Sectarianism and International Relations: Shia Iran in a Muslim World

Introduction

The rise of Shias in Lebanon and Iraq, civil wars in Syria and Yemen, and, more recently, the lifting of nuclear sanctions against Iran have fuelled speculation about the emergence of an Iran-led Shia bloc in the Middle East ¹ and aroused considerable interest in Islam’s foundational schism. Recent developments seem to confirm the view that Islam’s ‘principal’ sectarian divide plays an important role in international affairs in the region. The exclusion of Iran and its ‘allies’ Iraq and Syria from an anti-terrorism alliance launched by Saudi Arabia (December 2015) and the diplomatic crisis triggered by a Shia cleric’s execution by Saudi Arabia (January 2016) are cases in point. Popular assessments of the emerging situation in the Middle East often stress primordial factors by: (a) reading conflicts through the sectarian lens, (b) equating Iran and Shias and (c) representing Shia leadership as fundamentalist or extremist. The books under review provide a useful point of departure for the analysis of the three fallacies identified above. This review examines the fallacies in the order mentioned above before discussing the factors that might explain the abundance of sectarian readings of the Middle East. We will begin with a brief summary of the books.

The Books

The 3 books under review fill in a void in the literature insofar as Shia have until recently been a relatively understudied community, at least, in Saudi Arabia and South Asia (Jones and Qasmi, 2015, pp. 1, 57, 80, 184; Matthiesen, 2015, pp. i, 1). The countries covered by these books span the whole spectrum of Shia national experiences bound on one end by Iran, where a Shia majority has lived under a Shia-dominated state since the early sixteenth century, and on the other by Saudi Arabia, where a small, divided and persecuted Shia minority lives under an oppressive Sunni state. In between we have Iraq, a Shia-majority country where a Shia-dominated government has come to power recently and faces a restive Sunni minority, and Lebanon and Pakistan, where substantial Shia minorities live under Sunni/Christian and Sunni-dominated states respectively. Non-denominational India, where Shia are a ‘double minority’ (Jones and Qasmi, 2015, p. 77), lies outside this spectrum. Of the books reviewed here only Mishal and Goldberg (2014) directly address questions of interest to students of international relations. However, the other two books provide a deep understanding of Shia societies that can be readily used to answer such questions.

Jones and Qasmi’s The Shi‘a in Modern South Asia is a collection of eight essays introduced by Francis Robinson. Six of the essays deal with specific Shia communities in India. Three essays are dedicated to the Shias of Lucknow (Sajjad Rizvi, Muhammad Amir Ahmad Khan, and Justin Jones) with the other three essays addressing the Ismaili Shias of western India (Michel Boivin, Soumen Mukherjee, and Shireen Mirza). The remaining two essays deal with the Pakistani Shias. Tahir Kamran and Amir Khan Shahid discuss the Sunni-Sufi revival in response to the growth of Shiism, while Simon Fuchs discusses the career of the Pakistani Shia leader Sayyid ‘Arif Husain al-Husaini and the impact of Iran’s Islamic Revolution on Pakistan. The essays provide nuanced treatments of Shia communities informed by their historical and theological idiosyncrasies. The main weakness of the book is the lack of attention to the ethno-linguistic diversity of South Asian Shia communities. So, for instance, while we learn a lot about the Shia communities of Lucknow and western India, we do not know what explains the difference between their trajectories and why they have not found common cause in the face of shared challenges. The lack of uniformity of spellings of names is another shortcoming of the book. In some cases names are spelt in two different ways on the same page (see pages 141 and 152, for instance).

Matthiesen’s The Other Saudis is a good example of a historically grounded approach to the study of sectarianism and communal politics. It presents an exhaustive account of the predicament of Saudi Arabia’s little known Shia community, which is caught in the crossfire between the royal family and the Wahhabis and Saudi Arabia and Iran. It pays enormous attention to minute historical and theological details. The first two chapters nicely build up the discussion from the pre-twentieth century to the mid-twentieth century in a manner that allows us to understand how the evolution of the political economy and leadership within the Shia community over the past few centuries influenced developments in more recent times. The approach is not deterministic as it suggests how the historical factors that initially promoted the influence of the traditional leadership eventually checked that influence as well and opened up space for new possibilities. The following chapters examine different stages of Shia activism in Saudi Arabia and carefully explore the linkages between the stages. However, the immediate Sunni neighbours of Shias in the Eastern Province, the economy of the Eastern Province (the relative per capita income vis-à-vis the national average, share in Saudi Arabia’s food and oil output, and so on) ² , the relationship between the Shia and the immigrant workers, the relationship between Shias of the Eastern Province and other Shias and non-Wahhabi Sunnis of Saudi Arabia, and the Saudi Sunni commoner’s views on the Shia problem have received little, if any, attention. At times it seems that Matthiesen stands in the Eastern Province facing Bahrain (and Iran), which can only be partly justified by geography and history of the former.

