Picture any minority group, hated and distrusted for centuries and unwilling to change their fundamental religious beliefs, trying to become the regional powerhouse among those who have perpetrated that hatred and distrust. Such is Iran’s plight as a Shiite power struggling for influence in a Sunni-dominated Islamic world. I’ve blogged on their most fundamental differences – how each sector of Islam interprets the Qur’an – and how intense and historically- deep their mutual distrust has been.
Iran has bribed Sunnis – like their massive support for Hamas against Israel – made token gestures like allowing a Sunni billionaire to be Lebanese Prime Minister as the titular head of the Shiite-driven Hezbollah Party and generally tried to align itself with Palestine as regional champion for independence from Israel. They defy the United States and Israel at every turn, flashing their confrontational muscle. But they are stuck with the fact that 90%+ of the population is Shiite, and the clerical leaders of that faith live in Iran. Backing the Syrian Assad regime (a minority Shiite-affiliate government) hasn’t helped that cause, and the push back from Sunni powers like Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia… even the fundamentalist Taliban… has been strong.
This powerful, anti-Shiite phenomenon is hardly just government policy from Sunni-dominated regimes. It is a deep emotional grassroots reality. To understand how virulent this anti-Shiite sentiment is, one has only to look at the recent killings in Quetta, Pakistan (pictured above) to see hatred seething under the surface, even if the perpetrators are fundamentalists with profound Sunnis beliefs: “For at least a year now, Sunni extremist gunmen have been methodically attacking members of the Hazara community, a Persian-speaking Shiite minority that emigrated here from Afghanistan more than a century ago. The killers strike with chilling abandon, apparently fearless of the law: shop owners are gunned down at their counters, students as they play cricket, pilgrims dragged from buses and executed on the roadside.
“The latest victim, a mechanic named Hussain Ali, was killed [November 28th], shot inside his workshop. He joined the list of more than 100 Hazaras who have been killed this year, many in broad daylight. As often as not, the gunmen do not even bother to cover their faces.” New York Times, December 3rd. Quetta is the largest city and the provincial capital of the Baluchistan province of Pakistan, near the Afghan border and within that Tribal District where Taliban and other Sunni extremists live with little official intervention from official Pakistani authorities.
The Sunnis fundamentalists who populate this region believe that Shiite apostates have desecrated the faith and turned a Holy Book that is must reading for all Sunnis into some misguided mystical tome that can only be interpreted by the highest level of Shiite clerics. They hate this Shiite belief even more than the non-Islamic faiths such as Buddhism and Christianity.
This anti-Shiite bias is more clearly evidenced here, but the attitude is very prevalent all over the Sunni-dominated Muslim world, particularly among the poorest members of society. When dealing with uneducated people with centuries of bias and very closed minds on the subject, Iran has nothing but an uphill battle in its quest for regional power. It’s hard to keep this in mind when we focus on Iran as an emerging power, but local Sunnis have reasons that are even stronger than U.S. interests in containing Iran. And if Iran were to generate nuclear weapons, the real cause for alarm would be the race among Sunnis for their own nukes to balance Shiite power.
I’m Peter Dekom, and this is one more complex variable in an even more complex boiling political arena.
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