Abu Aardvark

Lebanon's crisis not really a Sunni-Shia crisis (unless it is)

A fair amount of the coverage of the escalating crisis in Lebanon is framing it as a Sunni-Shia conflict.  I don't have much to say about what's happening inside of Lebanon - I'd recommend checking out reflections by Brian Katulis, Abu "my pseudonym has outlived its utility" Muqawama, and many others following events there closely -  but I did want to point out something important in the wider arena.  Compared to the near-hysteria which broke out across the Arab world over Sunni-Shia conflict in late 2006, the Sunni-Shia dimension is very visibly not being driven by mainstream Islamist movements on either side. In the last day,

• the Muslim Brotherhood released a statement calling on all sides to end violence in the streets and to engage in national dialogue to end the crisis.
• Mohammed Fadlallah, the extremely influential Shia marja'a who is widely considered to be the spiritual guide for Hezbollah, warned all sides against falling into the trap of sectarian discourse and called for dialogue among all parties.
• Yusuf al-Qaradawi, one of the most influential Sunni Islamists from the Muslim Brotherhood trend, called for an end to the bloodshed and a unification of ranks against common external enemies.
• the popular MB-aligned website Islam Online is reprinting a whole slate of articles and opinions by various figures over the years denouncing Sunni-Shia tensions, including a 2006 statement by Egypt's Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa, a 2007 article criticizing the politicization of sectarian differences by the influential Egyptian columnist Salamah Ahmed Salamah, and more. 
• Fahmy Howeydi, the influential Egyptian Islamist columnist, said that he understands the distress and concern people feel, but that political struggles must not be allowed to rip apart the Islamic umma.

I could add more if I had the time, but hopefully this will suffice to make the point.  There's plenty of anti-Iranian and anti-Hezbollah agitation out there in the Arab media discourse on Lebanon the last few days, especially in the Saudi media and in some of the Lebanese media (and also anti-Shia discourse lurking in the corners) - and Ayman al-Zawahiri noticably focused on Lebanon in his last appearance -  but it isn't coming from Muslim Brotherhood circles or from key Shia figures such as Fadlallah.   Whatever happens in the ongoing struggle between the two Lebanese coalitions and their external patrons, I don't see this crisis offering much support for meta-narratives about popular Sunni-Shia conflicts bubbling up to the surface.  Which doesn't mean that those hoping to promote such conflict won't try to frame it in that way...

AJ: Qaradawi v Rafsanjani

Al-Jazeera today broadcast an extremely important direct dialogue between the influential Sunni Islamist Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Iranian politico Akbar Hashmi Rafsanjani on the subject of Sunni-Shia sectarian tensions.   I had expected to be liveblogging the dialogue, which I had seen advertised as running now, but instead they are running 'Behind the News' with clips of the debate and commentary from Fahmy Howeydi and Anis Niqash.  I do still hope to see the whole dialogue.

Qaradawi and Rafsanjani today on al-Jazeera

The debate wasn't face to face, and Rafsanjani spoke through a translator.  Still, Qaradawi and Rafsanjani reached some key points of consensus.   Both emphasized the danger of the United States exploiting Sunni-Shia differences, and both said that the United States and Israel were the only winners in an Iraqi civil war and the only beneficiaries from sectarian killing.    Both supported Iraq's territorial unity, and both called for unity against the American occupation rather than sectarian violence.  Both called for more Sunni-Shia dialogue, and for a common front against American plans to divide the Islamic umma.  Qaradawi said that whatever Sunni concerns about the Shia,  Sunnis (he used "we" here) would stand with Iran if it was attacked and against the aggressors.

Qaradawi sharply distinguished between resistance to the American occupation of Iraq and Sunni-Shia bloodshed. He insisted that Muslims defend the right of resistance to foreign occupation, whether in Iraq or Palestine or Afghanistan or anywhere, and denounced any attempts to delegitimize such resistance.  While he defended the Sunnis of Iraq, and called on Iran to use its influence to stop the sectarian killing in Iraq, he clearly and bluntly condemned any Sunnis who were killing Shia.  He pointed to last October's Mecca Document as an appropriate basis for Sunni-Shia relations in Iraq.