Mishal and Goldberg’s Understanding Shiite Leadership is an effort to unpack the world of the Shiite leadership in the Middle East. The first two chapters of the book deal with the nature of (Shiite) leadership and its quest for authority in the Shia world, where the absence of Imam has left behind a perpetual void in the society. The next two chapters explain the circumstances and the manner in which this void compels Shia leaders to gravitate toward the middle ground. (We will engage at length with the idea of middle ground leadership in a later section.) The next four chapters rely upon a variety of domestic and international and Shia and extra-Shia issues to illustrate the middle ground character of the Shiite leadership that is at odds with its caricatures that portray it as fundamentalist. The following chapter provides a dull and meandering summary of the discussion through a fictional Iranian. A short Epilogue tries to locate the Iranian/middle ground leadership in the international system. The book is poorly edited leaving behind a lot of repetition and non-uniformly formatted and incomplete references. The long quotes from Iran’s constitution break the flow of discussion. Another major weakness of the book is its assumption of Iranian exceptionalism, which perhaps explains the treatment of Iran in isolation from the world around it. The Mughals (India), Ottomans (Turkey), and Safavids (Iran) declined simultaneously; the Usulis emerged as the dominant school amongst Twelvers from Saudi Arabia to South Asia around the same time; and Khomeini was one among many other thinkers such as Jamal al-din al-Afghani, Abul Ala Maududi, and Sayyid Qutb who challenged secular rulers and redefined the state-religion relationship. However, Mishal and Goldberg cannot help us locate the developments in Iran within the broader regional/Islamic context.

The Sectarian Lens

Ishrat Aziz, a former Indian Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, complained that ‘the Shia–Sunni divide is talked about more in academic analyses and media comments outside the region than within’ (Aziz, 2015, p. 169). While Aziz is a little too harsh on academics, the authors reviewed here would agree that he has a point. A fictional character in Mishal and Goldberg (2014, p. 124) argues that ‘Visions of a Shiite political bloc are a projection of Western fears about an Islamic takeover. When the West cannot afford to criticize Sunnis ... it unloads on the Shiites.’ Matthiesen (2015, pp. 16–17) notes that:

Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the term sectarianism has become a catchall phrase in politics, media and academia. Culturalist explanations of Middle East politics dominate much of the media coverage ... Conflicts between Sunni and Shia have led some to speak of a “sectarian substructure that runs beneath Middle East politics”.

Matthiesen (2015, pp. 14), in fact, goes a step further and questions the applicability of the concept of ‘sect’ in the context of Islam. Simon Fuchs notes that ‘The precise influences of the “Iranian moment” are far more often assumed than actually established’ (Jones and Qasmi, 2015, p. 180). Likewise, Mishal and Goldberg (2014, p. 135) lament that ‘Scholars and observers are often tempted to ignore the middle ground qualities of Iran and Hizballah’s Shiite leadership and embrace the extremes at the ends. Perhaps the extremes lend themselves comfortably to analysis and deconstruction.’ However, the approach based on ancient-global labels has not lost ground in the academia. For instance, Francis Robinson’s introduction to The Shi’a in Modern South Asia expresses the following concern:

The new assertiveness of the Shi’a in that region after the Iranian revolution and the rise of Hizbollah in the Lebanon was reflected both in Pakistan and India ... This raises the issue of how the even greater Shi’i militancy of recent years will play out in the region. (Jones and Qasmi, 2015, p. 9)

Primordialist explanations of Middle Eastern conflicts invariably choose the Shia–Sunni schism as the point of departure, yet it is not self-evident why this divide is more salient than others. Presumably, an ancient sectarian divide, which predates the age of nation-states by more than a millennium, continues to be a stable source of identification in the present and is politically salient. However, once higher order, ancient-global disputes (Shia–Sunni schism) are deemed important, their more recent lower order local counterparts (e.g., disputes between Shia schools of jurisprudence) cannot be ignored. Both Shia and Sunni societies are marked by internal diversity that cannot be readily assembled into monolithic sectarian blocs in national, let alone international, politics. Fusion and fission over the centuries have rendered labels redundant or they signify entirely new things over time, for example, the Khoja Ismaili Shias of western India split into three groups—Aga Khanis, Twelvers and Sunnis (Jones and Qasmi, 2015, pp. 36–56)—and the Chistiyya Sufis of Pakistani Punjab drifted from mysticism to legalism and began to identify exclusively with Sunni Islam (Jones and Qasmi, 2015, pp. 159–178).

