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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/western-lies-sunni-shia-divide-set-region-ablaze-how">middleeasteye.net</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">How western lies about the 'Sunni-Shia divide' have set the region ablaze</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Hatem Bazian</div>
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<div class="gmail-reader-estimated-time" dir="ltr">October 11, 2024<br></div>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div><p>Sunnis
must fight Shia in the Middle East, and Shia must fight Sunnis,
according to the current, dumbed-down western framing of the region. </p>
<p>If you have been around for more than a few days, the rhetoric about
never-ending Sunni-Shia war and mayhem is never far from the minds of
western political leaders, think-tank inhabitants, Middle Eastern
leaders allied with the West, media talking heads, poisoned social media
users, and imperially appointed religious sermonisers. </p>
<p>All are aiding and abetting the process of driving war, acting as
merchants of death and destruction while claiming to work for peace. </p>
<p>As developments in the <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/uk" target="_blank">British</a>-designated
Middle East heat up again, colonial and Orientalist practitioners,
along with their handpicked post-colonial ruling elites, are jumping
into the fray to add insult to multi-generational injury. </p>
<p>As if <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/topics/israel-war-gaza" target="_blank">Israel’s genocide in Gaza</a>
and open-ended mayhem against Arabs and Muslims throughout the 20th and
into the 21st centuries were not enough, we have also been subjected to
the colonial “sushi theory” of Middle Eastern politics, which aims to
frame and explain everything that is wrong or dangerous in the region.</p>
<p>The colonially manufactured and stoked Sunni-Shia transhistorical conflict has been used to explain away Euro-<a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/us" target="_blank">American</a>
wars, Zionist violence, and foreign intervention in the region. The
old/new divide-and-rule policy is on full display, with numerous
participants and vast intelligence networks working day and night to
keep the death flames burning. (Here, I must admit that I like sushi, as
it is one of the healthiest meal choices - but not as a theory for the
Arab and Muslim worlds.) </p>
<p>One can both be committed to their own understanding of Islamic
history and existing cleavages - whether theological, textual,
political, national or ethnic - while resisting the colonially stoked
strategy of weaponising and instrumentalising such divisions to further
western domination of the region and its peoples. </p>
<h3>Vast oil wealth</h3>
<p>Regional conflict exists today primarily due to the vast oil and
natural gas resources across the Middle East, which are crucial for the
modern global economy. Before the <a href="https://www.wired.com/2008/05/dayintech-0526/" target="_blank">discovery</a> of Middle Eastern oil in 1908 in <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/iran" target="_blank">Iran</a>,
the world’s primary focus was on trade routes to Asia, raw materials,
and capturing markets for the surplus of industrial production from
factories across Europe and North America. </p>
<p>The rush for natural resources and markets in the 19th century witnessed the expansion of British, <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/france" target="_blank">French</a>,
Dutch, German, Italian and Belgian military, economic and epistemic
footprints, while utilising divide-and-rule strategies and the
deployment of massive violence and genocide to achieve colonial goals. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The colonially produced 'sushi theory' of Middle Eastern politics,
which professes to explain all the causes of conflict, is in fact the
precise recipe for never-ending wars</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Let’s be clear: divisions existed beforehand, but colonialism and
European greed created a revolving-door situation, leading to the
degradation of societies’ ability to resist, while allowing colonial
powers to capture more and more natural resources and markets at
fire-sale prices. </p>
<p>Religion was deployed as an imperial instrument to motivate and
stimulate interventionist policies, and to expand colonial economic and
political footprints around the globe.</p>
<p>Anyone who looks at the Global South without understanding colonial
divide-and-rule policies, and the weaponisation of religious, cultural,
linguistic and ethnic differences to maximise control and domination,
misses the crucial factors that fomented and maintained conflicts over a
long period. </p>
<p>Are European and American forces in the Middle East intended to
protect Sunnis from Shia, or vice versa? Is the massive build-up of
military bases and intelligence penetration across the region part of a
broader plan to foster peace, love and tranquility between Sunni and
Shia communities? </p>
<p>If you happen to believe this, then you must have missed the region’s long history, and the genesis of current conflicts.</p>
<h3>Dubious claims</h3>
<p>The western colonial project <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/big-story/britain-palestine-balfour-declaration-fatal-mistake" target="_blank">incubated the Zionist project</a>
and also helped to form the modern nation-states in the Arab region.
