The Rise of Shia Islam - and Iran

A Conversation with Vali Nasr

July 24, 2006

The recent violence in Lebanon and Israel, together with the sectarian strife in Iraq and escalating tensions around Iran's nuclear ambitions, has drawn urgent attention to the resurgence and politicization of Shia Islam in the Middle East. The Pew Forum invited Vali Nasr, author of a new book, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape The Future, to address a small group of academics, policy makers and journalists on the subject. Following are edited excerpts from his remarks. Read the full transcript.

Speaker: Vali Nasr, Adjunct Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies, the Council on Foreign Relations, Associate Chair of Research, Department of National Security Affairs, Naval Postgraduate School

---

A New Islamic Fault Line in the Middle East

The old issues of Islam and its role in public life have not gone away; we've seen them manifested more forcefully than ever in the elections in Egypt and Palestine and other parts of the world. But in the aftermath of the Iraq War, we've also seen a sectarian dimension -- a different fault line, a different chasm in politics and religion in the Middle East, which has its own repercussions. The events in Lebanon have pointed out the importance of the sectarian dimension, particularly in the way Saudi Arabia and the Arab League reacted. They didn't do so in the expected way of declaring Arab solidarity in the face of Israel. They lamented first Hezbollah's misbehavior, but then they went further to characterize this as a Shiite push for domination in the region and a Hezbollah-Iranian axis. So that contradicts a lot of people who argue that it's the West who raises the specter of sectarianism and that somehow Muslims don't see themselves as Shiites and Sunni. Many actors in the region are trying to understand how to calibrate this factor into policymaking.

Impact of the U.S. Invasion on Muslim Divisions in the Region

There is no doubt the Iraq war has had a very profound impact on the region. Whether it was right or wrong, whether it had been prosecuted differently, the impact of it was to shift the balance of power from one community in Iraq to another community. And that, in my opinion, was inevitable because Iraq, particularly after 1991, was much more organized along ethnic lines, as far as the Kurds were concerned, and sectarian lines, as far as the Shias were concerned.

So any kind of a change in that regime would have inevitably meant a transfer of power. The question is, does the transfer of power in any circumstance happen necessarily violently or could it happen in a different manner? That's an important question because if there's going to be any kind of change in the region in the coming years, this question's going to be revisited. It's going to be revisited in Lebanon, in Bahrain, in Saudi Arabia. Even now, the question we also ask is: what comes after the bombing? What comes after Hezbollah is shattered as a political military organization?

The fact of the matter remains that Shias are about 45 percent and possibly more of the population of Lebanon and the current political structure of the country does not reflect that numerical reality. If anything, this current crisis is going to make the sectarian division between Shias and the rest in Lebanon a political issue that will have to be sorted out with Hezbollah or whatever succeeds Hezbollah as the political voice of the Shias.

The symbolic effect of Iraq is tremendous in the Arab world. This is the very first Shia Arab country; it hasn't existed before in modern times. In many ways, the anger at the United States is not just because they invaded an Arab country or occupied an Arab country, but because the United States has facilitated the change in a balance of power that is centuries-long in that region.

Shiites Realize the Power of the Vote

The numbers tell the story. The Shiites are about 10 to 15 percent of the Muslim population worldwide, which makes them about 130 million to 190 million people, depending on what kind of statistics you look at. You don't find any in Indonesia or Nigeria or Senegal, they're all bang in the middle of the Middle East, and between Lebanon and Pakistan -- in that belt -- there are as many Shiites as there are Sunnis. And around the Persian Gulf, the overwhelming majority is Shiites. Shiites always like to point out that wherever there is oil, they're sitting on top of it, including in Saudi Arabia. But outside of Iran, they have always been treated like a minority, regardless of whether they were a numerical minority or not.

Now, this balance of power has changed. For the Sunnis, Iraq created, at least initially, winners and losers, in the conception of the region. The Shiites, whether or not they welcomed the U.S., whether or not they wanted the war, benefited from this. Even Hezbollah was initially very involved in the affairs of Iraq. Al-Manar, its television station, used to constantly repeat Ayatollah Sistani's "one man, one vote" mantra. They clearly had an eye on what "one man, one vote" could mean for Shias in Lebanon, as far as the distribution of power was concerned.

What is this Shia revival? Very basically, it is that this half of the population in the Middle East has now developed an expectation of better things to come. Iraq has shown that it is possible for Shiites to have power. And the understanding of the Shiites in Iraq was that it's not so much the U.S. that facilitated this as the process of voting.

Sistani put his emphasis on voting. His main intervention in politics was not to decide who ruled but [to advance] the idea that Shiites should band together under one umbrella. Who will actually get the pie, that can be settled afterwards, but they ought to band together under this united Iraqi alliance in order for the Shiites to win the prize of Iraq.