Religious divisions often overlap with ethnic and/or geographical divisions making it difficult to disentangle religious and non-religious determinants of conflicts. Arab Sunnis dominate the region to the west of the Persian Gulf, while the region to the east is dominated by Persian Shias. However, there are pockets of minorities on both sides of the Gulf and both the Shia and Sunni majority areas are internally diverse in terms of religious beliefs and practices. So, in most cases the majority character of parts of the Middle East becomes evident only when interested parties—or ‘identity entrepreneurs’ (Matthiesen, 2015, pp. 18, 217)—mobilize people along a particular dimension of identity. Otherwise most parts of the region appear to be assortments of diverse ethnolinguistic and sectarian communities.

There are three ethno-geographically segregated Shia communities in Saudi Arabia—Twelvers of the Eastern Province (al-mintaqa al-sharqiyya), Ismailis of Najran and Twelvers of Hijaz, who are also known as the nakhawila (Matthiesen, 2015, pp. 2–4). There is also a small Zaydi Shia community in Najran (Al-Rasheed, 2006, p. 7; Human Rights Watch, 2008). The Twelvers of the Eastern Province are in turn divided among Usulis, Akhbaris, Shaykhiyyas/Shaykhis, Shiraziyyas and Mudarrisiyyas (Matthiesen, 2015). These divisions are overlaid by politically salient class and generational divisions, for instance, the young and non-notables are more likely to be Islamists (Matthiesen, 2015, pp. 95–97, 100). Neighbouring Iraq’s Shias are similarly divided among Shia tribes of southern Iraq, scholarly community of the shrine cities (Najaf and Karbala) and the urban Shias (Mishal and Goldberg, 2014, pp. 52, 123). In addition to schools of jurisprudence, Indian Shias are divided into sub-sects/cultures demarcated by languages and geography, for instance, the Shias of western India are embedded into transnational trade networks, whereas the Shias of Lucknow and Hyderabad are centred on the late Mughal nobility and clerical notables. The Pakistani Shias are divided between Mohajir (refugees from India) and the sons-of-soil and between Shaykhis and Usulis (Jones and Qasmi, 2015, pp. 188–190). In Pakistan, the younger generation and the sons-of-soil are more likely to be Usulis (Rieck, 2015). In both Pakistan and India, the Shias of the hills to the north of Kashmir are different from the plains and, even, the Kashmiri Shia. In some cases ethno-regional and religious divides are coterminous. For instance, the institution of marji’iyya (that requires emulation of living teachers), which is an important part of Middle Eastern Shiism, is weak in South Asia (Jones and Qasmi, 2015, pp. 102, 200–201). In South Asia, Ismailis are located along the western coast. The divides could also be cross-cutting. Iraqi and Lebanese Shias are Arabic-speaking Arabs. The Lebanese Hizbullah, Iran’s ally, views itself a champion of the Arab—not Shia or Arab-Shia—cause. Even Iranian religious leaders claim Sayyid/Arab ancestry and can, therefore, be described as Persian-speaking Arabs.

Cross-cutting ethnolinguistic and religious diversity limits the analytical usefulness of ancient-global labels. It also limits the usefulness of these labels for mobilizing people. So, it is not surprising that Sunni states manage to exploit the internal differences of Shias (Jones and Qasmi, 2015, p. 190; Matthiesen, 2015, p. 175; Rieck 2015, pp. 121–123).

Is Iran the Axis of the Shia World?

Even if higher order divisions are assumed to be more salient it does not follow that Iran will be the rallying point for Shias regionally, let alone globally. The location of shrine cities and major seminaries in Iraq, the inner divisions within Shiism and the deeply personal nature of Usuli Shiism centred around marji’ (living guides who can be emulated) ensure a disjuncture between Iran’s political and religious influence. Iranian seminaries would have remained marginal but for Saddam Hussein’s persecution of Iraqi Shias and restrictions on foreign Shias visiting Iraq.

