Sunni, Shi'a and the "Trotskyists of Islam"

February 09, 2007 OpenDemocracy Fred Haliday
The conflict now besetting the middle east is, like all major international conflicts, multidimensional. It involves not just one major axis of violence (Israel/Arabs, United States/terrorism, west/Iran) but several overlapping conflicts that draw states and armed movements into their arena. The major concern of strategists and analysts remains the polarisation between the US and its foes in Iraq and, increasingly, in Iran. But there is another important, ominous, conflict accompanying these that has little to do with the machinations of Washington or Israel, and is less likely to be contained by political compromise: the spread, in a way radically new for the middle east, of direct conflict between Sunni and Shi'a Muslims.
Many generalisations and simplifications accompany the whole issue of Sunni and Shi'a Islam. In the aftermath of the Iranian revolution, when Ayatollah Khomeini produced a radical, populist, third-world rhetoric that denounced the west and the "golden idols" or taghut who served imperialist interests in the region (among them the Shah of Iran, Anwar Sadat, Saddam Hussein, and the Gulf rulers), it was claimed by many that Shi'ism, the belief of around 10% of all Muslims, was inherently militant. Unlike the Sunni, who had historically accepted the legitimacy of Islamic rulers, the caliphs, and who paid their clergy from state funds, thereby controlling them, the Shi'a refused to accept the Muslim credentials of their rulers and produced a clergy, paid for by the subscriptions of the faithful, that were closer to the people and so more radical. I recall a conversation with Ibrahim Yazdi, the first foreign minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran (who after Ayatollah Khomeini's death spent years under virtual house arrest in Tehran). As he sat under the enormous chandeliers of what had been the Shah's foreign ministry, he exclaimed with pride: "We are the Trotskyists of Islam!"
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BUT BEFORE YOU DO HERE IS MY COMMENT ABOUT THIS ARTICLE .

I am sorry that you have missed the point yet again Mr Fred Haiday - Just like when you fell in love with the likes of Ibrahim Yazdi in 1978 and promoted Khomeini and his like minded lunatics. The modern version of Shaisam with its emphases on the coming of Mehdi is sacrileges to the Sunnis. That's what is the root of the animosity between these two groups. You have failed to mention or grasp the importance of this crucial aspect that divides the Muslims today.