'A Stranger in Your Own City' by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad; 'The Caliph and the Imam' by Toby Matthiesen; and 'In Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East' by Steven Simon.Supplied
In his final State of the Union address in January, 2016, then U.S. president Barack Obama, claimed “the Middle East is going through a transformation that will play out for a generation, rooted in conflicts that date back millennia.”
Toby Matthiesen cites this quote in the opening pages of The Caliph and the Imam as a perfect example of a western leader stereotyping the politics and history of the Middle East with ill-informed broad-brush strokes. “Seeing Sunnism and Shiism as hermetically sealed binaries perpetually at odds with each other is wrong,” the Swiss historian and political scientist writes in this fascinating book, which provides a complete history of Sunni–Shia relations from the seventh century to early 21st century.
Today, Sunnis account for roughly 85 per cent of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims. Shias represent approximately 10 to 13 per cent of that figure. Islam’s split originated with a religious question where politics loomed large: Should the caliph or the imam lead Muslims after the Prophet Muhammad’s death in 632 AD? Sunnis accept Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali as the four rightly-guided caliphs to be the successors of the Prophet Muhammad. Shia, conversely, believe that Ali was the successor chosen by the Prophet, and that his and Fatima’s descendants are the legitimate leaders, or imams, of the Muslim community.
Matthiesen, who is currently a Marie Curie Global Fellow at Stanford University, examines these doctrinal, legal and theological debates in microscopic detail, with solid sources of research coming from numerous languages. He notes that Muslim rulers of the early and middle periods refrained from using war to divide Sunnism and Shiism into stark sectarian identities. A shift occurred around 1500, however, when the Safavid dynasty in Iran converted much of the country’s population to Shiism.
During this epoch of history, the Ottomans (who were Sunnis) never formally recognized Shiism and sometimes banned Iranian pilgrims visiting communal Islamic shrines of worship that fell within their jurisdiction. But this only occurred during heightened tensions with the Safavids. There was some sectarian strife under early modern Muslim empires. But daily life for both Sunni and Shia alike, while imperfect, was, for the most part, relatively tolerant and cosmopolitan.
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That changed, however, from the 18th century onwards. As European powers began to colonize much of the Middle East, India and Asia, where hundreds of millions of Muslims resided. Matthiesen notes how the San Remo Conference in April, 1920, ended with Britain being given mandates to administer the former territories of the Ottoman Empire, including Palestine and Mesopotamia.
The latter country became Iraq in 1921, where the British established separate judicial systems and religious classes in government schools for Sunnis and Shia. The notion that Sunnis “were less problematic partners” as Matthiesen puts it, was an imperial idea the British gleaned from their colonial adventures in India over the previous two centuries. Such sectarian prejudices led the Shia to be sidelined and marginalized from public life in Iraq for much of the 20th century.
Matthiesen encourages his readers, however, not to think about these stark divisions as an all or nothing, zero sum game. He stresses how, even Saddam Hussein’s regime, brutal as it was, did not encourage direct anti-Shia rhetoric in the Baath party. The pan-Arab, secular and socialist party was founded in Damascus, Syria, at the beginning of the 1940s. In fact, it was a Shia, Fuad al-Rikabi, who founded the party’s branch in Iraq in the early 1950s, which Hussein joined by the end of the decade. Granted, Sunni biases clearly existed in Iraq. Especially after 1979, when Hussein became president of Iraq and secretary general of the Baath party. That year, Iraq’s neighbour, Iran, disposed of its monarchy and became an Islamic Republic, led by Shia cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Iraq invaded Iran one year later. Those of Persian origin in Iraq were portrayed as potentially disloyal and subjected to surveillance by Hussein’s regime. Nevertheless, “Shia that distanced themselves from religiosity and stayed true to the Baath party could advance,” Matthiesen points out. In the early 21st century, Sunni–Shia relations once again became a focal point of concern for foreign powers meddling in Iraq. The De-Ba’athification policy that followed the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 saw Sunni rulers disposed of, as the Americans installed the first Shia-led government in Iraq in a thousand years.
