imposed in the region since the spread of Western hegemony.

  II

  Autocrats in the Arab world (and elsewhere) did not have absolute power and were not equally repressive. In each country it was necessary for the ruler to keep the loyalty of a powerbase, and it was in his interest for that powerbase to be as broad as possible. This meant that prudent rulers needed to negotiate and compromise with the wishes and aspirations of ordinary people. In the monarchies, most kings and emirs could rely on a sense of legitimacy among a large section (frequently, but not always, the majority) of the population. Yet it was doubtful, for instance, that the Sunni royal families could claim such legitimacy in the eyes of most of their Shi‘i subjects, save to the very appreciable extent that they were able to provide a stable regime from which Shi‘is, as well as Sunni, could benefit.

  The relationship between ruler
s in the Arabian peninsula and their tribal followers was contractual. Rulers had to make it worthwhile for their subjects to remain loyal. Revenue came from customs duties, not from taxation of tribal followers. In return for their loyalty, the followers would expect largesse from their ruler according to unwritten customs that dated from before the advent of Islam. When oil revenues appeared, the expectation of increased largesse accompanied them, and the ruler’s generosity would now be expected to include the provision of schools, clinics, roads and government jobs. The followers – who were now rebranded as ‘citizens’ or ‘nationals’ – would not be given any say in governing their country. Democratic institutions were not on the agenda. But the ruler’s subjects could still go and talk directly to the ruler, or at least to his local governor, and petition in the old, customary way.

  THE CENTRAL ISLAMIC LANDS SHOWING AREAS WITH MAJORITY SUNNI AND SHI‘I POPULATIONS

  A wise ruler would listen, but the decisions were for him to take. It was not a question of no taxation without representation. It is sometimes suggested that in fact it was the opposite: no representation without taxation. In other words, the fact that citizens did not pay income tax meant that the government had no necessity to grant them democratic institutions. Traditional rulers of Arabian tribal societies had to listen to their followers and sound out their opinions if they did not want to risk their authority ebbing away. However, the vast financial resources that were now often at their disposal – especially after the oil boom of the mid-1970s – meant that they could frequently imprison or exile opposition leaders and buy off the constituencies to which the opposition appealed. There was always an apparatus of repression quietly present in the background. When needed, it would be used ruthlessly.

  To an extent, these patterns also occurred in the military dictatorships, although they frequently lacked the same wealth and they were, by and large, not tribal societies – or at least much less so than was the case in Arabia. Yet military rulers and other dictators often depended on patronage in similar ways in order to stay in power. They had used socialist and nationalist ideologies as their original justification for kicking out the previous incumbent of the presidential palace, and were expected to expand education, healthcare, roads, mains electricity and piped water across the entire country – as well as to provide government jobs. They also needed a powerbase, and in some cases – notably Syria and Iraq –that basis for authority was to a considerable extent provided on sectarian lines. A central element of these powerbases consisted of members of a religious minority, meaning Alawis in the case of Syria, Sunnis in that of Iraq. This was almost an open invitation for poisonous religious politics to enter each country. As was seen in the last chapter, before 1979 militant groups in Syria were already trying to use solidarity among Sunnis to resist a regime dominated by members of the Alawi minority from which the president came. In Iraq, similar use of patronage by a president from the Sunni minority almost invited the Shi‘i majority to turn to sectarian politics.

  Several factors meant that governments in the non-oil states could no longer provide the services ordinary people had come to expect, These included rising populations, fluctuating oil prices, inefficiency, corruption, failed socialist policies (such as the promise of a civil service job to every graduate) and harsh neo-liberal ones (such as ending that promise of the government job and cutting subsidies on basic commodities). Activists associated with a liberal opposition political movement were unable to step into the breach, since they did not have the necessary base or funds, and the government was determined to keep it that way. On the other hand, those religious organisations prepared to work with the government were presented with a vacuum that they could fill. They distributed food to the poor and offered medical care, while at the same time providing classes for people to learn about the teachings and practice of their faith. All this helped them to anchor Islam more deeply as the bedrock of identity for millions of people. Sunni and Shi‘i organisations carried out such work in their own communities, as did Christian groups in theirs. Although this helped cement the religious identities of those who benefited, there was no necessary reason for this, of itself, to lead to sectarian strife.

  III

  Such was the backdrop during the 1980s and 1990s against which two radical forces would seek to expand. The first was the revolutionary Islamist ideology coming out of Iran. The other was a radical, revolutionary impulse that gained traction among some Sunnis. It blended Wahhabism with movements such as the conservative Deobandis in the Indian subcontinent and the ideology of Sayyid Qutb.

