Politics or Piety? Problematising the Sunni-Shi'a Schism in Iraq

Abstract

PDF Password = 369297 Many mainstream discourses currently have a tendency to portray the ongoing civil conflict(s) in Iraq as a throwback to disagreements regarding the legitimate successor to the Prophet Muhammed in the 7th Century. These disagreements resulted in a split within the umma (�community of believers�) that led to the formation of two distinct brands of Islam: Sunni, or orthodox Islam, and Shi�ism. In the eyes of Orientalists, and, indeed, salafi jihadist ideologues, the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Syria are merely a manifestation of this nearly 1400 year old schism. Ironically enough, Orientalists, who tend to define modernity, rationality and civilisation in exclusively Western terms, and salafi ideologues, who hark back to a putative �Golden Age� of Islam, subscribe to remarkably similar views when explaining these conflicts. In essence, both have a tendency to anchor contemporary socio-political phenomena in antiquity. In contrast, this chapter focuses on recent history and contemporary political contestation to explain the ongoing conflicts in Iraq. In doing so, it seeks to problematise the binary Sunni-Shi�a divide. Ascribing Sunni or Shi�a labels, in itself, is problematic as group identities are not homogenous. This is despite persistent reductionism among mainstream analyses, and especially the international media. As such, we investigate both inter-group and intra-group conflict in Iraq framed by historical, political, and social context, and supported by empirical facts. While we do briefly interrogate pre-2003 dynamics, the chapter predominantly focuses on post-2003 Iraq, including the impact of external interventions, de-Ba�athification, and the imposition of a sectarian quota system, as well as the corruption, sectarianism, and incompetence of post-2003 Iraqi regimes which gave rise to the group that calls itself the Islamic State. We are neither suggesting that Sunni-Shi�a antagonism does not exist in Iraq, nor that it is unimportant, but, rather, we examine a variety of alternative explanations that have contributed to the ongoing pandemonium engulfing the Iraqi state. The chapter argues that relying on sectarian conflict as an explanatory framework distorts understanding and shifts analytical attention away from more concrete issues and the urgent responses that they demand.