Learning Objective 1.4

NPR 5 Part Series Outline

Part 1: Origins

• The Shiites are concentrated in Iran, southern Iraq and southern Lebanon. But there are significant Shiite communities in Saudi Arabia and Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India as well. 
• Shiites take up 10 to 15 percent of the Muslim population. Although Sunn--Shiite origins are portrayed as violent, they had peaceful times together.
• The original split between Sunnis and Shiites occurred soon after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, in the year 632. Most of the Prophet Muhammad's followers wanted the community of Muslims to determine who would succeed him. A smaller group thought that someone from his family should take up his mantle.
• And thus they were the partisans of Ali, his cousin and son-in-law. Sunnis believed that leadership should fall to the person who was deemed by the elite of the community to be best able to lead the community. And it was fundamentally that political division that began the Sunni-Shia split.
• The violence and war split the small community of Muslims into two branches that would never reunite. The Shiites called their leaders imam, Ali being the first, Hussein the third. The significance of the imams is one of the fundamental differences that separate the two branches of Islam. 
• Over the next centuries, Islam clashed with the European Crusaders, with the Mongol conquerors from Central Asia, and was spread farther by the Ottoman Turks. In the 20th century, that meant a complex political dynamic involving Sunni and Shiites, Arabs and Persians, colonizers and colonized, oil, and the involvement of the superpowers.

Part 2: Mideast Turmoil/Rise of Shiites

• The Shiites of Arabia were under the authority of Sunni tribal leaders. In Persia, the monarchy and the Shiite clergy coexisted so long as neither ventured into the other's realm.
• In Persia, Reza Pahlavi, a military officer, seized power in a coup in 1925 and declared himself shah. Pahlavi changed the name of the state to Iran and set about creating a secular government, much to the dismay of some of the Shiite clergy.
• The young shah's reign was also marked with instability. In 1953, political turmoil broke out in Tehran, forcing the shah to flee the country, only to be returned to power in a CIA- and British-engineered coup that ousted the nationalist prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh.
• After that, the shah clamped down, creating a merciless secret police that sought to destroy all efforts to challenge his rule. In 1978, a popular movement exploded in the streets of Iran's cities, aimed at overthrowing the shah.
• The revolution in Iran was a tempest of conflicting ideologies, mixing communism, anti-imperialism and secular pluralism with Khomeini's ideas about an Islamic state. In the midst of the chaos, Khomeini oversaw the writing of a constitution that gave most of the state's power to the supreme religious leader.
• These events in Iran would have a powerful effect on the wider Islamic world.

Part 3: Sunni Reaction

• The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, Sunni Muslim fundamentalists seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, and the Ayatollah Khomeini led a Shiite revolution that swept the Shah of Iran from power and put in place the modern world's first Islamic republic.
• So, to win over the wider Arab public, some Sunni leaders, especially in Saudi Arabia, sought to sharpen the differences between Sunnis and Shiites. The result was the emergence of new and far more dangerous Sunni fundamentalist groups. 
• The most violent reaction to Iran's Shiite revolution came from Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Iraq invaded Iran in 1980 to seize its oil fields and destroy Khomeini's revolution. But Saddam did not cast the conflict in sectarian terms.
• The war killed hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides. It was fought initially in Iran's oil-rich region, then on the other side of the border in southern Iraq, where Iraq's Shiite population was concentrated.
• In 1982, Israel launched an all-out invasion of Lebanon, ostensibly to stop guerrilla attacks from the Palestine Liberation Organization. But the conflict would have unexpected and profound repercussions for the Sunni-Shiite divide and for the security of the United States.

Part 4: Iraq War Deepens the Divide

• When the United States invaded Iraq four years ago, on March 20, 2003, it didn't set out to deepen the Sunni-Shia divide in the Islamic world. But that may be one of the most important outcomes of the war. Until the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the Shia never governed a modern Arab state. They were in control in Persian Iran, but the Sunnis led most Arab states in the Middle East
• The Sunni insurgency first targeted American troops, but soon, with the involvement of al-Qaida in Iraq, it attacked the Shia as well. The targets: Shiite holy sites; Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad and elsewhere, and ordinary Shiite civilians, thousands of whom have been abducted and murdered.
• And then a year ago came the bombing of the Askariya Shrine, a mosque directly connected to the story of the Twelfth Shiite Imam, the messianic Hidden Imam. In 2006, the Shia fought back through militia attacks and murder. Shiite-Sunni violence now predominates in Iraq.
• Iraq's senior cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, although born and raised in Iran, advocated a political future for Iraq that is far different from the Iranian model. Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran created the model of the Islamic republic with all power resting in the hands of the clerics. Although this has been the government of Iran for more than a quarter century, there are doubters — in Iran, Iraq and throughout the Shiite world. 
• Twice in 2004, street fighting broke out in Najaf, with the Shiite militia known as the Mahdi Army attacking American troops. Sistani mediated an end to that fighting, but since then this militia has spawned neighborhood defense forces as well as anti-Sunni death squads.
• It also catapulted its leader, the young firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, into a prominent role in the Iraqi government. The escalating sectarian violence in Iraq has become a great concern for the Saudi monarchy, fearful that it may spread to the kingdom's own Shiite minority, which lives near some of the most valuable oil fields in eastern Saudi Arabia.

Part 5: Shia/Sunni Conflict Forces U.S. Shift in Iraq

• When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, President Bush declared that the aim was to overthrow Saddam Hussein and bring democracy to Iraq. The president also made clear that he had wider ambitions in the Middle East — to spread democracy and fight the war on terrorism.
• Over the years as U.S. policy ran into reality in Iraq — as the sectarian conflict between Shia and Sunni deepened — U.S. aims have changed. Now bringing stability to Iraq is the goal, while preventing Shiite Iran's emergence as a regional power.
• Undoubtedly there have been some benefits that the U.S. invasion set in motion, most importantly a political process that has fostered majority rule in Iraq. There seemed to be little awareness in Washington of the potential for such sectarian conflict.
• That may be especially true now that the Bush administration is focusing its attention on Iran. But the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq removed Iran's two most dangerous neighbors and enemies. U.S. policy has worked against the containment of Iran.
• U.S. policy is further complicated by the close relationship between the Bush administration and Israel, and lack of progress on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Despite the pre-invasion claims of some in the Bush administration, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein has proved of no benefit to that issue.