• Is a Sunni-Shi'ite thirty years war looming?  - Iason Athanasiadis
The new Middle East cold war is being fought in diverse battlefields from Baghdad through Beirut to Gaza between proxies loyal to Tehran and Riyadh.

• Attitudes in Jordan  - Mohammed Al-Masri
The Jordanian state has followed a zero-tolerance policy toward the public practice of Shi'ism.

• Reverberations in Palestine  - an interview withAhmed Yusef
The way Saddam Hussein was executed on the first day of the Eid struck at the core of Muslim sensibilities.

• Iran: the unwelcome consequences of Saddam Hussein's hanging  - Sadegh Zibakalam
Khamenei told his audience that Hussein was neither a Shi'ite nor a Sunni, but an enemy of Muslims.

Is a Sunni-Shi'ite thirty years war looming?
 Iason Athanasiadis

Sunnis fighting Shi'ites on Beirut's streets, a civil war in Iraq and political infighting in the Palestinian territories that is externally directed from Riyadh and Tehran: a snapshot of the new, sectarian Middle East.

A US-led, Israel-backed, Middle East-wide alliance of conservative Sunni and secular Muslim states is being marshaled against Iran and its allies on a backdrop of escalating confrontation between Tehran and Washington. After several months of faint rumblings, the Sunni axis is starting to take shape to a chorus of increasingly shrill condemnations by the Iranian theocracy of what it believes is an insidious policy aimed at dividing the region, the better for Washington to dominate it.

"The US and Zionist regime have a conspiracy to stir up conflict between Shi'ite and Sunni Muslims in order to plunder the wealth of the regional nations," said Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad this week. His statement followed a similar warning by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei who made a rare public appearance on the occasion of Aid-e Ghorban (Eid al-Adha) earlier this month following a spate of rumors that he had succumbed to illness.

The new Middle East cold war is being fought in diverse battlefields from Baghdad through Beirut to Gaza between proxies loyal to Tehran and Riyadh. In Lebanon, the CIA is authorized to covertly prop up the Lebanese government through funding anti-Hizballah groups and paying activists to support beleaguered Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. The Daily Telegraph reported that this is part of a secret plan by US President George W. Bush to help the Lebanese government prevent the spread of Iranian influence. On Tuesday, Hizballah loyalists took to the streets of Beirut and engaged in fighting with other factions in some of the worst sectarian fighting since the Lebanese civil war ended in 1990.

Even in Sudan, the echoes of the Sunni-Shi'ite conflict reverberate. In December, Sunni groups Ansar al-Sunna al-Muhammadiyyah and Majles al-Dawa demanded the closure of three Iranian cultural centers and expressed fears of Iranian-backed plans to spread Shi'ite beliefs in the country. For their part, Iranian diplomats are concerned by what they call US attempts to use an upcoming referendum on South Sudan by its majority Christian inhabitants to create a pro-US Christian secessionist state in the fault-line between Muslim and Christian East Africa.

This week, the anti-Iranian alliance stretched east to embrace Pakistan as General Pervez Musharraf journeyed to the Egyptian beach resort of Sharm al-Sheikh for talks with President Hosni Mubarak. In a previous stop in Riyadh, Musharraf vowed to deepen defense and strategic ties with the Wahhabi kingdom. His trip, according to the Saudi-owned, Arabic-language news-site Elaph, was intended to "expand the Sunni alliance which includes Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey to include Pakistan as well in order to face the growing Iranian influence in the region."

How quickly the Middle East landscape has changed, once again.

It all started in the dying hours of 2006, as former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was led to the gallows in a grimy Baghdad cell that served as a torture chamber during his reign. To catcalls and taunts, Hussein began reciting the fatiha. On the second repetition, and just as he was uttering the name of the Muslim prophet, he was interrupted by his own death. His execution and its timing--on the day when Sunni Muslims mark the holiest feast in the Muslim calendar--was more toxic for Sunni-Shi'ite relations in Iraq and across the region than even the bombing of Samara's Golden Mosque in February 2006--the previously commonly-accepted tipping point into civil war.

As Arab news channels began grainy replays of the unauthorized camera footage that revealed the execution to have been not so much dignified as gleefully revengeful, a news-blackout held in Tehran. Iranians were left uninformed by their national broadcaster that Hussein's dying curse had condemned America and--in place of Israel--Iran. They were clueless that they were being described in the Middle East by epithets such as the "Eastern tide", "Safavids" (the 16th century Persian empire that adopted Shi'ite Islam as the state dogma) and the "Persian menace".

