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February 5, 2007
The Road to Reformation
For those in the west
asking when Islam will have its Reformation, I have good news and bad
news. The good news is that the process appears to have begun. The bad
news is it's been marked by calumny, hatred and bloody violence. In this
way it mirrors the Reformation itself, which we now remember in a highly
sanitized way. During that era, Christians of differing sects massacred
each other as they fought to own the true interpretation of their religion.
No analogy is exact, but something similar seems to be happening within
Islam. Here the divide is between the Sunnis, who make up 85 percent of
the Muslim world, and the Shiites, who represent most of the other 15
percent.
The dominant new reality in the Middle East today
is the growing schism between these two groups. Look at the daily sectarian
killings in Iraq, listen to the dark warnings of Saudi and Jordanian leaders
about a "Shia crescent," watch the power struggles in Lebanon.
Islam's quiet cleavage has come out into the open. At a recent demonstration
in the Palestinian territories, opponents of Hamas taunted the Sunni Islamists
as "Shiites" because of their links to Iranian-backed Hizbullah.
We in the United States have spent much time asking
what all this means for Iraq, for U.S. troops in the midst of this free-for-all
and for America more generally. But think, for a moment, about what the
trend means for Al Qaeda.
Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri, both Sunnis,
created Al Qaeda to be a Pan-Islamic organization, uniting all Muslims
as it battled the West, Israel and Western-allied regimes like Saudi Arabia
and Egypt.
Neither Zawahiri nor bin Laden was animated by hatred
of Shiites. In its original fatwas and other statements, Al Qaeda makes
no mention of them, condemning only the "Crusaders" and "Jews."
But all ideologies change as they encounter reality. When bin Laden moved
to Peshawar in the 1980s to fight the Russians in Afghanistan, he allied
with radical Sunnis who had a long history of oppressing Afghanistan's
Shiite minority, the Hazaras. (The novel "The Kite Runner" is
about a young Hazara boy.) Even then, bin Laden didn't sanction anti-Shiite
violence, nor did he add anti-Shiite accusations to his messages. But
after the Sunni Taliban took power, Arab fighters under his command did
support his hosts' anti-Shiite pogroms.
Iraq was the real turning point. The self-appointed
leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, had a poisonous attitude
toward Shiites. In a letter to bin Laden, written in February 2004, he
described Iraq's Shiite majority as "the insurmountable obstacle,
the lurking snake, the crafty and malicious scorpion, the spying enemy
... The danger from the Shia ... is greater ... than the Americans ...
I come back and again say that the only solution is for us to strike the
religious, military, and other cadres among the Shia with blow after blow
until they bend to the Sunnis." Zarqawi was drawing on Wahhabi Islam-and
its offshoot Deobandism in South Asia-in which there is a deep and oppressive
strain of anti-Shiite ideology.
Bin Laden and Zawahiri were clearly uncomfortable with this new line, and the latter reproached Zarqawi directly. Bin Laden remained largely silent on the matter, but by the end of 2004, both had decided that Al Qaeda in Iraq was too strong to rebuke. And, rousing anti-Shiite feelings seemed the only way to mobilize Iraq's Sunni minority. It also, crucially, made them see Al Qaeda as an ally. The trouble for Al Qaeda is that as a practical matter, loathing Shiites works in only a few places: principally Iraq, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and some parts of the gulf. Most of the rest of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims are turned off by attacks on their co-religionists.
So, an organization that had hoped to rally the entire
Muslim world to jihad against the West has been dragged instead into a
dirty internal war within Islam. Bin Laden began his struggle hoping to
topple the Saudi regime. He is now aligned with the Saudi monarchy as
it organizes against Shiite domination. This necessarily limits Al Qaeda's
broader appeal and complicates its basic anti-Western strategy.
These emerging divisions weaken Al Qaeda, but they
will help most Muslims only if this story ends as the Reformation did.
What is currently a war of sects must become a war of ideas. First, Islam
must make space for differing views about what makes a good Muslim. Then
it will be able to take the next step and accept the diversity among religions,
each true in its own way.
The United States should avoid taking sides in this
sectarian struggle and aim instead to move the debate to this broader
plain. We should encourage the diversity within Islam, which has the potential
to divide our enemies. But more important, we should encourage the emerging
debate within it. In the end it was not murder but Martin Luther that
made the Reformation matter.
