By PHK
I put Vali Nasr's The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future (Henry Holt: 2006) at the top of my "to read" stack of books last month, and I'm glad I did. Much has been published about Islam in the English language press since 9/11, but most of the books and articles focus on the Sunnis and even the books that discuss the Shias tend to give this minority Islamic sect which represents about 15 percent of the Muslim world, its sub-sects and its relations to the Sunnis, short shrift. Nasr's The Shia Revival goes a long way to fill the void.
This book is particularly relevant for Americans because of the changes unfurling in the Middle East unleashed, in part, by our invasion and continued occupation of Iraq compounded by the Bush administration's less than well thought out intent to 'democratize' the region from which some officials, at least now, seem to be having second thoughts.
The Shia Revival is written for the general public - meaning it is not bogged down in generally useless political science jargon and convoluted sentences. Underneath, however, Nasr relies on the analytical tools of politics and political sociology to make his case. It is, for these and other reasons, a book I would not hesitate to assign as required reading for an upper division college level course in Islam and Politics.
Shia: too often an economic and social underclass
Any book represents the author's perspective and Nasr's The Shia Revival is no exception. Nasr, an Iran-American political scientist born in 1960 in Tehran, clearly paints the Shiites sympathetically. He describes many of them - with the exception of those in Iran - as too often an economic and social underclass governed by minority Sunnis* who view their coreligionists as heretical, beneath them and treat them as such. He argues and demonstrates with concrete examples how militant Sunni groups including and especially Al Qaeda and the Wahhabis are not only the most abusive of their Shia brethren but also how a Salafi brand of militant Islam brandished against the US is a renegade piece of Sunni Islam, not Shiite, and it is the Sunnis who support it and, therefore, who will need to bring it under control.
True, the Sunni-Shia split goes back to the 7th century erupting shortly after Mohammad's death. Nasr's description of what happened, the major differences between the two sects and the relevance for today is the most coherent and readable that I've found. This descriptive history, however, is foremost a scene setter for the most important part of his analysis that follows.
I think that at least one of Nasr's major - if unstated - goals was, and is, to provide US policy makers (those willing to listen) with a far greater comprehension of Iran and Iranian intentions in the Middle East than is presented in either the US media or by the so-called experts whose advice is still too often heeded by the current US administration.
Debunking the neocons
Perhaps most importantly, this book once and for all debunks the shaky rationale the neocons and their allies use in their push to "bomb Iran now" by demonstrating that:
1) Iran is more democratic and pluralistic (albeit imperfectly so) than almost all Muslim majority countries save Turkey, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Iraq;
2) the opening of Shia religious sites in Iraq to Iranian pilgrims helps to pluralize further Iranian society as does lively Iranian Internet usage (Nasr tell us that Persian is the third most popular language on the Internet and that there are now about 80,000 Iranian blogs);
3) democratic political ideas of Ayatollah Sistani - reflective of the more traditional Shia separation of mosque and state than those of the "theocratic" Ayatollah Komenei and his followers - are increasingly influential in the Shia world in good part because democratic secularism provides political equality;
4) Iran's nuclear ambitions have as much to do with the threats it sees from the world of Sunni extremism as anything else;
5) Iran is not the Iraqi government's "puppet master" despite charges to the contrary; and
6) an American military attack on Iran would primarily serve to destabilize an already unstable region further.
Nasr expects the center of Middle Eastern political gravity to move eastward from Egypt and the Levant to the Shiite-majority Iran, Iraq and the oil fields of the Persian Gulf presumably because of the world's increasing demand for oil. He further points out that the conflicts in Islamic sectarianism, a legacy the Iraq war has animated, are "due to the lopsided distribution of resources and power that have benefited one sect at the cost of the other."
Preparing for unintended consequences in a cloudy future
He also argues, however, that the future remains cloudy - whether Iraq will even remain as a single state is an unanswered question - but there is one certainty: the US will be unable to determine the direction of the Islamic sectarian conflict it has helped revive.
Instead, Nasr points out, the US government will need to prepare for the war's unintended consequences that will include a second explosion of Islamic extremism coming from the insurgency. Even to begin to prepare for the unpredictable, Nasr warns, Americans need to learn far more about the Shia than we know now. Reading Nasr's book is an excellent place to begin.
*Note: David Fromkin's 567 page opus, A Peace to End All Peace, Henry Holt, 1989 describes this historical period in detail. A Peace to End All Peace is based substantially on declassified British Foreign Office records. In this historical analysis, the post World War I creators of the original Iraq look as competent as the Richard Perles, Paul Wolfowitzs, Douglas Wurmsers and others who got us into the Iraq mess 80 years later.