In Egypt, President Mohammed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood supporters are still trying to quell the anger of the protestors of Tahrir Square. The crowds of protestors have been the biggest seen since former President Mubarak was washed out of power by the wave of the Arab Spring movement.
This movement, which began in Egypt in December of 2010, has spread all across the Arab world. As electoral democracy makes its impact felt on the Arab world for the first time in history, it is becoming clear that it is the overwhelmingly religious politicians that are going to chart the future course of the Arab world. I have hope for the flourishing democratic process, but also apprehensiveness in who the people are electing.
Last week over one hundred were injured and at least forty-three lives were taken in a chaotic Iraqi nation. The towns of Hilla, approximately sixty miles south of Badhdad, and Twareej, near the city of Karbala, are the most recent sites of suicide car bombings. Bombings and violence have been a way of life in Iraq. What is fueling the hatred between neighbors in Iraq and causing a sense of anxiety in the election of the new religious leaders in the Middle East?
The violence and unrest that makes itself known to us through our American newspapers, but that takes the lives of many innocent Muslim women and men in the Middle East, has deep roots. The Islamic religion had a schism in 632 A.D. immediately after the prophet Muhammad died without naming a successor as leader of the new Muslim believers. Some of these believers wanted the role of Caliph, or viceroy of God, to be passed down Muhammad’s bloodline, starting with his cousin Ali ibn Abi Talib.
But the majority of believers supported the Prophet’s friend Abu Bakr for the great position. This disagreement grew until the two sides met on the battlefield in 680 A.D., where Muhammad’s blood related second cousin was killed and then decapitated by the majority group of Muslims. The bloodline supporters later became known as the Shi’ites, and the dominant sect who first supported Abu Bakr became the Sunnis. The Sunni group has been the majority and power wielding group for most Islamic history up to today. Shi’ites continued to venerate the Imans, or the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, until the 9th century. It was then that al-Mahdi, the twelfth Iman, mystically disappeared. Mainstream Shi’ites today believe that al-Mahdi will emerge in the future to usher in a reign of justice.
Today about 90% of Muslims worldwide are Sunnis. Modern day Iraq, Iran, and Azerbaijan are the only nations with strong Shi’ite populations. Since that original schism in the Islamic religion, the Sunnis have held political power and the Shi’ites have been treated as an underclass. Sunnis used religious arguments to justify the oppression. Shi’ites, they said, were not genuine Muslims but heretics. Hundreds of years of oppression and violence between the groups has created other differences in their traditions. Certain Islamic names and prayers are common to Sunnis and Shi’ites. The Shi’ite mosques are usually decorated with portraits of Ali or other Imans, whereas portraits are seen as idolatry in a Sunni mosque. A few other prayer styles and language differences separate the two sects.
This separation in faith is the reason for a lot of the violence in the Middle East, specifically in Iraq. The wider Muslim world, however, tends to focus on the big picture. Shi’ites are now politically dominant in Iraq, and Iran is the leading Shi’ite power. So in most Arab capitals, the sectarian war between Sunnis and Shi’ites in Iraq is increasingly blamed on Iran trying to build another Shi’ite nation. Taken along with President Ahmadinejad’s nuclear ambitions, Iran’s sponsorship of the Shi’ite extremist groups is underneath much of the violence and conflict. Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda, and Hamas are all extremist groups today that have ties to this sectarian conflict. Hamas, the group that has historically called for the destruction of Israel, has recently been active in the bombings in Israel.
Amidst this sectarian war that still rages, Islamic countries like Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt are electing new leaders. Egypt’s government will be drafting a new constitution soon. For Islam, the current political movement could be likened to the aftermath of 1848 in Europe, when liberal democracy became an alternative to absolute monarchy. Only after that, once virtually every political movement was a liberal one, did it become important to distinguish between socialists and capitalists, libertarians and statists – the distinctions that have seemed essential ever since. The movement to liberal democracy seems natural. But in moving forward to a more liberal democratic future, the important question is whether the Islamic world can make amends with its past disagreements of religious leadership. I have hope.