Iran adheres to Twelver Shiism, which is the dominant branch of Shiism, and the Usuli School of Jurisprudence. Shaykhiyyas, rivals of Usulis, seem to have a greater presence in neighbouring Pakistan (Jones and Qasmi, 2015, p. 200). Even among the Usulis, Iran’s dominance is not automatically guaranteed as the laity are divided among maraji (plural of marji)’. Indeed, Iraqi maraji’ enjoy greater support than their Iranian counterparts. Bahraini Shia, for instance, follow the Iraq based Ayatallah Ali al-Sistani, while the Hizbullah in Lebanon is deeply influenced by the al-Sadr family of Iraq originally from Jabal ‘Amil in Lebanon (Mishal and Goldberg, 2014, pp. 48, 62). Others acknowledge the authority of multiple maraji’. Sections of the Pakistani Shia seem to have treated Khomeini as the political leader and al-Khu’i as the spiritual leader—the recipient of khums (taxes due to the missing imam) (Jones and Qasmi, 2015, p. 201), while Twelver Khojas described al-Sistani and Khamenei as ‘two eyes’ (Jones and Qasmi, 2015, p. 147). However, even allegiance to an Iranian marji’ does not guarantee political alignment with Iran. The ‘allegiance’ of Pakistani leader Sayyid ‘Arif Husain al-Husaini (Jones and Qasmi, 2015, pp. 199–200; Rieck 2015) and the Bahraini leader Shaykh Ali Salman (Mishal and Goldberg, 2014, p. 62) to the Supreme Leader of Iran are cases in point.

Moreover, non-Iranians might pledge allegiance to an anti-establishment Iranian marji’. Ayatallah Shar’iatmadari retained ‘an extensive and vocal following in Pakistan’ even after being put under house arrest after an alleged coup attempt (Jones and Qasmi, 2015, p. 201). The differences between marji’/centres of learning are politically salient. The Shiraziyyas and the Islamic al-da’wa party (hizb al-da’wa al-islamiya) differed on the desirability of Western-style party system, for instance. Their differences, however, mirrored the differences of Karbala and Najaf-based maraji’ (Matthiesen, 2015, pp. 92–93). Besides, association with the same marji’ does not guarantee unity of interests. Both mainstream Indian Twelvers and Khoja Twelvers were associated with Sheikh Mazanderani (Jones and Qasmi, 2015, pp. 60, 140, 142), but that did not entail working together. In the Middle East, both Muhammad al-Shirazi and Khomeini propagated variants of the doctrine of wilayat al-faqih (guardianship of the jurist) (Steinberg, 2011, p. 176; Matthiesen, 2015, p. 92), but that did not bring their followers together.

Furthermore, if a non-Iranian society shares an idea with Khomeini that does not automatically imply revolutionary Iranian provenance. Lucknow-based Shia thinker Sayyid ‘Ali Naqi Naqvi’s treatment of the Karbala story anticipated Khomeini and ‘Ali Shari’ati in crucial respects by a few decades (Jones and Qasmi, 2015, p. 101). ³ A Persian translation of ‘Ali Naqi’s Shahid-i-Insaniyat (A martyr for humanity) was available in Iran soon after it was published in India in 1942. While the prior existence of Khomeini-like ideas in a society could make the local community open to Iranian influence, it also limits that influence insofar as the local community does not accept the intellectual priority of Iranian leaders. Moreover, revolutionary Iran would inherit the rivalries of its local counterpart. Indeed, as soon as a faction aligns with Iran that pushes its local competitors to adopt an anti-Iranian position.

Likewise a restive Shia minority does not automatically imply Iranian instigation. Pakistani (Jones and Qasmi, 2015, p. 185), Bahraini (Matthiesen, 2015; Mishal and Goldberg, 2014), and Saudi (Matthiesen, 2015) Shia resistance to the state predate the Iranian revolution by about two decades. Even after 1979, some Shia leaders of Pakistan claimed space ‘without any obvious Iranian ideological inputs’ (Jones and Qasmi, 2015, p. 187). Morever, Shias of other countries have been part of the larger social and political mobilizations, which both limits their need for external/Iranian support as well as makes them reluctant to embrace divisive Iranian agenda, if any. In the post-War period, the Saudi Shias were part of larger ‘secular’ opposition for more than a decade (Matthiesen, 2015). Indian Shias have a long tradition of cross-confessional religious participation or cultural pan-Islamism (Jones and Qasmi, 2015, pp. 57–104). The popular support in Pakistan for Iran’s Mossadegh, who was ousted in a coup in 1953, also suggests that people are capable of cross-confessional, secular sympathies independent of the policy of the government (Toor, 2011, p. 97). In fact, cross-confessional progressive left movements were active across the Muslim world after the Second World War. The United States played a role, even if passive, in the failure of leftist movements in countries such as Saudi Arabia (Matthiesen, 2015) and Pakistan (Toor, 2011).

