Playing Politics With Religion

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By USSAMA MAKDISI
Ussama Makdisi is a professor of history at Rice University and the author of the forthcoming book “Understanding Sectarianism.”
Published: July 3, 2013

“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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/opinion/global/playing-politics-with-religion.html

[cbayer]

1. I tend to agree with his conclusion. I think much of this is much more about power and

politics, than religion.

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.

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2. "they manipulate any division among their people to secure and keep power."

Regardless of the country, its rulers will use race, class, gender, ethnicity and will exploit any other difference necessary.

It is allowed on all hands, that the primitive way of breaking eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger end; but his present majesty’s grandfather, while he was a boy, going to eat an egg, and breaking it according to the ancient practice, happened to cut one of his fingers. Whereupon the emperor his father published an edict, commanding all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs. The people so highly resented this law, that our histories tell us, there have been six rebellions raised on that account; wherein one emperor lost his life, and another his crown. Voyage to Lilliput, Ch. 4