By Ussama Makdisi/ The New York Times
“Civilized society is perpetually threatened with disintegration,” wrote Sigmund Freud in “Civilization and Its Discontents.” So it is with the sectarian violence that tears at the Middle East today. The strife that pits Sunnis against Shiites is a product of sustained internal and external pressures that have manipulated and made toxic what has long been one of the hallmarks of Levantine societies, their religious diversity. Neither the internal nor the external reasons are intelligible on their own. They reinforce each other.
The internal failures are most evident in Syria. The fact that Bashar al-Assad is an Alawite and that many of the leading military forces are controlled by Alawite officers is an obviously salient factor in exacerbating sectarian tensions in Syria. But the regime is not Alawite in any religious sense. Like the ostensibly “Sunni” regime of Saddam Hussein that long brutalized Iraq, it is essentially despotic.
The Baath Party has long been a nominally secular nationalist party, but its leaders turned an ideal of secularism on its head. Instead of building a constructive national community, the regimes in both Iraq and Syria forged alliances across sectarian, class and regional lines in order to stifle all forms of dissent to their rule. Hence the “Sunni” Saddam crushed Sunni Kurds just as brutally as he did Shiite opposition to his rule.
The main characteristic of these regimes has not been sectarianism; they manipulate any division among their people to secure and keep power. By contrast, the dynasties of Saudi Arabia and Qatar reject religious pluralism as a matter of state ideology. Both countries have encouraged an extraordinary outpouring of sectarian incitement against the Shiites of the Arab world in a bid to retain absolute power and to undermine what they regard as their most formidable regional foe: Shiite Iran. Tehran has close ties to Damascus and is patron to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
But the intervention by Saudi Arabia and Qatar against the Assad regime is not necessarily for sectarian reasons. Rather, both monarchies have secular interests, namely preserving the region’s pro-Western petroleum order, which provides great benefits to the Saud and Thani regimes. To the extent that they are involved in a major struggle against Iran, they do so in explicit coordination with the United States.
Thus the sectarian dimension cannot and must not be isolated from the far more obvious and salient secular geopolitical one. It is politics that pushes sectarianism, that provides it with the enabling context, and that now encourages and legitimates the devastating violence across sectarian lines that is ravaging Syria and Iraq and Lebanon.
By the same token, it is also true that once sectarianism is enabled, it is not easily controlled so long as the political and military situation remains chaotic. As the history of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan reminds us, it is far easier to mobilize religious fervor than it is to diffuse it. Sectarian elements on the ground do not necessarily respect hierarchy. They are unpredictable.
The external reasons for the sectarian catastrophe that threatens the Middle East are equally obvious. French colonialism in Syria after World War I explicitly reinforced sectarian divisions and encouraged an Alawite entrance into the military that eventually saw Hafez al-Assad rise to power. It also provoked an anti-Western nationalist reaction, of which the Baath Party was one example.
Similarly, Shiite Hezbollah, now involved openly on the side of the Assad regime, emerged as a direct response to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, an invasion condoned by the United States. And U.S. support for the shah’s dictatorship helped precipitate the Iranian revolution and the anti-Western discourse that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini espoused.
The United States has also consistently supported the Wahhabi Saudis over secular nationalists in the Middle East. Finally and most obviously, the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 played a pivotal role in destabilizing the region, inadvertently bolstering Tehran’s influence, and provoking Saudi and Qatari fear of Iran.
Sectarianism is thus not the product of a natural order of things but of its deformation. It is a manifestation of modern politics and power, not of age-old religious hatreds. Both internal and external actors have together conspired without conspiracy, in different ways and with different intensities, to transform the Middle East’s greatest blessing — its historic religious diversity — into its greatest liability.
Ussama Makdisi is a professor of history at Rice University and the author of the forthcoming book “Understanding Sectarianism.”
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