Three additional points need to be noted. First, Iran’s overseas Shiite activism did not begin in 1979. For instance, in the 1970s, Ayatallah ‘Abd al-Rida Ibrahimi Kermani of Iran jostled with Kuwait-based Ayatallah Mirza Hasan al-Ha’iri al-Ihqaqi for influence among the Pakistani Shias (Jones and Qasmi, 2015, p. 190). Second, the non-Iranian Shia did not have to wait until 1979 to connect with each other. The international networks of the Lucknow Shias, for instance, predate the Revolution by more than a century and a half (Jones and Qasmi, 2015, pp. 12–35, 57–79). Lucknow’s Shia nobility (for example, the Mahmudabad family) and scholars (for example, Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali and his khandan-i-ijtihad) made a decisive contribution to the growth of Usuli dominance in the Middle East and their massive financial contributions laid the secular foundations of the Shia shrine cities (Jones and Qasmi, 2015, pp. 12–35, 80–104), which played a major role in the conversion of the Arab Sunni tribes of southeast Iraq (Mishal and Goldberg, 2014, pp. 52, 123). ⁴ Iran is not a natural node of international Shia networks, whereas the shrine cities are.

Finally, while it is true that Iran hosted Shia dissidents from across the world, in most countries domestic push factors were more important for connecting Shias with international networks than revolutionary Iran’s appeal. Forced migration connected the Saudi Arabia-based Shia to transnational networks long before 1979. Heavy taxes and systemic discrimination compelled many Saudi Shias to migrate to Bahrain during the 1920s (Steinberg, 2011, pp. 173–174). This trend was supplemented by the Saudi state’s opposition to local Shia seminaries, courts and jurisprudence in the following decades (Matthiesen, 2015; Steinberg, 2011, p. 175), which forced Saudi Shia to go to Iraq for both education and spiritual guidance. Saddam Hussein’s crackdown scattered the Iraq-based Saudi Shias, with some of them going to Iran and Syria (Matthiesen, 2015, pp. 83–84, 133). The failed coup in Bahrain similarly affected the Bahrain-based Saudi Shias (Matthiesen, 2015, p. 119). In short, the suppression of Shia schools coupled with the rise of Usulis, who stress marji’iyya—the need to follow a living teacher, across the Shia world starting in the late eighteenth century were the major factors behind educational/spiritual migration. Likewise a variety of local factors that were independent of the Iranian Revolution–geographical segregation, political marginalization, institutional discrimination, centuries of indirect rule through local clerical notables, restricted economic opportunities and religious persecution–have contributed to the making of the sectarian identity of Saudi Shia.

Also, even as they were pushed toward Iraq and then Iran, non-Iranian Shias quickly realized the limits to the Iranian state’s Shia activism/sympathies (Matthiesen, 2015, pp. 120, 133, 167). Close alignment with Iran meant both isolation at home and being left at the mercy of exigencies of the Iranian foreign policy. No wonder Saudi Shia exiles have increasingly preferred Damascus, Beirut, Bahrain, Kuwait and even London to Tehran and Qom (Matthiesen, 2015).

Is the Shia Leadership Fundamentalist/Extremist?

Religiosity was of secondary importance in the Iranian Revolution that combined a nationalist, class-based struggle against foreign domination and the clerical community’s existential struggle against the state and involved a broad coalition of clerics, socialists, wealthy merchants, landowners and Western-educated liberals (Mishal and Goldberg, 2014, pp. 4–5). Likewise, Hizbullah has built a rainbow coalition in Lebanon (Zisser, 2011, p. 159, also see Jones and Qasmi 2015 and Rieck 2015 for Pakistani Shia organizations). Ervand Abrahamian suggests that Khomeini was not fundamentalist in the sense the word is applied in the Christian context and that Third World populism is a more appropriate description of his leadership (Mishal and Goldberg, 2014, pp. 3–4).