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad documents what happened next, in his beautifully written, first-person memoir, A Stranger in Your Own City. For the last two decades the Iraqi journalist, who is currently based in Istanbul, has been writing for The Guardian on sectarian conflict across the Middle East. His latest book spans that time frame and elaborates on much of that journalism.
The author cites al-Qaeda’s bombing of the Shia Al-Askari shrine in Samarra, 125 kilometres north of Baghdad, in February, 2006, as a crucial turning point in modern Iraqi history. Shortly afterwards, militiamen from Iraq’s Shia religious parties fanned out across Iraq’s capital on a murderous rampage against their Sunni counterparts. Many western journalists have since cited this as the moment the bloodthirsty civil war between Sunni and Shia in Iraq truly began. In fact, “the gradual slide towards civil war had actually begun two years earlier, when insurgents began to execute soldiers because they were Shia,” Abdul-Ahad writes.
In Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East, Steven Simon examines how sectarian divisions in Iraq exploded after 2003. He argues that the American occupiers misunderstood the complex nature of Iraq’s society to begin with. They concluded, incorrectly, that the country had always been hopelessly divided.
The book looks at the rise and fall of American engagement in the Middle East from 1979 to the present day. Simon calls it a tale “of gross misunderstandings, appalling errors, and death and destruction on an epochal scale.” Is Simon critiquing his younger, hawkish self? It appears so. He was, after all, working behind the scenes in Washington (and in the Middle East) implementing American foreign policy as much of this history was unfolding in real time.
Simon began his diplomatic career in the 1980s, working at the State Department, where he developed a diplomatic strategy to facilitate the Reagan administration’s plans for military operations in the Middle East, which began in Lebanon. Simon’s last government post was as National Security Council senior director for the Middle East and North Africa, where he witnessed Obama’s reluctance to put boots on the ground in Syria. This part of the book has the feel of an Ian Fleming novel. During Obama’s second term, Simon was engaged in an unofficial effort to reduce violence in the Syrian civil war.
Elsewhere, the author cites several other high-profile diplomatic and policy making meetings he was involved in. Simon was summoned in November, 2002, to meet then British prime minister, Tony Blair, his foreign secretary Jack Straw, and chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, at 10 Downing Street in London. Blair asked Simon and his Washington cohorts would Iraqis be better off with or without Hussein? They informed the prime minister that removing Hussein could possibly unleash severe intercommunal violence in a politically unstable country like Iraq. Pursuing regime change, therefore, would not be a good idea. Blair ignored their advice. And the will of his people. A month later, Blair said to Britain’s House of Commons “let the future government of Iraq be given the chance to begin the process of uniting the nation’s disparate groups, on a democratic basis, respecting human rights.”
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Then U.S. president George W. Bush shared this delusional belief that if democracy could just be exported en masse to Iraq, international terrorism would wither away, as civil liberties and the rule of law flourished. But this idea was “disconnected from reality,” Simon argues.
This past March marked the 20th anniversary of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. Today, it is not a shining beacon of democracy. Still, even if it had become the country Blair or Bush envisioned, would “observers of a thriving, democratic Iraq be able to say that a war that killed hundreds of thousands of ordinary Iraqis sped its road to democracy?” Simon asks rhetorically. His arguments are powerful and persuasive. But he doesn’t believe in moral or legal accountability, insinuating instead that in the cruel and callous world of geopolitics, power is a dirty business, and realpolitik ensures that, well, stuff happens.
Simon does, however, cite some statistics from the Brown University Cost of War Project, which claims the Iraq war is responsible for the deaths of 300,000 individuals. The non-partisan research team also estimate that up to 4.6 million people have been killed in post 9/11 conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen.
Abdul-Ahad puts the human cost of the Iraq conflict, specifically, in chilling terms. But his haunting words could just as easily be applied to the millions who have been killed across the Middle East over the last quarter of a century, in wasteful wars that are estimated to have cost upwards of US$8-trillion. “The dead are forgotten, unknown,” he writes. “And their bodies are swollen by the futile earth, but the ruins remain.”