Meanwhile, Arab commentators raged at the perceived insult of executing an Arab nationalist leader on the holiest of Muslim feasts. Al-Jazeera provided coverage of pro-Saddam Hussein wakes in Fallujah and Cairo and screened a report from a village in the Nile Delta whose inhabitants--many of whom had made fortunes as migrant workers in Hussein's Iraq--had renamed it Saddamiyyah out of sympathy with the departed Iraqi leader. In Detroit, a wave of revenge vandalism hit businesses owned by Shi'ite Iraqis.

"Do the obnoxious sectarian slogans that we heard the moment that Saddam collapsed on the noose and which we all have in our pockets via Bluetooth require us to reconsider our neutrality vis-a-vis the Safavid sectarian futility?" wrote Ali Saad al-Mussa, a professor at Saudi Arabia's King Khalid University and a regular writer for al-Watan, a pro-government daily. "They hastened the sacrifice for many reasons, the simplest of which is to celebrate the victory that came 1,000 years late."

Saudi Arabia is a staunchly Sunni country whose Shi'ite minority is mistreated and referred to as 'ar-Rafidin' (the rejectionists). Despite an opening made by King Abdullah in 1998, when he went to Tehran in a landmark visit that marked a new beginning in relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia, ties have unraveled since the election of Ahmadinezhad in July 2005. The perception that he is an Iranian nationalist with ambitions to take over Iraq and dominate the region has led Riyadh to seek ways of weakening Iran through launching an oil war against its eastern neighbor. The price of oil has tumbled from $70 to under $50 in the past few months and much of this has to do, oil traders say, with a political decision by Sunni Arab oil producers and the US to hurt Iran economically and create a domestic crisis inside the country.

With Iraq's sectarian militants being given the surge treatment and a worried Arab world wanting to administer a purge upon Iran's theocrats, the US is unwittingly or consciously engaging in social engineering on a region-wide scale. In the mid-decades of the 20th century, imperial power Britain wielded a policy of "divide and conquer" to keep its dominions under control. In Egypt, the Christian minority Copts were encouraged to enlist in the police, earning the hostility of their Sunni Muslim fellow citizens. In Cyprus, the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities were encouraged into an antagonistic relationship by Britain's occupation bureaucracy. In 21st century Iraq, ordinary people are outraged at the manner in which the US has insisted on viewing society through the filter of Sunni, Shi'ite and Kurdish sections, delineating divisions that were dormant.

"One might well be forgiven for surmising that the current thrust of US policy in the Middle East and throughout the Muslim world is to exacerbate and instrumentalize Sunni-Shi'ite divisions," says Fred Reed, a specialist on Middle East politics.

With Arab anti-Iranian rhetoric having reached a pitch unprecedented since the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, evidence is mounting that a new Arab-Persian confrontation is unfolding across the region. From Lebanon to Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan to far-flung conflicts such as Somalia and Sudan, a desperate struggle for influence is under way.

With emotions dangerously sharpened and Washington flailing for a strategy that will shift attention away from its role even while maintaining its influence in the region, violence will inexorably spread. Some Iranian academics and former officials are already describing this conflict as another thirty years war that will eventually lead the region to a Muslim version of the Treaty of Westphalia and the modern era. It was the 1648 Peace of Westphalia that finally buried the hatchet between Catholics and Protestants in Europe and brought into being sovereign nation states and the modern international system.

The Westphalian system allowed each state to define its religion. In the process, it created a segregated, sectarianly-cleansed Europe. Such an apocalyptic scenario might eventually make lasting Middle Eastern peace possible but it would also imply that, in a region that gifted the world its three major monotheistic religions, its Muslims have found untenable even the uneasy coexistence that characterized the first 14 centuries of Islam.- Published 25/1/2007 © bitterlemons-international.org

Iason Athanasiadis is an Istanbul-based writer and photographer who lived in Iran from 2004 to 2007.

The timing of the execution of Saddam Hussein on the first morning of Eid al-Adha, the video clips officially released by the Iraqi government and those from the cell phones documenting the execution triggered a wave of anger and provoked anti-Shi'ite and anti-Iranian sentiment among the Jordanian public. Jordanians interpreted the event as an act of Iranian/Shi'ite revenge against Sunnis in Iraq and throughout the Arab world.

Jordanians expressed their outrage and protest in different ways, ranging from declining to offer sweets during the Eid to restraining wedding celebrations and hanging posters praising Saddam Hussein as a martyr. Some dedicated their Eid rituals to him and opened houses of mourning. Demonstrations organized in some Jordanian cities generated calls for revenge.

However, in spite of the obvious anger, there were no reported incidents of reprisals against the 200,000 or so Iraqi Shi'ite refugees in Jordan--thanks both to measures taken by the security services and precautions taken by some Iraqis to avoid certain areas of Amman for a few days following the execution. Columnists and op-ed writers in newspapers of different political and cultural leanings, including the Islamic Action Front, expressed anger and dismay and concluded that the execution itself demonstrated the sectarian, militant nature of the Iraqi government and revealed its servitude to American, Iranian and Israeli interests in the region.