Khomeini’s acceptance of the indispensability of modern state (Mishal and Goldberg, 2014, p. 30) and his realist explanation of the desirability of the ceasefire with Iraq (Mishal and Goldberg, 2014, p. 47) and the post-Revolution constitution, which is silent on sectarian issues and is designed to preclude the possibility of centralization of authority (Mishal and Goldberg, 2014, pp. 46, 55), point to moderation rather than extremism. Likewise, on theological matters, Khomeini did not claim primacy for Shias because Shia–Sunni entente/ecumenism (taqrib) was essential for his global Islamic system (Jones and Qasmi, 2015, pp. 101, 192; Rieck, 2015). In fact, as Aziz (2015, p. 169) argues, Iran does not want that ‘its problems with the neighbouring countries should be seen as following the logic of the Shia–Sunni divide because such a sectarian approach will not be good for its interests and image in the broader Arab and Islamic world’. Iran’s shrill anti-Jew/West rhetoric notwithstanding, it continues to host Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian minorities (Census of Iran, 2012, p. 26) and is home to numerous synagogues (Maghen, 2011: 191). ⁵ However, Mishal and Goldberg (2014) do not tell us what the ecumenist Iranian leadership has meant to Iran’s religious minorities. Likewise, Iran’s Kashmir rhetoric is rarely, if ever, backed by concrete support and has to be seen in the perspective of its posturing within the Islamic world. The rhetoric notwithstanding, in the mid-1990s, Iran helped India by blocking Pakistan’s Kashmir resolution in the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (renamed as Organisation of Islamic Cooperation in 2011) (Bhadrakumar, 2005).

Shia ecumenism was not discovered by Khomeini though. It has a much older history in South Asia (Jones and Qasmi, 2015, pp. 80–104; Devji, 2013, pp. 60–67). Brown (2004, p. 208) notes the double irony of Indian Shia leaders being the most vocal champions of the cause of the Ottoman Caliphate. ⁶ In fact, the Indian Shia were disproportionately represented in the leadership of the movement for creation of Pakistan. Devji (2013, p. 67) compares pan-Islamist Shia leaders in colonial South Asia with Christian champions of Arab nationalism, who used entente to secure space for their communities. In the Middle East, Shia and non-Muslim minorities participated in secular/cross-confessional Arab nationalist and pan-Arab movements and organized along class lines in the nascent oil industry (Mishal and Goldberg, 2014, p. 53; Matthiesen, 2015, pp. 89, 70–71, 76, 103). Saudi Shia Islamists emerged after the failure of secular leftist movements (Matthiesen, 2015, pp. 10, 19–21, 89–90). Later after the failure of Islamism, Saudi Shia turned to human rights, Saudi nationalism and Islamic pluralism to challenge the Saudi state (Matthiesen, 2015, pp. 141–146, 177–178).

Mishal and Goldberg (2014, p. i) explain that contrary to popular image, ‘the political vision and practice of these [Shiite] leaderships view the world as a “middle ground”, shying away from absolutist and extremist tendencies’. From the international perspective, the middle ground Shia leadership is engaged in a negotiation between ‘local sensibilities and global constraints’ (Mishal and Goldberg, 2014, p. 136). Mishal and Goldberg’s discussion of Hizbullah’s relationship with Israel, Iran’s relationship with Bahrain and Azerbaijan, Iran’s family planning programme and the eventual downfall of Ahmadinejad effortlessly establishes that the Shia leaders are anything but fundamentalist or extremist. Yet the conceptual framework used by Mishal and Goldberg to theorize the Shia leadership is problematic.

What is the difference between middle ground and moderate leaderships? Is middle ground leadership uniquely Persian/Shia? What word/phrase is used in insider discussions to describe middle ground? It seems Mishal and Goldberg’s middle ground leadership is a Shia–Persian avatar of pragmatism, even if of independent origins. This becomes clear when they fleetingly refer to the rise of middle ground leadership in Brazil, China, India and Turkey (Mishal and Goldberg, 2014, pp. 8, 132–137). At one point they even suggest that the US straddles the middle ground (Mishal and Goldberg, 2014, p. 128). They also claim that Turkey’s middle ground leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan comfortably and simultaneously claims Ottoman grandeur, European modernity, and, we can add, Islamic piety (Mishal and Goldberg, 2014, p. 137). This suggests Mishal and Goldberg are dealing with Third World pragmatism and populism rolled into one, which is commonplace in most economically successful developing countries. ⁷ A similar impression emerges from their suggestion that contrary to outside assessments negotiations over the nuclear programme were not a diversionary tactic, rather ‘Iranian policy is its most committed when it is also able to walk a parallel path’ (Mishal and Goldberg, 2014, p. 77). This is true of most leadership insofar as keeping alternatives alive improves bargaining power (see Kumar, 2016 for negotiations between India and Iran over the development of Chabahar port and oil and gas exploration). When Mishal and Goldberg’s fictional character claims that the Non-Aligned Movement nations ‘were the freaks’, whereas Khomeini was first to claim moral superiority of middle ground existence over extremes (Mishal and Goldberg, 2014, p. 131), it becomes clear that the characterization of Iranian leadership as uniquely middle ground-based needs a more careful assessment.