Post-colonialism has made it possible to remove colonial troops while
keeping the colonial epistemic system in place, whether in economics,
education, or social and religious structures. </p>
<p>The region named the Middle East by the British was shaped, and
continues to exist, within the frameworks set out in the 19th century
and cemented by the <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/sykes-picot-one-hundred-years" target="_blank">Sykes-Picot Agreement</a> and the subsequent Paris Peace Conference at the end of the First World War. </p>
<p>The British and the French worked in the 19th and 20th centuries to
stoke Sunni and Shia divisions to further their colonial programmes in
the Ottoman and Qajar (Persian) regions. The instrumentalisation and
stoking of Christian-Muslim tensions in the area, amid dubious claims of
“protecting” Christian populations in the East, was a fundamental part
of a colonial endeavour vested in natural resources, trade routes and
racist claims of a civilisational project. </p>
<p></p>
<p>Every place you look around the Global South, colonial powers have
used the divide-and-rule strategy to stir up old wounds, fomenting
religious, ethnic, racial and cultural conflicts that were then used to
push for invasions and interventions, pouring more fuel on the fire. </p>
<p>While such differences exist - indeed, they are natural among diverse
human groupings - it is important to understand how they were utilised
in the colonial period, and are currently deployed to further the
hegemonic domination and expansion of the West’s modern colonial
footprint across the region.</p>
<p>Colonial powers stirred up the preexisting Sunni-Shia divide. They
stoked tensions, amplified differences, sponsored “thinkers” and “think
tanks”, wrote and published biased articles, funded media outlets, and
drove daggers into households, mosques and community gatherings. </p>
<p>Notably, the region we call the Middle East <a href="https://www.opec.org/opec_web/en/data_graphs/330.htm" target="_blank">has the largest</a>
oil and natural gas reserves in the world. Western greed is a driving
force in this equation. For US and European corporate and financial
elites, this resource is too valuable to be kept in the hands of the
“subhuman populations” who inhabit this region. The same applies to
Venezuela, and more broadly to Latin American and African resources.</p>
<h3>Imperial intervention</h3>
<p>The foolish, colonially produced “sushi theory” of Middle Eastern
politics, which professes to explain all the causes of conflict, is in
fact the precise recipe for never-ending wars that necessitate continued
western imperial intervention, massive military sales, support for
Zionism, propping up of post-colonial monarchies, and broad-based
hegemonic control.</p>
<p>Furthermore, the Sunni-Shia framing of conflicts reproduces the old
Orientalist tropes about “irrational” cultural and religious divisions
that call for western “civilisational” rehabilitation projects across
the region. This paradigm ushers in massive interventionist programmes
that seek to transform Arab and Muslim societies across the region into
cuddly post-colonial subjects - ones who will accept domination,
humiliation, constant violence, “civilisational reforms”, and pillaging
of resources in exchange for being welcomed into the emptiness of
western cultural production and norms. </p>
<div>
<p><a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/islam-century-western-distortion" target="_blank"><img src="https://www.middleeasteye.net/sites/default/files/styles/read_more/public/images-story/Palestinian-protest-Parliament-Square-London-February-2024-afp-henry-nicholls%202.jpg.webp?itok=XKIQ7zQt" width="400" height="250" alt="" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img"></a></p><p>Islam and a century of western distortion</p>
<p><br>
</p></div>
<p>Surrender to global market forces, and join the pleasure tours in the
Red Sea, Halloween festivals en route to Mecca, hedonistic escapes in
the Gulf, and decadent resorts in <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/egypt" target="_blank">Egypt</a>’s Taba. </p>
<p>Colonial advisers on the scene will help to build the tallest, empty
vanity buildings in the world; host the most outrageous western raves;
offer the biggest prizes for the most inconsequential sports races to
nowhere; and celebrate being important, to help alleviate your
self-produced inferiority complex. </p>
<p>The West will provide colonial perfumes to make your rot smell like
roses, as you sell your society to the western corporate machine,