Not surprisingly, the execution led to an upsurge in feelings against Iraqi Shi'ites in particular, Shi'ites at-large and Iran as a Shi'ite and Persian state determined to undermine both Sunni and Arab beliefs and aspirations. Twenty-two Jordanian MPs called for a severing of diplomatic ties with Iran.

The Shi'ite question does not assume the same level of importance in Jordan as in some Arab countries where there are significant Shi'ite communities. The overwhelming majority of Jordanian Muslims are Sunni; Jordanian Shi'ites number fewer than 4,000 according to the most generous estimate. The Jordanian public's lack of awareness of this small minority that has been part of Jordanian society for around 100 years signifies its assimilation. It has never been a focus of public debate.

The Shi'ite question becomes relevant to the Jordanian public and Jordanian elites only as a consequence of the American occupation of Iraq. It is political developments in Iraq and the region and the impact of Iraqi refugees in Jordan that have heavily influenced the formation of attitudes toward Shi'ites in recent times.

Those attitudes, at least during the first 18 months after the war, were only one facet of Jordanians' overall approach to Iraqis. The general Jordanian attitude was shaped by two widely held perceptions. The first claimed that Iraqis at large and Shi'ites in particular determined the outcome of the war by facilitating and welcoming the American occupation. Secondly, the Iraqi refugees entering Jordan in the wake of the war, in contrast to the first wave of 1991, were chiefly from the affluent middle class along with skilled laborers who contributed to an overall price surge, especially in the real estate sector. The Iraqis therefore became the focus of Jordanian grievances and complaints about increased traffic, prices and fuel costs. Friction between the Jordanian and Palestinian communities receded as mutual resentment of the newcomers emerged.

The new refugees from the 2003 Iraq war were not a homogenous community, but rather a transparent reflection of the complex ethnic, religious and sectarian composition of cotemporary Iraqi society. The collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime and subsequent political developments encouraged Iraqis to be open about their sectarian background. Books about Shi'ism, its history and its martyrs found a place in downtown Amman book stalls. Jordanians became familiar with Shi'ite symbols, with the result that differences between Shi'ite and Sunni Islam were both underlined and exacerbated. Religious lessons given at mosques and Friday sermon messages emphasized differences between the Sunni and Shi'ite schools of thought, thereby alerting the Jordanian public to the "correctness" of Sunni interpretations of Islam.

Jordanians closely observed the new political developments within Iraq that signaled the rise of Shi'ite political power at the expense of the Sunnis. The formation of the new Iraqi government, the elections and the drafting of the constitution all generated heated debate and uneasy feelings toward Iraqi Shi'ites in Jordan. These anxieties deepened as a result of the intensified mutual attacks between the two communities in Iraq.

Iraqi Shi'ites were thought by Jordanians to have established political hegemony through their collaboration with the American occupying forces, and to have marginalized the political role of the Sunnis. Southern and central Iraq came to be viewed as Iranian outposts, and the perception evolved that many Shi'ite militias and politicians constituted an anti-Sunni camp that served an anti-Arab agenda--be it Iranian, American or both.

King Abdullah's well known warning of the emergence of a Shi'ite crescent two years ago deepened Jordanian society's concerns about a possible Iranian threat, creating a corresponding unease over Shi'ite politics in Iraq. The Jordanian establishment warned frequently of the conversion of some Jordanians to Shi'ism. While the number of such converts is extremely limited and does not exceed hundreds by even the most generous estimate, the Jordanian state has followed a zero-tolerance policy toward the public practice of Shi'ism. Since the main concern of the Iraqi Shi'ites in Jordan right now is to keep their residency rights valid and intact, they practice their religious rituals in private.

In fact, the threat to the Jordanian state is not conversion to Shi'ism as such, but what may be termed political Shi'ism: support for Shi'ite political organizations and acceptance of their political paradigms. For example, the sweeping support for Hizballah during the war in Lebanon last summer was a clear manifestation of political Shi'ism. As much as events in Iraq and interaction with Iraqi communities within Jordan lead to Jordanian antipathy toward Iraqi Shi'ites and Iran, the Israeli factor and potential conflict between Israel and Hizballah still encourage support for Hizballah-style Shi'ite organizations. Therefore it might be misleading to assume that new anti-Iranian feelings in Jordan are sustainable, when the Israel factor in regional developments could dramatically undermine them.- Published 25/1/2007 © bitterlemons-international.org

Dr. Mohammed Al-Masri is a researcher at the Center for Strategic Studies, University of Jordan.