On the Sunni Side of the Street

My dinner companion, a successful Sunni businessman, says he is not so sure that Sunnis really are the minority in Iraq, given that the current numbers are estimates based on a 50-year-old census. Here in Lebanon there hasn’t been an official count since 1932, though researchers across the political spectrum generally concur that the Shia are the largest sect in this tiny country of almost 4 million. “No,” says my friend. “We are the majority.”

Unfortunately, his vexed calculations are representative of a large current in the region, and the problem goes far beyond suspect arithmetic. As the sun sets on the Sunni Arabs’ de facto Middle East empire, the sectarian fault lines that have been obscured by Arab nationalist politics are starting to widen, and everyone, Sunnis and non-Sunnis alike, is getting nervous. Iraq is merely the first tremor, and the Sunni-Shia divide there is only one of many. To name just a couple that have been in the news in the last month:In Egypt, Sunnis have turned on their Copt countrymen for a perceived slight to Islam, and in Syria the ruling Alawite sect may be girding itself for a fight to the death with that country’s Sunni majority.

Many here believe that the Bush administration planned from the very beginning of the Iraq war to redraw the map of the Middle East in this way, a plate shift that would set Arabs at each others’ throats and thus benefit Israel above all. While it’s indeed true that many Israeli analysts have long understood the region to be a boiling cauldron of confessional, ethnic, and national rivalries, the U.S. inability to stem sectarian violence in Iraq suggests that the White House scarcely fathomed the depths of this divide, never mind intended to manipulate it. Conversely, if, as other critics of the Bush administration contend, the White House should have understood all of this in detail beforehand, it seems only fair to point out that even many in the region were taken in by decades of Arab nationalist rhetoric.

A few weeks ago, a friend in Cairo related how his mother was watching one of the new Iraqi satellite stations and heard for the first time the story of the deaths of Hussein and Hassan, the grandsons of the prophet Muhammad. “She started sobbing,” my friend said, “and when my sister the Islamist saw her crying, she told her to stop it, because it’s a Shiite story and their deaths were good for the Sunnis.”

With the threat of communal violence around every corner, even al Qaeda is apparently trying to rein in one of its own. In a letter from this past July that U.S. intelligence has attributed to al Qaeda’s number two man, Ayman al-Zawahiri cautions Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al Qaeda’s man in Iraq, that “many of your Muslim admirers amongst the common folk are wondering about your attacks on the Shia.” You and I may know that Shiites are heretics, Zawahiri confides, but many ordinary Muslims do not have a very clear idea about the doctrinal distinctions between Sunni and Shia and don’t understand why you are killing those who appear to be your brothers. In short, me against my brother, but me and my brother against the outsider.

We are used to hearing about the struggle between extremists and moderates for the soul of Islam, and the role of modernity in Muslim societies–a battle in which we may have a stake but no real role to play. But what we’re seeing in Iraq and elsewhere is also a very old political conflict–with theological foundations, to be sure–between Sunni Arabs and virtually all other comers. Islamism and Arab nationalism are only the latest renditions of a narrative that holds Sunni Arabs at the center of the universe. In a sense, then, Westerners may share some common ground with the Shiites, the Copts, and the Alawites, among other non-Sunni groups in the Middle East. Perhaps the 9/11 attacks came not because of what we do and who we are. Another possibility is that Americans were killed because of who we are not–Sunni Arabs.

Most of the early ideologues of Arab nationalism were Christian, which suggests that they saw Arab unity as an idea that might enable them to live peacefully, perhaps even as equals, with their Sunni neighbors, by creating a group premised on language, not religion or tribe. However, it was not long before Arab nationalism’s essential features became obvious: What linked all the Arabs was the language of the Holy Koran, and the greatest hero of the Arab nation was the prophet of Islam. The region’s minorities may have hoped Arab nationalism would disguise their differences with the majority population, but in the end they merely helped to manufacture another heroic Sunni narrative.

In effect, promoting democracy in the Middle East aims to replace that story with another one. If Arab nationalism aimed to obscure separate identities in order to exalt the group, democracy holds that all people are equal regardless of religion, sect, clan, race, or sex. Democracy means to enshrine the individual as society’s most meaningful political unit–which is almost unimaginably radical in a region where group solidarity is a matter of life and death.

We probably shouldn’t misinterpret the significance of Iraq’s constitutional referendum, or pretend that the essential arithmetic of the Middle East has changed overnight. No doubt many in the Middle East are going to find it hard to sympathize with a Sunni community that believes God and history have ordained it to rule over all others. But we should remember that the Sunnis are, at least in Iraq, a minority, and they have very good reasons to be terrified. Everyone assumes Shiites and Kurds have reaped all the gains from the downfall of Saddam. But if democracy were to take root, it might end up also protecting the minority Sunnis, even as it turns their worldview on its head.

Lee Smith is writing a book on Arab culture.