Shia–Sunni relations
[3] Recent years have witnessed the Iran–Saudi Arabia proxy conflict, as well as sectarian violence from Pakistan to Yemen, which became a major element of friction throughout the Middle East and South Asia.
Shia make up the majority of the citizen population in Iran, Iraq, Bahrain and Azerbaijan, as well as being a minority in Pakistan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen, Nigeria, Afghanistan, India, Chad, Turkey, and Kuwait.
[28] Shiism and Sufism are said to share a number of hallmarks: Belief in an inner meaning to the Quran, special status for some mortals (saints for Sufi, Imams for Shia), as well as veneration of Ali and Muhammad's family.
Many distinctions can be made between Sunnis and Shiaīs through observation alone: When prostrating during Salah, Shia place their forehead onto a piece of naturally-occurring material—most often a clay tablet (mohr) or soil (turbah)—instead of directly onto a prayer rug.
Even so, by the 13th to 14th century, Sunni and Shiite practices remained highly intertwined, and figures today commonly associated with Shia Islam, such as Ali and Jafar al-Sadiq, played an almost universal role for Muslim believers to understand the unseen (Al-Ghaib).
The first Abbasid caliph, As-Saffah, recruited Shia support in his campaign against the Umayyads by emphasising his blood relationship to Muhammad's household through descent from his uncle, 'Abbas ibn 'Abd al-Muttalib.
[59] Muhammad Khudabandah, the famous builder of Soltaniyeh, was among the first of the Mongols to convert to Shiaism, and his descendants ruled for many years in Persia and were instrumental in spreading Shī'ī thought.
[43] According to English explorer Richard Francis Burton, a non-Muslim who journeyed to Mecca in disguise in 1853, when a Shi'ite performs hajj, "that man is happy who gets over it without a beating, [for] in no part of Al-Hijaz are they for a moment safe from abuse and blows.
[59] On 21 April 1802, about 12,000 Wahhabi Sunnis under the command of Abdul-Aziz bin Muhammad, the second ruler of the First Saudi State attacked and sacked Karbala, killed between 2,000 and 5,000 inhabitants and plundered the tomb of Husayn ibn Ali, grandson of Muhammad and son of Ali ibn Abi Talib,[68]: 74 and destroyed its dome, seizing a large quantity of spoils, including gold, Persian carpets, money, pearls, and guns that had accumulated in the tomb, most of them donations.
[77] At least one scholar sees the period from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire through the decline of Arab nationalism as a time of relative unity and harmony between traditionalist Sunni and Shia Muslims.
His efforts, including connecting with scholars such as Mahmud Shaltut and Seyyed Hossein Borujerdi, led to the founding of Dar-al-Taghrib (community for reforming unity between Sunni and Shia Muslims).
[90] Fundamentalist Sunni clerics popularized slurs against Shia such as "Safawis" (from the Safavid Empire, thus implying their being Iranian agents), or even worse rafidha (rejecters of the faith), and majus (Zoroastrian or crypto Persian).
[98] Many in the Muslim world explain the bloodshed as the work of conspiracies by outside forces—"the forces of hegemony and Zionism which aim to weaken [Arabs]" (Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Yusuf al-Qaradawi),[95] unspecified "enemies" (Iran president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad),[99] or "oppressive pressure by the imperialist front."
Nafeez Ahmed cites a 2008 RAND Corporation study for the American military which recommended "divide and rule" as a possible strategy whereby the US takes "the side of the conservative Sunni regimes ... working with them against all Shiite empowerment movements in the Muslim world".
[102] Christopher Davidson argues that the crisis in Yemen is being "egged on" by the US, and could be part of a wider covert strategy to "spur fragmentation in Iran allies and allow Israel to be surrounded by weak states".
The new sectarianism takes a subtler form: Shi'ites profess their unity of purpose with Sunnis, but then declare that a major expression of Sunnism (in this case, Saudi Wahhabism) is a deviation from ecumenical Islam.
Anger against the United States was also fueled by the humiliating disbandment of the Iraqi army and the de-Baathification law, which was first introduced as a provision and then turned into a permanent article of the constitution.
[98]Malise Ruthven writes that the post invasion de-Ba'athification by the US occupiers deprived Iraq of "the officer class and administrative cadres that had ruled under Saddam Hussein, leaving the field to sectarian-based militias".
[145][146][147] According to the British television Channel 4, from 2005 through early 2006, commandos of the Ministry of the Interior which is controlled by the Badr Organization, and ...who are almost exclusively Shia Muslims—have been implicated in rounding up and killing thousands of ordinary Sunni civilians.
[173] During the 20th century, an Islamic uprising in Syria occurred with sectarian religious overtones between the Alawite-dominated Assad government and the Islamist Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, culminating with the 1982 Hama massacre.
[176] Bulgaria's ex-Ambassador Dimitar Mihaylov further claims that the current post-Arab Spring situation (encompassing ISIS, the Syrian civil war, Yemen, Iraq and others) represents a "qualitatively new" development in the history of Shi'a-Sunni dynamics.
"[184]And Amnesty International adds: Members of the Shi'a Muslim community (estimated at between 7 and 10 per cent of Saudi Arabia's population of about 19 million) suffer systematic political, social, cultural as well as religious discrimination.
[188] Meanwhile, broadcasts from Iran in the name of the Islamic Revolutionary Organization attacked the monarchy, telling listeners, "Kings despoil a country when they enter it and make the noblest of its people its meanest ...
To the fury of Shia Muslims, the Wahhabi Sunnis demolished domes in the cemetery of Al-Baqi, near the Medina, "the reputed resting place of the Prophet Muhammad's daughter Fatima and four of the Twelve Imams".
"[221] Bahrain has many disaffected unemployed youths and many have protested Sheikh Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa's efforts to create a parliament as merely a "cooptation of the effendis", i.e. traditional elders and notables.
Some see a precursor of Pakistani Shia–Sunni strife in the April 1979 execution of deposed President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto on questionable charges by Islamic fundamentalist General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq.
The Shia campaign has clashed with Saudi Arabian, which also funds religious centers, school, and trains students and clerics, but as part of an effort to spread its competing Wahabbi interpretation of Islam.
[288] In the few years of its success, it was responsible for human rights abuses and war crimes (United Nations), and ethnic cleansing on a "historic scale" (Amnesty International), particularly of Shia Muslims.
[289] In June 2014, after ISIS had "seized vast territories" in western and northern Iraq, there were "frequent accounts of fighters' capturing groups of people and releasing the Sunnis while the Shiites are singled out for execution", according to the New York Times.
They displayed mutual warmth with hugs and smiles for cameras and promised "a thaw in relations between the two regional powers but stopped short of agreeing on any concrete plans to tackle the escalating sectarian and political crises throughout the Middle East.
