How western lies about the 'Sunni-Shia divide' have set the region ablaze

Sunnis must fight Shia in the Middle East, and Shia must fight Sunnis, according to the current, dumbed-down western framing of the region. 

If you have been around for more than a few days, the rhetoric about never-ending Sunni-Shia war and mayhem is never far from the minds of western political leaders, think-tank inhabitants, Middle Eastern leaders allied with the West, media talking heads, poisoned social media users, and imperially appointed religious sermonisers. 

All are aiding and abetting the process of driving war, acting as merchants of death and destruction while claiming to work for peace. 

As developments in the British-designated Middle East heat up again, colonial and Orientalist practitioners, along with their handpicked post-colonial ruling elites, are jumping into the fray to add insult to multi-generational injury. 

As if Israel’s genocide in Gaza and open-ended mayhem against Arabs and Muslims throughout the 20th and into the 21st centuries were not enough, we have also been subjected to the colonial “sushi theory” of Middle Eastern politics, which aims to frame and explain everything that is wrong or dangerous in the region.

The colonially manufactured and stoked Sunni-Shia transhistorical conflict has been used to explain away Euro-American wars, Zionist violence, and foreign intervention in the region. The old/new divide-and-rule policy is on full display, with numerous participants and vast intelligence networks working day and night to keep the death flames burning. (Here, I must admit that I like sushi, as it is one of the healthiest meal choices - but not as a theory for the Arab and Muslim worlds.) 

One can both be committed to their own understanding of Islamic history and existing cleavages - whether theological, textual, political, national or ethnic - while resisting the colonially stoked strategy of weaponising and instrumentalising such divisions to further western domination of the region and its peoples. 

Vast oil wealth

Regional conflict exists today primarily due to the vast oil and natural gas resources across the Middle East, which are crucial for the modern global economy. Before the discovery of Middle Eastern oil in 1908 in Iran, the world’s primary focus was on trade routes to Asia, raw materials, and capturing markets for the surplus of industrial production from factories across Europe and North America. 

The rush for natural resources and markets in the 19th century witnessed the expansion of British, French, Dutch, German, Italian and Belgian military, economic and epistemic footprints, while utilising divide-and-rule strategies and the deployment of massive violence and genocide to achieve colonial goals. 

The colonially produced 'sushi theory' of Middle Eastern politics, which professes to explain all the causes of conflict, is in fact the precise recipe for never-ending wars

Let’s be clear: divisions existed beforehand, but colonialism and European greed created a revolving-door situation, leading to the degradation of societies’ ability to resist, while allowing colonial powers to capture more and more natural resources and markets at fire-sale prices. 

Religion was deployed as an imperial instrument to motivate and stimulate interventionist policies, and to expand colonial economic and political footprints around the globe.

Anyone who looks at the Global South without understanding colonial divide-and-rule policies, and the weaponisation of religious, cultural, linguistic and ethnic differences to maximise control and domination, misses the crucial factors that fomented and maintained conflicts over a long period. 

Are European and American forces in the Middle East intended to protect Sunnis from Shia, or vice versa? Is the massive build-up of military bases and intelligence penetration across the region part of a broader plan to foster peace, love and tranquility between Sunni and Shia communities? 

If you happen to believe this, then you must have missed the region’s long history, and the genesis of current conflicts.

Dubious claims

The western colonial project incubated the Zionist project and also helped to form the modern nation-states in the Arab region. Post-colonialism has made it possible to remove colonial troops while keeping the colonial epistemic system in place, whether in economics, education, or social and religious structures. 

The region named the Middle East by the British was shaped, and continues to exist, within the frameworks set out in the 19th century and cemented by the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the subsequent Paris Peace Conference at the end of the First World War.  

The British and the French worked in the 19th and 20th centuries to stoke Sunni and Shia divisions to further their colonial programmes in the Ottoman and Qajar (Persian) regions. The instrumentalisation and stoking of Christian-Muslim tensions in the area, amid dubious claims of “protecting” Christian populations in the East, was a fundamental part of a colonial endeavour vested in natural resources, trade routes and racist claims of a civilisational project.  

Every place you look around the Global South, colonial powers have used the divide-and-rule strategy to stir up old wounds, fomenting religious, ethnic, racial and cultural conflicts that were then used to push for invasions and interventions, pouring more fuel on the fire. 

While such differences exist - indeed, they are natural among diverse human groupings - it is important to understand how they were utilised in the colonial period, and are currently deployed to further the hegemonic domination and expansion of the West’s modern colonial footprint across the region.

Colonial powers stirred up the preexisting Sunni-Shia divide. They stoked tensions, amplified differences, sponsored “thinkers” and “think tanks”, wrote and published biased articles, funded media outlets, and drove daggers into households, mosques and community gatherings. 

