A Concise History of Sunnis and Shi'is
Page 34
The second strong theme to emerge from this book is the strength and indefatigability that the author observes in the ordinary people of these largely rural areas. They are proud of their revolution. On her first visit, in August 2012, she watched as they tried to build what they hope will be the civil society of the new Syria. But then comes her third, tragic, observation. By the time she returns a year later, a process of hard-line and coercive Islamisation is well underway. Part of this is the spread of a vicious sectarian narrative that demonises Alawis and other non-Sunnis. To a large extent, this process of hard Islamisation is imposed by the numerous foreign fighters, Sunni Muslims who have come from other countries to battle for the establishment of a state in Syria based on a strict and narrow interpretation of the Sharia that stems, ultimately, from Wahhabism. Yet there are also plenty of Syrians taking part in this project. It has become inextricably linked to the fight to overthrow the regime.
V
The imposition of anti-Alawi and anti-Shi‘i Islamism in rural northern Syria brings us naturally to Saudi Arabia, the home of Wahhabism, which is the primary source of the anti-Shi‘i discourse that has spread so widely since 2003. At the same time, Saudi Arabia has a substantial Shi‘i minority in its eastern province. As was seen in earlier chapters, that community has often faced exclusion and has regularly been the object of hate-preaching. This is despite intermittent attempts by the Saudi monarchy to win its support; at times its treatment has been less harsh than at others.
There have also been attempts at reform in Saudi Arabia, especially during the reign of King Abdullah, who ruled for ten years from 2005. Before then, there had been a major reconciliation with a Shi‘i reform movement in 1993, which had led to many Shi‘i activists returning home from exile, and a sharp reduction of Iranian influence among Saudi Shi‘is. Nevertheless, while there may have been some small improvement in the position of Shi‘is in Saudi Arabia, the underlying issues were not addressed and dissatisfaction grew.22 Although since 2004 Ashura processions have been allowed in predominantly Shi‘i towns and villages including Qatif, they have remained forbidden in mixed areas where they might cause communal tensions.23 At the same time, what can only be called anti-Shi‘i hate-preaching has never ceased; its quantity has merely waxed and waned.
In 2003, an ‘Islamo-Liberal’ alliance of Sunnis and Shi‘is in Saudi Arabia presented a petition for reforms which included an end to sectarian and regional discrimination as well as a national parliament and anti-corruption measures. Demands for Twelver Shi‘ism to be recognised as a separate doctrinal law school followed. But a terrorist campaign inside the country by al-Qa‘ida from May 2003 onwards knocked discussions of such issues off-track. The sad truth is that for much of the Wahhabi establishment (and parts of the ruling family) anti-Shi‘i discourse remains to this day a powerful way to gain legitimacy against the claims of Sunni revolutionary groups like al-Qa‘ida.24 Anti-Shi‘i rhetoric has also been an instrument of Saudi foreign policy,25 which is tied in with the kingdom’s struggle with Iran for hegemony over the Muslim world. Even after King Abdullah came to the throne, this still applied, though he fostered dialogue with his country’s Shi‘is. Thus, expressions of sympathy for Hezbollah among Saudi Shi‘is (and some Sunnis) during the Lebanese crisis in the summer of 2006 led to further anti-Shi‘i preaching in Saudi Arabia.26
In February 2009, there were clashes between Sunni and Shi‘i pilgrims (the latter largely from the eastern province) at the al-Baqi‘ cemetery in Medina where the first Shi‘i imams and other members of the Prophet’s family are buried. Riots and demonstrations spread to the eastern province. Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, a passionate Shi‘i preacher, disobeyed instructions from the security services to use his sermons to subdue the protests. Instead, he preached that the Eastern Province should have the right to secede from Saudi Arabia. Sectarian tensions simmered over the following two-year period, then blew up again in February 2011, at the time when the demonstrations of the Arab Spring reached nearby Shi‘i majority Bahrain.