Qaradawi rejected the "takfiris and extremists on both sides".  At the same time, he called for frank and open discussion rather than pleasantries, implicitly defending his controversial remarks at the Doha conference last month.  Rafsanjani, for his part, avowed the importance of dialogue with all Muslim ulema and the need for  Sunni-Shia rapprochement. He clearly hoped to reassure Sunni Arab audiences about Iranian intentions, and treated this as a public diplomacy mission on behalf of Iran, trying to repair the damage done to Iran's reputation in the Arab world over the last couple of months, doing the sort of thing which I only wish senior American officials were more willing to do. 

Fahmy Howeydi and Anis Naqash served as discussants on 'Behind the News'.  Howeydi argued that it was  important to have direct dialogue between Sunni and Shia at this level, hoping that it would open the door to more untelevised dialogues. Naqash was less impressed, arguing that the current problems were all political, not sectarian. He complained that Sunni-Shia dialogues only legitimized the false idea that sectarian conflict existed and empowered extremists on both sides.  Howeydi defended such dialogues as offering an opportunity for moderates and reasonable voices to exchange views and to make progress.   Both Howeydi and Naqash noted that Rafsanjani spoke as a statesman and Qaradawi as a daiya (preacher), making actual dialogue a bit difficult.   

Overall, this was a fascinating program, and of real importance in the current political climate.  The primary takeaway is that, as I've written several times before, that Arab political populists are stepping back from their anti-Shia moves last month because they see the sectarian conflict being exploited by the United States and its regional allies.  Iranian pragmatists like Rafsanjani are encouraging this retrenchment, hoping to claw back ground lost over Iraq and Saddam's execution.  Like Mohamed Mehdi Akef, Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, Qaradawi - his finger ever to the political wind - has tacked away from the post-Saddam execution anti-Shia hysteria and back towards a more conventional political line. I'm hoping I get the chance to ask him about all of this in Doha this weekend. 

UPDATE:  some coverage of the debate can be found here, and a lengthy roundup (in Arabic) on Qaradawi's web site here.

Fadlallah on al-Jazeera

Syed Mohamed Husayn Fadlallah is on Ahmed Mansour's No Limits program on al-Jazeera live from Beirut right now.  Fadlallah, of course, is often described as the spiritual leader of Hezbollah, and is one of the most prominent Shia figures in the Arab world (you can check out his website here).   It never used to be seen as unusual for someone like Fadlallah to be featured on al-Jazeera, but in the current state of Sunni-Shia hysteria I guess it's worth noting.

It's also an absolutely fascinating encounter, one of the most interesting I've seen since this whole Shia-Sunni business got going (note:  all that follows is liveblogging, not from transcript, so apologies if some of the wording isn't exactly right).  Mansour sympathizes with the Sunni insurgency  - he was the reporter whose reporting from Falluja in 2004 caused such problems for the American campaign there.  He pushed Fadlallah hard, in his polite but dogged way, on the position of the Shia in Arab politics. A lot of major tropes in current Sunni-Shia tensions were raised openly, with no screaming. This chance for a major Shia personality to directly address a vast Sunni audience, and to air sensitive issues openly in a calm setting, was a good example of what a platform like al-Jazeera can offer - sure, some people will complain about some of the points which were made being inflammatory or offensive, but the point is that all of those points are already very much out there anyway, and at least here they could be rebutted or debated.   

After briefly touching on Palestine, about which they could easily agree, Mansour and Fadlallah moved to Lebanon and then to Iraq and the wider Sunni-Shia tensions in the region.  Fadlallah insisted that the Shia of Lebanon had no distinctly Shia position, and that their demands were national;  he refused to take Mansour's bait about the Prime Minister being Sunni.  When Fadlallah complained of an American project to create a "Greater Middle East," Mansour said that "some say" that there is also a Greater Iran project.  Mansour raised fears of a Shia crescent and Iranian expansionism, which Fadlallah dismissed as "fantasies" manufactured by hostile powers.  And when Mansour brought up the "Shiaziation of Sunnis" allegation, Fadlallah denied it categorically - while complaining in his turn about the thousands of Sunni books declaring Shia to be kufr (apostates).  He criticized Yusuf al-Qaradawi for raising unwarranted allegations in public rather than discussing them in private first to discover the facts:  dialogue in the media full of accusations and rabble-rousing will only divide the Islamic umma and help the enemies of Islam, according to Fadlullah.

