Still, the Sunni terrorist would, and will once given the chance, make war on their Shi’ite counterparts once they inhabit the same expanse of land. Peel a layer off of the resentment and you’ll find the resurrected, feral war between Sunni and Shi’ite. ~Dennis Dale, Untethered

Mr. Dale’s post discusses the various problems of adhering strictly to the “occupation” narrative (hegemony breeds terrorism) in the light of the persistent hostility towards the West within Islam per se, and he makes a number of telling observations.  He is correct that hegemony and occupation do not explain everything, and they certainly don’t excuse anything that Islamic fanatics do.  But that isn’t actually what I wanted to talk about in relation to his post. 

What caught my attention was the above quote, which, in connection with the line from David Brooks the other day about the “Sunni-Shi’ite style of politics,” got me to thinking about something that I came across in recent years.  This was my discovery, hardly news to Islamicists (that is, scholars of the Islamic world), that the conventional description of the origins of the two sects in Islam–the dispute over succession to the Caliphate, made worse by the death of Husayn at the hands of Yazid–does not really describe the origin of the sharp sectarian divisions that later became much more stark, violent and significant.  The events of the seventh century acquired new and added significance as they were marshalled in the creation of much starker sectarian identities in later conflicts–perhaps similar to the process that early modern historians refer to as “confessionalisation.”  Though the first real hardening of the lines came in the ninth century, the establishment of the Fatimid caliphate in 969 was a significant event in re-politicising a dispute that had by and large had only limited political impact. 

I have heard it persuasively argued that real, ongoing sectarian hostility did not exist until it was actively fomented by the Safavids and the Ottomans starting in the late 16th century, as their fellow sectarians in the disputed lands in Mesopotamia became the tools of the rival imperial policies.  However, under the Qajars Iran exercised no aggressive foreign policy designs in the west and the sectarian rift ceased to have as much real political significance.  It is my impression that this had remained the case in most countries until very recently, except perhaps in Lebanon, where Shi’ites’ identity was strongly politicised during the civil war, and Pakistan.  In Iraq, however, obviously the disparity between the sect that had the preponderance of power and the sect that the government suppressed brutally in living memory politicised these divisions in a way that was not really typical of most other mixed Muslim communities (Pakistan, hotbed of jihadism, remains an important exception here). 

What brought all of this to mind was the description of the Sunni-Shi’ite divide as a “resurrected, feral war,” as if it were a primordial, visceral resentment based in centuries of traditional opposition, an “ancient hatred” to use the phrase invoked so often in the Balkans, when the communal hostility is of much more recent provenance with intelligible political causes.  Like the Serb-Croat bitterness inherited from the Croats’ genocidal handiwork in WWII, most of the scores being settled now in Iraq are likely to be relatively recent, probably even within the lifetime of the people settling the scores.  These conflicts draw on the ancient disputes and martyrs of the seventh century for their symbolism, but the violence we are seeing between the rival death squads is not so much “resurrected” from another time as it has simply been bottled up for years and then unleashed and allowed to run rampant.  Perhaps this is a lot of arguing over not much, but I recall that one of the basic problems Westerners had in understanding the Balkan conflicts was their presumption that they understood it by reference to the Schism of 1054 and the alleged “ancient hatred” that motivated the three sides, when the sources and reasons for their hatreds were very modern and rooted in the actions of the current actors’ immediate ancestors.