The protests in Saudi Arabia were as much calls for equality and democratic participation as for the remedying of specifically Shi‘i grievances, although the lack of equality underlay the latter. King Abdullah responded to the protests with promises of massive additional government expenditure to provide jobs, but some of that expenditure was for religious institutions and the Ministry of the Interior, in neither of which are Shi‘is usually employed. Although the protests were dampened down by this policy, there were demonstrations by several hundred people in Qatif on 9 and 10 March calling for the release of prisoners. One of the slogans was ‘Not Sunni, not Shi‘i, Islamic Unity’.27 But when on 14 March Saudi Arabia sent troops to Bahrain to stiffen the resolve of the government against protesters calling for democracy, for a while the protests grew again. It was this risk of its citizens combining across sectarian divides that frightened the government above all else. The protests were quelled by a mixture of repression and pleas for calm from religious leaders. Yet that autumn and over the winter they flared up again, and a number of people were killed.
Since then, the tensions between Sunnis and Shi‘is in Saudi Arabia have not gone away. They were made worse by the execution of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr on 2 January 2016. He had been on death row since his conviction in 2014 on charges of ‘disobeying the ruler’, ‘inciting sectarian strife’ and ‘encouraging, leading and participating in demonstrations’.28 It was surely pure hypocrisy to have him executed for inciting sectarian strife, when anti-Shi‘i hate-preaching is so widely tolerated in Saudi Arabia. The angry reactions from Iran, the Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and from across the Shi‘i world illustrate how this execution ratcheted Sunni-Shi‘i tensions up another notch.
Saudi Arabia’s repression of its Shi‘is is also linked to its use of its armed forces in two nearby countries, Bahrain and Yemen, where its actions have aided a process of ‘sectarianisation’. In Bahrain, the Arab Spring protests brought people from across the sectarian divide together, but fear and mistrust between Sunnis and Shi‘is rendered fragile any attempts to build a united front calling for reform. Shi‘is make up 60– 70 per cent of the Bahraini population. Toby Matthiesen, an author and researcher specialising in Middle Eastern politics, was an eyewitness to the demonstrations of February-March 2011 that called for a degree of democracy. His conclusion was that, at least in the first days of the protests, they were not sectarian. Rather than ‘the people want the fall of the regime’, which had been the call in Tunisia and Cairo, the shout in Bahrain was ‘the people want the reform of the regime’. Yet the government, with Saudi backing, exploited fears of the Iranian bogeyman to pre-empt the emergence of a mature opposition movement that spanned the divide: something to which Iran also contributed through the use of unhelpful rhetoric.
Another example of sectarianism being fed by Saudi foreign policy has been Yemen, where the kingdom has supported the Yemeni government against the Houthi rebellion from 2009 onwards. The Houthis are from the Zaydi minority that constitutes a little over a third of Yemen’s population. The Zaydis, it will be recalled, are distinct from Twelver Shi‘ism. Their school of the Sharia is much closer to the Sunni doctrinal law schools, and sectarian differences have historically played little or no part in Yemen. Until 1962, North Yemen was ruled by a Zaydi Imam. When he was overthrown in a coup, civil war ensued between, on one side, royalists who were loyal to the Imam’s son, and, on the other, republicans; but religious sect was entirely absent as a factor in the conflict. In the 1960s, the Saudi Arabians actively supported the cause of the Zaydi Imam. At that time, they did not care that he was a Shi‘i. They saw him as something of a traditional Arab and Muslim ruler who was fighting the same good fight that they espoused against the Arab nationalism and socialism of President Nasser of Egypt. At that time, sectarianism was absent from Yemeni politics.