Things got most heated over Iraq, where Fadlallah doggedly tried to focus on common Sunni-Shia opposition to American occupation while Mansour equally doggedly tried to highlight Shia official cooperation with the United States.  When Fadlallah said that the Shia of Lebanon were Lebanese first, but of course has relationships with outside powers (meaning Iran) just like everyone has relationships with outside powers, Mansour pounced:  the Shia of Iraq have positive relations as well, but with the United States.  Fadlallah responded by trying to focus all attention on the United States, the greatest problem for the region in his view.  When Mansour quoted Abd al-Aziz Hakim saying that "America's vision for Iraq is closest to ours", Fadlallah looked pained.  Fadlallah responded by announcing that he had private information that there was widespread armed Shia opposition to the US occupation of Iraq.  (Mansour: can you show me this information?  Fadlallah:  no, it's secret.)   He boasted of his own fatwas forbidding any Muslim from assisting the Americans in controlling Iraq and calling on Muslims to resist the US occupation and American strategy in the region.  Fadlallah firmly denounced Sunni-Shia bloodshed of any kind, and called on all intra-Muslim killing to stop. But he also aired complaints about the "takfiris" (his word) who openly called for the killing of Shia Muslims.  Fadlallah's bottom line:  the Muslim umma needs to understand that the problems are not between Sunni and Shia but between Islam and the American administration.   

Overall, a simply fascinating exchange.   No time to analyze it any further, but well worth everyone's attention.
UPDATE: transcript here.

Debating the death squads

Right now on al-Jazeera, Faisal al-Qassem's The Opposite Direction (the popular program which generated quite the firestorm with its program on Saddam's execution) is hosting a 'discussion' of Shia death squads in Iraq. To the extent that simultaneous screaming constitutes a discussion.   

This should calm things down.

UPDATE:  evidently, this program really pissed the Iraqi government off (thanks J for the tip) - it blasted al-Jazeera for helping to "spread death and destruction."  As Reuters put it, "It gave no reason for the new criticism, but one official in the ruling Shi'ite alliance said a talk show was broadcast on Tuesday that criticized the government and Shi'ite parties." Reuters quoted Ahmed Sheikh, al-Jazeera's editor in chief, calling the statement "unjustified, baseless and ridiculous":   "What did we do, nothing? The Iraqi government is looking for a scapegoat to justify their failure in bringing security and stability to Iraqis." 

Sunni-Shia conflict at Cairo book fair?

I've just come across a report in al-Masryoun, an Egyptian paper with which I'm not familiar, about clashes between Sunni and Shia at the Cairo Book Festival. The report claims that a Shia book vendor got into a scuffle over his supposedly offensive behavior which had to be broken up by the security forces. It then links it back to Sunni Muslim anger over "hundreds of thousands" of pamphlets urging Sunnis to become Shia and advertising a forum dedicated to "Shia-izing Egypt", along with the publication of numerous Shia books attacking the Sunnis, and Qaradawi's warnings about the dissemination of Shia books among Sunnis.

One of the alleged pamphlets as reproduced in al-Masriyoun, with the URL airbrushed out

In a report on Al-Arabiya's website yesterday, the Shia publisher denied producing anti-Sunni materials or materials calling for Sunnis to convert to Shi'ism, while the other Shia at the center of the conflict said that he had been coming to the Book Festival for many years and that all of his books had been approved by al-Azhar.   The Shia-ization of Egypt forum does appear to exist, though it's hard to judge who actually created it or why.   But whatever the truth, enough there for the tabloids to leap on it and for more rumors and buzz to spread... and the beat goes on.