Notably, the region we call the Middle East has the largest oil and natural gas reserves in the world. Western greed is a driving force in this equation. For US and European corporate and financial elites, this resource is too valuable to be kept in the hands of the “subhuman populations” who inhabit this region. The same applies to Venezuela, and more broadly to Latin American and African resources.

Imperial intervention

The foolish, colonially produced “sushi theory” of Middle Eastern politics, which professes to explain all the causes of conflict, is in fact the precise recipe for never-ending wars that necessitate continued western imperial intervention, massive military sales, support for Zionism, propping up of post-colonial monarchies, and broad-based hegemonic control.

Furthermore, the Sunni-Shia framing of conflicts reproduces the old Orientalist tropes about “irrational” cultural and religious divisions that call for western “civilisational” rehabilitation projects across the region. This paradigm ushers in massive interventionist programmes that seek to transform Arab and Muslim societies across the region into cuddly post-colonial subjects - ones who will accept domination, humiliation, constant violence, “civilisational reforms”, and pillaging of resources in exchange for being welcomed into the emptiness of western cultural production and norms.  

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Surrender to global market forces, and join the pleasure tours in the Red Sea, Halloween festivals en route to Mecca, hedonistic escapes in the Gulf, and decadent resorts in Egypt’s Taba.  

Colonial advisers on the scene will help to build the tallest, empty vanity buildings in the world; host the most outrageous western raves; offer the biggest prizes for the most inconsequential sports races to nowhere; and celebrate being important, to help alleviate your self-produced inferiority complex. 

The West will provide colonial perfumes to make your rot smell like roses, as you sell your society to the western corporate machine, privatise national resources, open your borders to Israeli products and investment, and welcome every US and western Islamophobic diplomat or media personality.

This is the pitch: what is keeping you from arriving on the world stage are the “bad” Sunnis and Shia in your neighbourhood, who seem not to understand the value of letting go of their society’s centre of ethical and moral meaning. Sell your soul to colonialism, and let go of your moral and ethical inhibitions. The Abraham Accords, Camp David Accords, Wadi Araba Treaty and a host of other agreements have brought “prosperity” and “inclusion” to circles of upward influence and mobility.

Religious 'wisdom'

Now, let me turn to the imperially appointed religious figures who peddle the present colonial scheme, packaged as the foundation of religious and spiritual meaning for unsuspecting people to consume.

The “religious” cadre comes out in strength to sell “sushi theory” across the Arab and Muslim world, with ready-made fatwas and explanations to ignite the disharmony fuse and cast doubt on de-colonial possibilities. The term “peace” is used in these imperially constructed religious circles to mean normalisation with Israel, alongside the justification of hegemonic domination and western military bases across the region.

The imperial religious cadre defends the indefensible, while instructing all to obey the ruler, because he knows what’s best.  

In this context, Israel becomes a strategic ally, and western power in the region is a safety net. Sunni Palestinians are troublemakers disrupting the colonial “peace”, and Shia expansionism is a threat to the region’s survival. The US, Israel, Nato, monarchs, dictators, intelligence services and “private contractors” - the modern mercenaries - are needed to save you from each other. 

US, Israel, monarchs, dictators, intelligence services and 'private contractors' - modern mercenaries - are needed to save you from each other

Otherwise, the story goes, the Sunni or Shia monster hiding under your beds and prayer rugs will come out to kill you. To combat this, you need Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Zionism, western military bases, a corporate takeover of your economy, and a PR firm to shape your curriculum to produce a compliant population - one that consumes and indulges, but never dares to ask a question or raise any opposition.

This imperial religion, and the imperially nurtured religious elites who peddle colonial discourses, are the real harbingers of death. They act as the religious handmaiden to empire, while blessing the death machines that mow down their flocks in the hundreds of thousands, or even millions.

These professional imperial religious wizards readily deploy texts, mine sources for pacification nuggets, and entertain us with orchestrated gatherings to impart silencing “wisdom” on the one hand, and messages of fire and brimstone on the other to critics of the present colonial project.

This cuddly bunch is all too ready to offer religious justifications for kings, presidents and empire, rationalising the mass killing of anyone who dares to challenge this paradigm and speak truth to power.  

We can still maintain an understanding of Sunni-Shia history and the complex narratives that are shared and debated, while refusing the ongoing colonial attempts to weaponise this issue to dominate the region and devour the best and brightest among us, disrupting real change. Any discourse that pushes and weaponises these divisions, only serves the colonial project and its multifaceted attempts to reconquer the region.

Finally, we must dispense with the idea that the colonial enemy of my enemy is my friend. This must be replaced with the historically verifiable understanding across the Global South that the colonial enemy of my enemy, after a divide-and-rule strategy, has devoured us both. 

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.