Yet today in Yemen, tragically, a new sectarian divide is being opened up. Salafi proselytisation aimed at the Zaydi minority has bee
n encouraged by Saudi Arabia, and sectarianism has reared its ugly head. The Houthi movement was a Zaydi reaction led by a family of Zaydi religious scholars who feared the marginalising of their community. Fighting between the government and Houthi rebels began in 2004. As elsewhere, the 2011 Arab Spring protests in Yemen were non-sectarian in nature, but negotiations for a new constitution broke down over the question of federalism, which the Houthis saw as rigged against them. Since the first half of 2014, the country has been destroyed in a complex civil war in which the former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and his supporters are allied with the Houthis. It has suited Saudi Arabia, and its Gulf allies that have intervened in the conflict, to consider Yemen another battlefield between Sunnis and Shi‘is, while the Houthis have received some support from Iran and Hezbollah. In Yemen there is now a danger of a wholly new sectarianisation redefining allegiances.
VI
In early 2002 the French scholar Gilles Kepel, a respected authority on Islamism, published a book called Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam. It was the translation of a work he had published in his native language in 2000, and its thesis was that Islamism had peaked and was in decline. The book had been updated to take account of 9/11, but for Kepel that event only added grist to his mill. He saw it as a clear act of desperation: a sign that Islamists knew they had lost the argument.
Many people will dismiss this view as simply an expert getting it completely wrong. But Kepel’s thesis is not nearly as mad and out-of-touch as they might assume. Since 2003, there have been mass movements in a number of Middle Eastern states in which millions of people have gone on to the streets to demonstrate with immense courage for democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, human rights, the rule of law, and the creation of a corruption-free economy that provides jobs. These demands are problematic for Islamists, since their main source of inspiration is from the West, not Islam. By their nature, they are also un-sectarian.
The first of these expressions of people power was in Lebanon in February to March 2005, and was dubbed the Cedar Revolution. Large numbers of people from different sectarian backgrounds across the Christian-Muslim and Sunni-Shi‘i divides demonstrated angrily but peacefully together in the aftermath of the assassination of Lebanon’s prime minister, Rafiq Hariri. Syria was widely believed to be behind the assassination, so the demands included an end to Syrian interference in Lebanon, the withdrawal of Syrian troops from the country, and fresh elections. The largest of these demonstrations was on 14 March, in which hundreds of thousands, possibly one million, took part – perhaps one in every five-or-so inhabitants of the country. This phenomenon led to massive international pressure on Syria to withdraw, and Syria removed its forces within weeks. Even though a large rival demonstration was organised by Hezbollah in reply (and Hezbollah has been accused of involvement in Rafiq Hariri’s murder), it did not call for the withdrawal to be reversed. Instead, it gave the Syrians an enthusiastic send-off and thanked them for their role in helping to protect Lebanon against Israel.
These mass protests left a legacy. Ten years later, in 2015, a campaign called ‘You Stink’ once again brought Lebanese people of all sects together to demonstrate against the government’s incompetence and corruption, which had led to the breakdown of rubbish collection in Beirut. Lebanon’s sectarian political system is too deeply entrenched for it to be uprooted easily, but increasing numbers of Lebanese are coming to the conclusion that one day this has to be done. Possibly connected with this are two factors that have tarnished Hezbollah’s revolutionary credentials. The first is its intervention in the Syrian conflict on the side of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, where Hezbollah’s militias have actually been serving as counter-revolutionary troops. The other concerns its role in Lebanon itself, and shows how movements that are based on a sect/tribe can be ill-suited to serving the true interests of their followers. As it is now a major force in Lebanese politics, with seats in parliament and ministers in the government, Hezbollah has become compromised in exactly the same way as the other sect-based political parties in Lebanon. Like them, it has opposed measures such as increases in workers’ salaries and insurance. It has done this because it is reluctant to see collaboration among trade unionists that transcends sectarian divides and is a potential threat to its hold over its Shi‘i followers. It also wants to preserve its relations with the other sect-based parties with which it needs to do deals, and to safeguard its own, considerable business interests.