Jihadi viral videos

Just one more example of the "jihadi viral videos" that I was writing about yesterday.  Today I downloaded another clip, this one allegedly of a Shia rally praising Sistani as a descendent of the Prophet, denouncing King Abdullah as "son of an American."  I say allegedly because the time, place, and nature of the rally are all unclear - one major feature of all of these video clips is how decontextualized they are, allowing people to put the worst possible spin on them if they are so inclined.  Like most of these "jihadi viral videos", the clip was less than a minute long.  It had been viewed more than 15,000 times on this forum alone since being posted yesterday.

This particular clip actually led to some confusion in the ensuring discussion.  One participant pointed out that everybody in the (virtual) room hates and denounces the Saudi royal family, not least Osama bin Laden, so why get so upset about Shia doing the same?  Was the clip being circulated by Saudi intelligence agents, who might mistakenly think that insults to King Abdullah would be negatively received?   But others took the bait, denouncing the Shia as "worse than pigs" and defending Abdullah as at least better than a Shia.    Another (rather amusingly) suggests that perhaps the real target of the rally was Jordan's King Abdullah, not the Saudi King Abdullah, since the former's mother was non-Arab (British, not American). 

Whatever the case, it's just one more example of the growing impact of these viral clips.  What I find most intriguing about them is that they circulate under the radar of the mass media, and I think are of increasing importance in shaping popular attitudes.   When posted on forums or spread by SMS they are coming from relatively trusted interlocutors, giving them perhaps more credibility than something aired on the mass media.  If anybody took me up on this morning's challenge - to reconstruct the origins and spread of the "Shia conversion meme" - I strongly suspect that these viral clips might play an important role.   

Nasrallah on the Shia conversion meme

I've written a lot lately about the odd idea circulating in the Arab world that large numbers of Sunnis are converting to Shi'ism, and that Iran is encouraging this as part of a general plot to spread its influence. Everyone seems to believe this, even though there is virtually no evidence that it is actually happening anywhere.  The meme has gone so far that Hassan Nasrullah felt the need to weigh in on the question.   As translated by Mideastwire, via Josh Landis: 

"For example, it is said that Iran or the Shi'i Islamic movements throughout the Arab and Islamic world have a plan to turn Sunnis into Shi'is. It is also said that there are plans, studies centres, programmes, and huge sums of money geared towards this end. When you say this to any Sunni leader, Sunni scholar, Sunni movement, or young Sunni man, they will mobilize themselves against it. This is their natural right. This issue is now presented strongly and some news media are working on it. Some Arab leaders and senior men of religion spoke about this issue. Depicting this as a basic and major issue on which others are working will lead the nation to sedition whose end will not be known.

"Let us both Shi'is and Sunnis first make sure of this, cooperate, and investigate this together to know if there is really such a thing and if it exists. Let us find out if it really exists or if it is fabricated, drafted, written, organized, and presented by someone as top secret information to some leaders, men of religion, or quarters. Let us scrutinize things and make sure of this first to know if it exists or not.

...

Although tonight is a night of grief and consolation, allow me to lighten the atmosphere a bit for you because the worst of calamities forces laughter as the popular saying goes. I said this to those who came to see me about this issue. I told them if Hezbollah wants to convert some Sunni youths in Lebanon into Shi'is, what will it do? You say it will spend huge sums of money rather than use ideology, conviction, evidence, and so forth although we do not use even these for this purpose. This is not our cause. It is well known since 1982 that this has not been our cause. It is not our policy to turn Sunnis into Shi'is or prevent the Shi'is from becoming Sunnis.

....