privatise national resources, open your borders to <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/israel" target="_blank">Israeli</a> products and investment, and welcome every US and western <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/topics/islamophobia" target="_blank">Islamophobic</a> diplomat or media personality.</p>
<p>This is the pitch: what is keeping you from arriving on the world
stage are the “bad” Sunnis and Shia in your neighbourhood, who seem not
to understand the value of letting go of their society’s centre of
ethical and moral meaning. Sell your soul to colonialism, and let go of
your moral and ethical inhibitions. The <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-gulf-normalisation-deals-support-plummets" target="_blank">Abraham Accords</a>,
Camp David Accords, Wadi Araba Treaty and a host of other agreements
have brought “prosperity” and “inclusion” to circles of upward influence
and mobility.</p>
<h3>Religious 'wisdom'</h3>
<p>Now, let me turn to the imperially appointed religious figures who
peddle the present colonial scheme, packaged as the foundation of
religious and spiritual meaning for unsuspecting people to consume.</p>
<p>The “religious” cadre comes out in strength to sell “sushi theory”
across the Arab and Muslim world, with ready-made fatwas and
explanations to ignite the disharmony fuse and cast doubt on de-colonial
possibilities. The term “peace” is used in these imperially constructed
religious circles to mean <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/topics/israel-normalisation-deals" target="_blank">normalisation</a> with Israel, alongside the justification of hegemonic domination and western military bases across the region.</p>
<p>The imperial religious cadre defends the indefensible, while instructing all to obey the ruler, because he knows what’s best. </p>
<p>In this context, Israel becomes a strategic ally, and western power in the region is a safety net. Sunni <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/palestine" target="_blank">Palestinians</a> are troublemakers disrupting the colonial “peace”, and Shia expansionism is a threat to the region’s survival. The US, Israel, <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/topics/nato" target="_blank">Nato</a>,
monarchs, dictators, intelligence services and “private contractors” -
the modern mercenaries - are needed to save you from each other. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>US, Israel, monarchs, dictators, intelligence services and 'private
contractors' - modern mercenaries - are needed to save you from each
other</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Otherwise, the story goes, the Sunni or Shia monster hiding under
your beds and prayer rugs will come out to kill you. To combat this, you
need Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Zionism, western
military bases, a corporate takeover of your economy, and a PR firm to
shape your curriculum to produce a compliant population - one that
consumes and indulges, but never dares to ask a question or raise any
opposition.</p>
<p>This imperial religion, and the imperially nurtured religious elites
who peddle colonial discourses, are the real harbingers of death. They
act as the religious handmaiden to empire, while blessing the death
machines that mow down their flocks in the hundreds of thousands, or
even millions.</p>
<p>These professional imperial religious wizards readily deploy texts,
mine sources for pacification nuggets, and entertain us with
orchestrated gatherings to impart silencing “wisdom” on the one hand,
and messages of fire and brimstone on the other to critics of the
present colonial project.</p>
<p>This cuddly bunch is all too ready to offer religious justifications
for kings, presidents and empire, rationalising the mass killing of
anyone who dares to challenge this paradigm and speak truth to power. </p>
<p>We can still maintain an understanding of Sunni-Shia history and the
complex narratives that are shared and debated, while refusing the
ongoing colonial attempts to weaponise this issue to dominate the region
and devour the best and brightest among us, disrupting real change. Any
discourse that pushes and weaponises these divisions, only serves the
colonial project and its multifaceted attempts to reconquer the region.</p>
<p>Finally, we must dispense with the idea that the colonial enemy of my
enemy is my friend. This must be replaced with the historically
verifiable understanding across the Global South that the colonial enemy
of my enemy, after a divide-and-rule strategy, has devoured us both. </p>
<p><i>The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.</i></p>
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