Mishal and Goldberg’s discussion is weakest when they suggest that nuclear negotiations were not about acquisition or detonation, rather about expansion of international influence and engaging with other countries. They argue that this approach ‘allowed it [Iran] to develop close ties with Venezuela’ (Mishal and Goldberg, 2014, p. 7). Iran surely had much better channels for engaging with the rest of the world and Venezuela is certainly not the most important country for Iran. Similarly, Mishal and Goldberg sound unconvincing when their fictional character claims that Israel’s commitment to one big idea makes reconciliation with middle ground Iran impossible (Mishal and Goldberg, 2014, p. 126). The ‘big idea’ has not hampered Israel’s engagement, even if clandestine, with a variety of Muslim countries. Mishal and Goldberg overlook a crucial point. The caricaturing of Shia leaders as fundamentalist/extremist seems to have been driven largely by the US antipathy to the revolutionary regime.

(Mis)Reading the Middle East?

In light of the above discussion, one wonders what might explain the efflorescence of culturalist or primordialist explanations of Middle Eastern conflicts. A number of factors seem to encourage a primordialist reading. First, the historical boundary between Sunni and Shia majority areas of the Middle East runs through Iraq and this provides a sectarian colour to the contest over the Persian Gulf, with the Sunni monarchies arrayed against Shia Iran. However, as argued above, this macro-distribution masks enormous diversity of identities and interests.

Second, the geographical distribution of minorities within the countries of the region compounds the impression that governments are driven by sectarian interests. Shia minorities occupy the large oil-rich Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, which also accounts for a substantial part of domestic food output (Steinberg, 2011, pp. 168–169). In Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the marginalized Shia majority and Kurdish minorities occupied the oil-rich territories. Iran’s Sunni minorities are based in the strategically important Sistan and Baluchestan, whereas its Arab-speaking minority occupy the strategically important and resource-rich Khuzestan. The absence of fully representative governments in the region has meant unfair treatment of such minorities, irrespective of their (sectarian) identity. In fact, often the state refuses to acknowledge the presence of minorities or give visibility to minorities. This is reflected in among other things their reluctance to share statistics about minorities. Lebanon, which suspended census in 1932 to preserve the delicate colonial–sectarian political equilibrium (Horowitz, 2000, p. 195), best exemplifies the reluctance. In case of Saudi Arabia, Alonso and Starr (1985, p. 96) note that the government did not publish census data for a long time because it believed that that the country’s enemies could use the information to ‘promote subversion’ and Matthiesen (2015, p. 4) adds that the population estimates of ‘Shia, are a constant source of politically inspired debate, as there has never been a census detailing sectarian affiliation.’ Likewise, Iran’s census does not provide information about linguistic and sectarian affiliation of people.

Matthiesen (2015) lays bare the nature of discrimination and persecution faced by Saudi Shias, who are seen as secessionists—willing to join their Bahraini cousins; as sectarian others—willing to join their co-religionists in Iran and attack Saudi Arabia’s Sunni character; and as an economic threat—a sectarian minority sitting atop the country’s oil wealth. The Saudi royalty stokes these fears to rally diverse Sunni groups, who are otherwise uncomfortable with the Wahhabi-dominated government. Matthiesen (2015) and Steinberg (2011, pp. 163–165, 179–180) suggest that the condition of the Saudi Shias depends upon the balance of power between the religious and political establishments, which is beyond their control. However, the Shia cannot confront the King, who uses them as a bargaining chip, as they have been made to believe that the King stands between them and the Wahhabi frindge.

Third, the geographical–sectarian fault line that runs through the Gulf became aligned with another divide after the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, the most populous country of the region. The Shia character of the new Iranian regime mattered less to the Sunni monarchies than its republican orientation. This is evident from the membership of the Gulf Cooperation Council launched by the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar and Kuwait in 1981 that did not include republican Iraq, which was under a Sunni ruler at that time. When the Arab Spring protests rocked Sunni Egypt, the monarchies relived the horrors of 1979 and the early 1980s. Interestingly, while Saudi Arabia is now opposed to the ‘Shia’ faction in the latest conflict in Yemen, a few decades ago it had supported the same faction against republican forces backed by Sunni Egypt.