What will the purpose of turning 50, 100, or 200 young Sunnis into Shi'is be? Is it increasing the number of Shi'is by 200? First of all, this will cost us huge sums of money. Second, it will cause us a problem whose end will not be known. I told them this does not require us to do much. We in Hezbollah can issue a circular saying we this year want you to produce more. The number of Shi'is will then increase by 50,000 people in only one year. We will thus do it for free. Well, you continue to produce without needing such a recommendation, praise be to God. "What they say is silly and is aimed at incitement. True, a very small number of Sunni youths in Lebanon might have been influenced by the general atmosphere and converted to Shiism. Likewise, and for the same reasons, some Shi'is might have turned into Sunnis. Let us count their number in Lebanon and see if there is a phenomenon to convert to Shiism or Sunnism. There is nothing of the sort.

...

I heard that some Arab leaders, some Arab news media, and some men of religion gave astronomical figures. In life there are things that can be believed and others that cannot be believed. Some key figures in Lebanon - and they know themselves - said in private meetings that 7 million Sunnis in Syria converted to Shiism. What sort of talk is this? Yes, and they build on this assumption, which leads to other consequences. They say a battle should be waged against converting people to Shiism, but none has plans to spread Shiism.

This "conversion meme" is really toxic, and the fact that it has become serious enough for Nasrallah to spend this much time on it is a phenomenon worth exploring.  This could be a great subject for some enterprising researcher to use to analyze how political ideas spread in today's media-saturated Middle East:  trace the emergence of the idea that Sunnis are converting to Shi'ism en masse through various media forms (public and private) to trace out the lines of influence and dissemination.  It might also help shed light on whether it is primarily being driven from the top down, by governments and their proxies (as I think) or from the bottom up driven by the surfacing of deeply rooted Sunni-Shia animosities (as many others argue).   I don't have the time right now to do it myself, but I wish somebody would! 

Al-Araji video clip

This short clip of a khutba by Hazim al-'Araji, a prominent figure in the Sadrist movement and the Mehdi Army, calling for the Shia to kill and torture Sunnis, especially the 'Wahabbis' and 'Baathis', is circulating widely via SMS, email, and forums. The Araji clip as produced by Ansar al-Sunnah was only a few minutes long, and bracketed his speech with clips of heroic 'mujahedin' executing blindfolded Shia in revenge for Saddam's execution.  Lovely. 

While it's hard to know for sure, these short video clips seems to be having a pretty big impact on inflaming sectarian attitudes around the region - and to be having increasingly greater impact than long speeches or videos by al-Qaeda's leaders.  A friend of mine told me that when he was recently in Saudi Arabia, everyone he met had seen and been engraged by another video clip featuring a shaykh's opinion on the relative merits of the Shia and Sunni.     I had a similar experience in Egypt with the police abuse video, which everyone seemed to have seen and many were eager to share.    This particular media form seems particularly well-suited to getting people worked up - easy to circulate because they are small files and requiring very little by way of attention span. 

Sunni-Shia: fighting over deck chairs on the Titanic

I want to briefly note and summarize two important essays on the Sunni-Shia question in the Arab press today before I take off to DC for a workshop tomorrow.   

First, Fahmy Howeydi in al-Khaleej.  Reflecting on the now-famous Doha conference on Sunni-Shia relations, Howeydi writes that the tense, hostile atmosphere surrounding the event differed from all of the dozens of similar "inter-sect" forums in which he had participated over the years.   On the other hand, those dozens of conferences had tended to follow similar patterns:  highly theoretical and abstract discussions, mutual flattery, an emphasis on the common ground rather than on real differences.  At least this conference demonstrated some much-needed frankness, he muses.   There have been real changes in Shia-Sunni relations in recent years, he writes, including the rise of hard-line conservatives in Iran, rather than the pro-dialogue moderate Khatemi forces and the rise of a Shia-dominated government in Iraq.  The near-complete collapse of the Arab order or any effective Arab political presence in the region's politics created an opportunity for Iran to fill the void.   Instead of using that opportunity to pursue the interests of all Muslims, however, Iran chose to pursue narrow Shia  interests.  He emphasizes that the Shia themselves are not bad, there is a range of views in the Shia community just as in the Sunni community (he distinguishes sharply between what he describes as the noble Sunni insurgency fighting occupation and the tiny al-Qaeda fragment which instead declared war on the Shia).   Finally, the Shia nature of Saddam's execution brought these growing Sunni concerns to the street.  But, he concludes, unleashing the fire of sectarian war would be a disaster for the region: not only for its direct consequences but because it would weaken any Muslim front against the umma's common enemies.   And so he returns to the Doha conference.   The first session passed without incident, but then Qaradawi opened the wounds.  In Howeydi's telling, Qaradawi did a service by demolishing the pleasantries and demanding a frank exchange of views:  painful at first, but necessary for any healing to begin.   In the end, as in his earlier essays on the subject, Howeydi sees the need for a common front against shared enemies as the highest priority - even as he wants to see honest discussion of real issues.

