“Sectarian tensions are not new, of course, but the vocabulary of anti-Shiism in the Middle East has changed dramatically over the last 10 years. Shiites who used to be accused of ethnic otherness are now being cast as outside the Muslim community itself. Exclusion on doctrinal grounds was a mostly Saudi exception in the framing of Shiism. It is now increasingly becoming the regional rule. Prior to 2003, anti-Shiism in Iraq was perhaps best encapsulated in the term ajam…………. In other words, prior to 2003, Middle Eastern Sunni-Shiite dynamics were more often manifestations of nationalistic and ethnic rather than religious expression. …………These pre-2003 niceties, superfluous as they might seem to most Shiites, have long since been discarded. While Shiites’ Arab pedigrees continue to be questioned, anti-Shiite discourse today is overwhelmingly concerned with religious otherness. It is the post-2003 sectarian landscape and the inflammation of a religiously inspired sectarian entrenchment that has shaped the sectarianization of Syria’s civil war in stark contrast to how the Hama massacre of 1982 was framed. Likewise, it is this new sectarian landscape that is facilitating Hezbollah’s unabashedly Shiite posture of late. Just as it is the post-2003 environment that has led to the spread of Sunni-Shiite tension beyond its usual geographic hotspots — who could have predicted the public lynching of Shiites in Egypt of all places? ……………………”
An interesting article in Foreign Policy magazine, but it compels me to add my own two cents.
Many sectarian events have racked the Muslim world in recent years, stretching from Morocco to Indonesia. One of these stands in my mind as the most shocking, as an indication of the degree of sectarian hatred that has eaten the social fabric of Muslim societies. That was a few months ago, when neighbors attacked and lynched their neighbors in a town in Egypt. When one of the previously most tolerant Arab countries witnessed thousands of Sunni Muslims converge on a house of Shi’a Muslims and basically rip them to pieces.
Saudi media, and some other Gulf media, often emphasize a sinister connection between Shi’ism and being pro-Iranian (sometimes these campaigns tend to be self-fulfilling to some extent). Other favorite terms for Shi’as once used by Baathists in Iraq and now used by despotic tribal ruling clans in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and by Persian Gulf Salafis are: Majouss (Magi, referring to Zoroastrianism, the pre-Islamic faith of the Persian Empire); and Safawi (referring to the Safavid Shi’a dynasty of Persia which fought with the Ottoman Turks for control of what is now Iraq). Both terms seek to deliberately emphasize some perceived Persian or Iranian connection or nature of Arab Shi’as and distinguish them from other Arabs.
Cheers
mhg