  Sayyid Qutb was a Sunni Islamist theorist born in Egypt in 1906. He was convicted of plotting against the Egyptian state and executed in 1966. But by then he had published books that would lead to his being perceived as the intellectual godfather of radical Islam and the terrorism that is today seen as its hallmark. He came from a devout family and had memorised the Qur’an as a boy, but he also received a modern education and was respected as a gifted secular intellectual when he was a young man. He was well into his forties before he joined the Muslim Brotherhood in 1953. A religious arch-conservative as well as a theoretician of Islamist revolution, he advocated reinstating the inferior status for Christians and Jews that was enshrined in the Sharia but had been abolished in the nineteenth century, and rolling back the gradual improvements which secular reforms had made to the position of women. ‘Only in the Islamic way of life,’ he wrote in Milestones, his last book, ‘do all men become free from the servitude of some men to others and devote themselves to God alone.’2

  In the end, he rejected Western ideologies like nationalism, socialism and communism outright in favour of a sense of Islam as the sole feeling of identity that should unite all Muslims. He knew that those who would set out to establish this vision were few, but they were a vanguard that would spread its word from individual to individual until a new, righteous generation was created that would bring Egypt (and other Muslim countries) back to the Islam of the salaf, the pious forebears who had known and loved the Prophet and the following two generations. Although the primary task of the members of the vanguard was preaching and showing how to live Islam by example, Sayyid Qutb taught that they should also use violence when necessary, so as to stop those whose actions hindered the preaching of Islam. This teaching would have ominous consequences.

  Both of the new, radical movements mentioned above had as their main objective the rolling back of Western political and cultural domination of the Islamic lands. Although in theory they might have appeared to be allies, the clash between them would lead to sectarian discord.

  But it did not start that way. The Iranian Revolution caused an initial groundswell of pride in Islam among many Muslims the world over. This was not restricted to Shi‘is. Some enthusiastic Sunnis even saw velayet-e faqih (‘government by the [Shi‘i] mujtahid’) as a new version of the caliphate. In Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood at first applauded the Iranians for overthrowing the secular identity that they had been forced to adopt by the Shah, whose rule they saw as characterised by lax religious observance and general misery. Some Malaysian Islamists saw the Islamic republic as a symbolic triumph of the Islamic ideal and Islamic identity.3 In these countries – as in many other parts of the Muslim world where there were no Shi‘is or there was a minimal Shi‘i presence – a few Sunnis might decide to convert to Shi‘ism after being inspired by Khomeini’s anti-imperialist rhetoric. Generally speaking, however, such conversions had little lasting impact and very often the converts were re-absorbed by Sunni Islam. In Senegal a group of young intellectuals sparked enthusiasm for Islamism after visiting Iran in the early 1980s. They founded a newspaper in which they called for unity between Sunnis and Shi‘is, while attacking Saudi Arabia and Egypt, as well the local Muslim religious establishment. But they were unable to establish alternative networks to those provided by traditional Senegalese Sufi brotherhoods. Over time, many of them became members of the religious establishment they had once condem
ned, while their newspaper (Wal Fajri, ‘The Dawn’ in the Senegalese language Wolof) evolved into a mainstream liberal publication.4

  Saudi Arabia suddenly found itself faced by a challenge from the Shi‘is of the kingdom’s Eastern Province. Ever since the Saudis had gained control of the area, before the First World War, the public processions commemorating the martyrdom of Hussein at Karbala had been generally banned. In 1958 there had been sectarian clashes in Qatif, when Sunnis made fun of the Shi‘i rituals. Since then, commemorations had generally taken place only behind closed doors, in private colleges or confined spaces, or in towns and villages that were exclusively Shi‘i.5 But in 1979, no doubt emboldened by the Iranian Revolution, and following calls from religious scholars, Shi‘is tried to hold their commemorative processions publicly in the streets. This was an open act of defiance, especially as the commemorations held in Iran a year earlier had been an important milestone in the collapse of the Shah’s regime. Twenty-thousand members of the National Guard, all recruited from Sunni tribes, had to be sent to disperse the crowds of mourners.6

  Protests culminated in demonstrations across the province on 27 November, in which as many as 70,000 may have taken part. The following day there was violence, and demonstrators in the old town of Qatif carried pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini and chanted slogans from the Iranian Revolution. One of these was ‘La sunniyya la Shi‘iyya... thawra thawra islamiyya.’ This catchy slogan (it is a rhyming couplet in Arabic) means in English, ‘No Sunni, no Shi‘i... [we want] a revolution, an Islamic revolution!’ Subsequently, Qatif had to be sealed off as protesters looted the offices of the Saudi British Bank and the Saudi Arabian national airline. Ominously, too, the protesters reconvened to march on 12 January, the fortieth day – the arba‘een – of the killing of the first demonstrator, as well as on 1 February 1980, the first anniversary of the return of Khomeini to Iran.7