Sectarian hostility drives wedge against pan-Muslim unity
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CAIRO:: After the Lebanese militia Hezbollah battled Israel for 34 days last summer, Hamada Abdullah, a Sunni Muslim, posted a small picture of Hassan Nasrallah, the group's leader, on the bare wall of his home.
It did not matter that Nasrallah was a Shiite Muslim, who led an organization that only allowed Shiites to be members and was aligned with the Shiite Muslim state of Iran. To Abdullah, Nasrallah was first and foremost a bold Arab leader. A resistance leader.
But these days Abdullah says he is suspicious of Nasrallah and his politics.
"His whole army in the south of Lebanon, they are Shiites," Abdullah said, leaning over as if to convey something shocking and offensive during a meal in his living room in a village outside the city.
The botched hangings of Saddam Hussein and his aides, the bloody sectarian violence in Iraq and the political power struggle in Lebanon between Hezbollah and the government have all conspired to aggravate sectarian tensions around the region.
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Perhaps more to the point, they have undermined the sense of pan-Muslim unity that Shiite clerics and Iranian leaders had tried to promote — and that was felt on the streets of many Arab countries — as a means to enhance their regional influence.
"When Hezbollah did what they did in Lebanon in the summer, no one thought of it as a Shiite party; it was a nationalist party," said Tahir Masry, a former prime minister of Jordan. "Now with the events in Iraq culminating in the way Saddam Hussein was executed and the lack of condemnation and total silence of Hezbollah, many people are examining the position of Hezbollah as a Shiite party."
But the growing sense of separation Sunnis are feeling toward Shiites has not grown organically from events in the region. Instead, it has been promoted by some Sunni religious leaders and Sunni states — primarily Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia — which had been looking for a wedge to drive between their citizens and Shiite leaders from Iran, political analysts and former government officials in the region said.
The hanging of Saddam on a Muslim holy day, for example, which led to sharp criticism of the United States, was also seen as offering a benefit to U.S. allies in the region in that it was used to create sectarian tensions and to push back against Iran's growing influence, political analysts said.
But there are risks. "The reality of the current situation is that we are approaching an open Sunni-Shiite conflict in the region," said Emad Gad, an expert in international relations at the government-financed Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. "And Egypt will also be a part of it as a part of the Sunni axis. No one will be able to avoid or escape it."
Sunnis make up the vast majority in the Islamic world, with Shiites comprising the second-largest sect. The two split in a dispute over who would lead the Muslim community after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. While there are many theological differences between the two groups — and similarities — the gathering conflict is not fueled by religion. Instead it is being stoked by a determination on the part of Sunni leaders to preserve, or reinvigorate, their waning influence and power in the region — while Shiites have been emboldened and so have pressed for more influence.
After the war between Hezbollah and Israel, Shiite leaders seemed to reach their zenith as an antidote to a Sunni Muslim leadership widely viewed as corrupt, impotent and stooges of the West, analysts here said. Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Nasrallah both won wide followings across the region for their willingness to defy the United States. After its war with Israel, Hezbollah and its allies pressed for more power in Lebanon and when rebuffed, began demonstrations that aim to topple the government.
Fueled by the state-controlled news media in many Sunni Muslim states, there is a growing divide across the Middle East between Sunni Muslims and Shiites — or at least a growing estrangement. Egyptians, for example, are inundated on a nearly daily basis with headlines and commentaries and television reports of supposed Shiite transgressions.
"Raising the ugly face of Shiites, expanding Iranian influence in the region," read a headline in a recent edition of Rose El-Youssef, a pro-government Egyptian weekly newspaper.
Writing in a Palestinian-owned newspaper, Al Quds Al Arabi, Abdel- Beri Atwan, the editor-in-chief, commented on what he sees as efforts to fan sectarian tensions: "America confirmed that the humiliating execution of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein on the holy Id al-Adha was well studied and planned by the U.S. and its spiteful sectarian allies in Iraq, to widen the sectarian sedition in the region and hasten the process of polarization between the Shi'i crescent and the Sunni arc."