In Iran in 2009, there was a surprise presidential election result in Iran. The leading reformist candidate, Mir Hossein Musavi, who was widely expected to win, was beaten by the incumbent, the hard-line Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. There were a number of surprising things about the way the result was declared and the distribution of votes across the country. These suggested a very high probability of electoral fraud (this has not been proved – but the evidence to settle the question categorically is not publicly available). Peaceful but angry demonstrations followed, and on several occasions demonstrators were shot. Pro-regime thugs were also active, and even attacked Mir Hossein Musavi when he was walking in a funeral procession. These events became known as the Green revolution. The name caught on because many of the protesters wore green bandanas, wristbands and clothing. Green is the colour associated with Ali and with Islam. The demonstrators took to the rooftops in some districts at night to shout ‘Allahu akbar’ as a protest, a tactic that had been used in the Islamic Revolution that toppled the Shah. Although the regime eventually managed to bring an end to the demonstrations, it had received a nasty shock. In the short term, the events strengthened the hard-line elements; but next time there was a presidential election in Iran, in 2013, there were no suggestions of serious attempts at tampering with the result. The moderate candidate, Hassan Rouhani, was elected, and he increased his share of the vote when re-elected in 2017.
But the greatest wave of mass protests in favour of democracy, the rule of law, freedom of speech and a corruption-free economy was the aforementioned Arab Spring, which began in Tunisia in December 2010. In early 2011, it reverberated across many other Arab countries, most notably Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain and Yemen. Its ripples travelled further, including to Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Jordan, Iraq and Oman. It led to the transformation of Tunisia into a democratic state, but in some of the other countries the experience was much less positive. In Egypt, the dictator Hosni Mubarak was brought down; but the aftermath of his fall was mishandled, and today Egypt is once again under military rule. In Libya, the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi almost led to the disintegration of the country, and it has not yet reassembled itself. Syria and Yemen dissolved into civil wars in which outside powers have treated warring factions, including the Syrian and Yemeni governments, as proxies. In Bahrain, protests calling for democracy and reform unnerved the monarchy and led to a crackdown backed up by troops sent in support by Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia also increased the suppression of its own Shi‘i population.
Initially, none of these expressions of people power had anything to do with Islamism or sectarianism between Sunnis and Shi‘is (or between Muslims and Christians or other minorities). When taken together, they make a powerful statement about the direction in which the peoples of the Middle East wish to travel. Islam, of course, plays a role: it is the bedrock of the region’s culture and identity for the vast majority of its people. It is therefore unsurprising that Iranians protesting against a stolen election result should chant ‘Allahu akbar’ from the safe anonymity of rooftops at night. In 2009 this Islamic slogan was used to taunt what might now be called the Iranian revolutionary establishment. One can detect similarities between this and the use of Islamic rhetoric on many earlier occasions. In Tunisia in 2011, the Nahda Party won the largest number of seats in the country’s first democratic election (but not enough to gain a majority). This was a moderate Islamist movement with a socialist outlook. However, it lost seats in Tunisia’s second democratic election and accepted the result. It now rejects the epithet ‘Isl
amist’ and considers itself to be a ‘Muslim democratic’ party. It thus seeks to take inspiration from the tenets of Islam in its democratic politics in the same way that, say, Germany’s Christian Democrats aim to take inspiration from Christian social teaching.
Yet in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, Islamist forces were often best placed to exploit the ensuing vacuum as military regimes fell or found themselves with their backs to the wall. As so often before, the dictators and the monarchies had made sure that leaders of liberal opposition groups were in exile, had been co-opted, or were too weak to build up a powerbase that could challenge them. The success of Islamist parties and other groups followed on naturally from the symbiotic relationship between rulers and Islamists that had grown over the previous twenty or thirty years. This had allowed those Islamist groups that were willing to play the game according to the rules set by the regime to be the best-organised political forces in the country. At the same time, whenever they could, oppressive rulers would claim that opposition to their rule was sectarian, and use sectarianism to divide and rule.