This model has been extremely influential. In Saudi Arabia's municipal elections last year, the main Saudi Shia leader, Sheikh Hassan al-Safar, repeatedly quoted Sistani's sermons in telling Shiites they should vote. It was no surprise that in the Shi'ite areas of Saudi Arabia, voter turnout was twice as much as in the Sunni areas. The result in Saudi Arabia is telling: It's the first time that Shiites are sitting in any position of authority on municipal councils. So I would say the first aspect of this Shia revival is an expectation of transfer of power through voting or through participation or through accepting political reform.

The second aspect of this revival is that the opening of the borders of Iraq has created networks of relationships among people. Pilgrims, migrants, investors and money have begun going back and forth all the way from Lebanon to the Gulf to Iran. We were too hung up, in my opinion, on this division between Arabs and Iranians.

And Hezbollah, which for some time has been arguing that it wants to define what Lebaneseness is – they took this concept from the Christians – does not see Lebaneseness as necessarily Arabness. It is Arab, but it also has non-Arab components in it, and that dynamic is clearly at play; namely, that the cultural relationships among the Shia communities is strengthening, rather than weakening. The Arab-Iranian tie is not as strong. And partly, it is the ferocity of the Sunni resistance to Shia empowerment that pushes them together.

I would say if the U.S. wants to wean Iraqi Shiites away from Iran, the way is not to play footsie with the Sunnis in Baghdad. I think that policy not only is not working, but it has actually been counterproductive in terms of our influence among the Shiites in Iraq.

Iran's Rising Power

Finally, the other element in this Shia revival is the rise of Iran. Iran has a far larger economy than either that of Saudi Arabia or Egypt. One might say it was inevitable that Iran was going to assert itself.

The Iraq war had two dynamics in it that accelerated this process. One is that it removed the Sunni bulwarks around Iran. This began, really, with the Afghan war. For reasons that had nothing to do with Iran, the U.S. took the Taliban out. Now, the Taliban-Pakistan-Saudi axis was the principal Sunni wall on Iran's east. On Iran's west, the Iraq war removed the Saddam regime and, in fact, made southern Iraq far more permissible to Iranian influence. Iran all of a sudden found itself in a Prussian moment. Its zone of influence became very obvious: the Persian/Shia zone in Central Asia and north-western Afghanistan, and the Shia zone of influence across the Persian Gulf and southern Iraq.

Iranian assertiveness feeds on the Shia revival because in some ways Iran believes a Shia regime in Iraq and Shia power in the region automatically makes the region less hostile to Iran, even forgetting about ruling over them. Generally, Iran believes that Arab nationalism is racist, chauvinistically anti-Iranian, that Ba'athism was particularly anti-Iranian; and that a greater Shia voice in the region makes it more "Iranian friendly." That can have multiple impacts – cultural, economic, all the way to military, foreign policy and the like.

Iran's profile as a rogue state obviously increased after [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad became president and began to attack Israel and question the Holocaust and the like. Clearly Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan see playing this game of emphasizing the Iranian-Shia relationship as a way of actively engaging the U.S. in the containment of Iran and changing the balance of relations in Iraq among the U.S., the Shia-led government and the insurgents.

Now, whether this is true or not, it is an operative assumption in Iran that Iran has a problem because it's at loggerheads with the U.S. over the nuclear issue. That has a logic of its own, but at the same time, Iran's policies are leading to an opening for its traditional rivals in the region to try to cobble together what they would call "an American-Sunni alliance" to contain the Shia.

Focus on Israel

Iranian strategy has been to focus on the Arab-Israeli issue, and that's been Hezbollah's strategy as well. This has always been the Shia reaction to sectarianism. Khomeini's strategy was to divert attention from the sectarian issue to the Arab-Israeli issue. It was Hezbollah's strategy throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

Even before Ahmadinejad began to pick up the cause of attacking Israel, already you were hearing this kind of argument in Tehran. Ahmadinejad's first volleys of attack against Israel made him very popular, with pictures of him being sold in Damascus and Amman – and the joke in Iran is that he's more popular in Cairo than he is in Tehran.

So there is a convergence of interests in trying to focus on Israel. The benefit lies in saying the following; that it is the Shiites who are willing to take on Israel when the traditional Sunni governments have basically thrown in the towel, number one. Number two is that the Shiites are going to redefine the Arab-Israeli issue to back before Oslo: You don't accept Israel's right to exist, you don't accept it as a country, and forget about a political process, you're back to conflict. That's exactly Ahmadinejad's tactic; that everything that was agreed and settled in the past 20 years is off the table. Again, it's the Shiites who are doing this, not the Sunni government.

Read the full transcript.