Islam’s Clash with Islam
By Jeffrey Simpson
Oct. 17 2014
Last weekend, news
attention was focused on the battle between the Islamic State and Kurdish
forces. At the same time, the Islamic State set off bombs in and near Baghdad
that killed 45 people, including the police chief of Anbar province.
Anbar is a largely
Sunni area, and yet the Sunni militants chose to attack there. Baghdad is governed
by a rickety coalition with a Shia Prime Minister – from the militants’
perspective, an attack on Iraq’s seat of government is not only an attack on
weakling Sunnis, but also on Shia leadership.
In Iraq, and in many
places throughout the Islamic world, militant Muslims are fighting not just
those of other faiths – Buddhists in Thailand, Christians in northern Nigeria
and the Central African Republic – but they are also fighting other Islamic
sects and secular governments headed by Muslims. To say that Islam is fighting
itself stretches a point, but not that far.
Samuel Huntington, the
late political scientist, popularized the phrase “clash of civilizations” for
the struggle between Islam and Christianity where countries from those two
traditions meet or overlap. His theory was controversial, with critics pointing
to areas where no such clashes exist. But so great is the intra-Islamic
struggle that it might be called a “clash within a civilization.”
Scan the Muslim world.
Far from the headlines in the West, Pakistani insurgents have been attacking
border posts in southern Iran. The insurgents want to carve out an independent
territory in the Sunni tribal area of Baluchistan, which spills into Iran.
Fighting against Iranians pits Pakistani Sunni militants against the world’s
leading Shia power.
In Yemen last week, a
Sunni suicide bomber killed at least 47 people in a counterstrike against a
Shia group that recently took control of the capital, Sanaa. It was the third
bombing in a week – the others claimed 20 and 29 lives.
In Afghanistan,
despite the election of a democratically elected government, fighting continues
– especially in the southern Pashtun areas where the Sunni Taliban continues to
wage war against the secular government in Kabul.
In Syria, of course,
there are so many groups fighting each other – from Bashar al-Assad’s secular
government dominated by the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiism, to the Islamic
State and every shade in between – that the country has become the epicentre of
intra-Islamic conflict. Syria is a cauldron of chaos into which the West has
moved with the noble but nigh-impossible task of identifying and organizing
“moderate” Muslims to fight simultaneously against Mr. al-Assad and the Islamic
State. A mission less likely to succeed can scarcely be imagined.
In Algeria and then
Egypt, secular Muslim authorities lost elections to religious parties, then
ousted those religious parties from power, provoking a nasty civil war in the
former and a massive crackdown in the latter.
In Libya, an uprising
against Muammar Qadhafi produced a civil war in which the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization intervened to help oust the former dictator with no sense of who
should replace him. Predictably, the result has been constant fighting among various
warlords and sects for power.
Iran which for all the
venom heaped upon it by Israel and certain Western governments (such as
Canada), is relatively stable internally. Yet it continues to foment trouble by
sending weapons to Shia Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, and to Hamas in Gaza. It
also has relations with Shia militias inside Iraq. Its relations with Sunni
Saudi Arabia are extremely frosty.
Obviously, some of the
militant Islamic groups are targeting Western interests. And Iran’s government
has long been hostile to the United States, the “Great Satan.” But a great deal
of the strife in the Muslim world today is among religious groups, sects and
governments, mixed into a toxic brew by power politics, religious ideology and
historical enmities.
The West’s ability to
decisively influence these conflicts, each of which is unique, is more limited
than those anxious to intervene apparently understand.
Source:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/islams-clash-with-islam/article21138368/
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