It bears emphasis that until 1979 international relations in the Middle East could not be read through the sectarian lens. Shia Iran was an ally of Saudi Arabia (Steinberg, 2011, p. 176), a founding member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) along with Saudi Arabia and also a member of the US/Sunni-dominated Central Treaty Organization. ⁸ These were not the only organizations that included Iran and its Sunni neighbours. Iran, Turkey and Pakistan formed an organization called Regional Cooperation for Development in 1964, which was active until late 1978 and then `lapsed into dormancy’ after the Revolution before being revived in 1985 (Yeşilbursa, 2009, p. 657). More interestingly, the revival of the organization happened at a time Pakistan was inundated by Saudi-sponsored anti-Shia propaganda.

Moreover, it can be argued that even post-1979 conflicts were driven by geopolitical factors rather than identity. The decade long Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988) was not a Shia–Sunni war. The year 1979 witnessed a number of developments: the downfall of monarchy in Iran (January), the assassination of the US ambassador to Afghanistan (February), the hanging of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan (April), the hostage crises at the US embassy in Tehran and Mecca mosque, the Intifada in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, and the burning of the US embassy in Islamabad (November) and the arrival of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’ army in Afghanistan (December). At the end of this quick series of events, Iraq attacked Iran to benefit from the latter’s disarray. This was also the time when the economic orientation of countries as diverse as China, India, the US, and Britain and global financial institutions changed and countries as far apart as India, Turkey, and the US witnessed the rise of religious conservatism.

While sectarianism was not the driving force behind the Iran–Iraq War and other regional conflicts, there was increased emphasis on the sectarian divide nevertheless and as mentioned above secular leftist movements gave way to Islamists. Saudi Arabia invested in the translation of the Quran into other languages and was later followed by Iran in this regard. The ‘theological’ competition had a secular context though. In the 1970s, Sunni monarchies began to use their new found wealth to spread their influence in the Muslim world. The emergence of a republican Islamist regime in oil-rich Iran, one of the oldest and most important non-Arab centres of Islam, rattled the monarchies and they tried to isolate Iran by highlighting its Shia character. Yet, both Saudi Arabia and Iran appreciate the limits of the sectarian card and have not provided sustained support to religious minorities-based insurgent groups in each other’s territory. In fact, they have often used their sectarian brethren in each other’s territory as bargaining chips. Moreover, neither government is driven by religious rage or foreign instigation. Otherwise we cannot explain the Saudi–Iranian détente of the early 1990s that survived the Khobar Towers bombings, which targeted the US forces in Saudi Arabia (Steinberg, 2011, p. 178).

If sectarian readings are misleading, then what explains the Iran–Saudi Arabia rivalry? Aziz (2015) refers us to unalterable power asymmetries. The Gulf countries, whose combined population is about half of Iran’s population, still depend on the outside world for both manpower and technology. On the other hand, under the sanctions Iran learnt to do things at home without much external support and survived because of its large pool of trained workforce. Saudi Arabia’s unstable monarchy is using sectarianism ‘as a tool for regime survival and power projection abroad’ (Matthiesen, 2015, pp. 216–217) and to mask its structural weakness vis-à-vis a resurgent Iran. Yet this strategy is risky because just as Shias are a minority within Islam, Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabis are a minority within Sunni Islam.

Concluding Remarks

Unlike much of the prejudiced commentary within academia and the media, the three books reviewed here delve deeply into local particularities and provide nuanced descriptions of the internal diversity of Shia societies as well as the complex manner in which Shia organizations and leaderships operate. They highlight the difficulties in mobilising diverse Shia (and Sunni) communities against each other across countries overriding other identity markers and socio-economic factors that bind them to their local contexts. This in turn highlights the limited analytical usefulness of ancient-global labels for explaining contemporary developments. They also suggest that the growth of Iran’s influence in the Shia world is not guaranteed, the growth of Iran’s influence is not the same as the growth of Shia Iran’s influence, any growth of Iranian influence engenders its own resistance within Shia communities outside Iran and caricatures of Shia leadership as fundamentalist/extremist are grossly misleading. For want of space, the review has skipped the theological fine print of these books and Matthiesen’s interesting discussion of the nature and scope of political action in neo-patrimonial states.

I will end the review with some observations on the shared flaws of the literature reviewed here. The books under review hardly pay any attention to ethnolinguistic diversity, which may cut across or align with religious-theological diversity and thereby suppress or accentuate a conflict. Another major flaw is the absence of references to the literature on the relationship between sect and religion and state and religion. This omission is particularly glaring because all the books reviewed here confront problems at the interface between sects, religion, and state. Understanding the ongoing unrest in the Middle East requires greater investment in inter-disciplinary studies that combines the grounded perspective of the books reviewed here, which makes ample room for local idiosyncrasies, with broad brush theoretical and cross-country/cultural studies.