Second, Abd al-Wahhab al-Effendi in al-Quds al-Arabi.  Effendi begins with the 1980s, when - in his view - the United States entered the sectarian wars by calling to defend the Arab Gulf states from the Iranian threat.  He remembers a prominent pro-Iraqi Gulf Islamist telling him then that the Shia posed a unique threat because of their deviationism.  Am I to understand, he replied at the time, that you believe that Reagan is coming to us to establish a true Sunni order and fight Shia deviationism?    Of course not.   And now, he writes, here the region is again, repeating the same arguments and the same mistakes.   Effendi does not want to deny that real Sunni-Shia differences exist, because they do, but differences are one thing and conflict is another.   There is nothing religious which drives Sunni and Shia to conflict.  The current conflict is created, he writes, to serve the political interests of those forces desiring conflict with Iran - nothing more, nothing less.   Actually, the best part of this essay is the title, from which I took the title of the post:  "Conflict between the Sunna and the Shia... is struggling over the deck chairs on the Titanic."
 
So, to sum up a lot of what I've been posting the last few days, what we're seeing is something of a return to the regime-popular lines of conflict which characterized the anti-Hezbollah mobilization last summer.  Saddam's execution briefly drove many prominent figures from the populist (Arab nationalist, Muslim Brotherhood-style Islamist) camp towards the anti-Shia position, since there was a lot of very real popular outrage that they either shared or wanted to be aligned with.   But now they seem to be backing away from the anti-Shia line (without giving up their grievances over Iranian behavior in Iraq) because they see a political trap being laid by the pro-American authoritarian regimes.   Whether their appeals to abstain from sectarian conflict in the interests of a common political project will suffice in the face of the sectarian demons already unleashed - or in the face of the interests which still push for their unleashing - very much remains to be seen.   

And with that, I'm off.   Blogging and responding to comments will depend on internet access.  Cheers! 

Jordan: new public opinion survey

The Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan has just released the latest round of surveys on the state of democracy in Jordan.  The report isn't yet available on the CSS site, and is only sketchily reported in various newspapers, but here's what I've been able to piece together of the major findings:

• on the 10 point scale (10 the highest) consistently used by the CSS since the early 1990s, the state of 'democracy in Jordan' is currently 5.8, no real difference from most other surveys, a little bit down from 2005 (when it was 6.2)
• just under 50% felt that freedom to join political parties or participate in demonstrations is guaranteed in Jordan
• around 40% said that democracy is the best system to improve economic conditions - an odd way to phrase the question, I think.  Similarly, only 10% said that rule by religious figures would improve economic conditions, again a bizarre way of framing the question - presumably those who want religious government do so because of their religious beliefs, not because of venal material expectations.  I don't know if this very poor framing represents sloppy construction of the survey or an intentional way of not asking other more direct questions. 
• around 60% described the last Parliamentary election as 'fair and just.'  That is rather low.   Less than 50% think that the current Parliament is doing its job well.
• 58.8% see the public media as credible.  Also very low. 

One result which I found especially interesting given my current concerns about the rising sectarian tension:   the survey found near consensus that religious minorities - including the Shia - should be seen as full citizens and be able to practice their beliefs in full freedom, and that a different sect should not be grounds for doubting their loyalty or citizenship.  That seems like one more piece of evidence in support of the general thesis that the current wave of anti-Shi'ism in the region is coming from the top down (the governments) and not from the bottom up.