Do Factors Other Than Islam Explain the Violence in the Middle East?

Does the West have an Islamophobic obsession with Islam? A still relevant five-year old article asserts this:”Obsession with Islam blinds West to real problems,” by Omer Taspinar, Asia Times, March 13, 2019:

Autocracy, radicalism and sectarianism in the Middle East are mostly to do with plain old politics and institutional failure. So if the West really wants to understand the region, a new political slogan might help focus the mind: It’s nationalism and failed governance, stupid. It’s not Islam.

Others — you and I, for example — may disagree, seeing the role of Islam in wars all over the Middle East. What has Lebanon been since the 1970s but a place of conflict between Maronites, Sunnis, and Shi’a? The Lebanese Civil War was not about nationalism or “failed government.” It was a war of Muslims against Christians, attacked only because they were Christians. The government of Lebanon did not fail, but had been one of the most stable, and least despotic, in the Middle East. What was the conflict in Yemen, if not one of Shi’a against Sunnis, each side backed by a powerful foreign power, Iran against Saudi Arabia? If the Houthis had been Sunnis, would the Saudis have intervened? The Saudis do not hate the Iranian Shi’a because of recent Iranian designs on the Middle East, as Taspinar suggests; they have been taught to hate the Shi’a since the days of Abd al-Wahhab. Their textbooks are full of anti-Shia rhetoric; some texts suggest that the Shia are worse Infidels “even than the Jews and the Christians.” The Saudis persecute their own Shi’a, too, who live in the oil-bearing Al-Hasa province. That persecution has nothing to do with either “nationalism” or “failed governance.” Saudi Arabia may have brutal rulers, but its ruthless regime is not tottering; it is hardly an example of “failed governance.”

What kind of “nationalism” is being supported or opposed in Yemen, in Syria, in Iraq, in Lebanon? The outcome of wars over religion, like all wars, will include non-religious effects. There are the Victor and the Vanquished. But that does not mean that religion was not the original cause of the conflict. If the Shi’a defeat the Sunnis in Iraq, or vice versa, that will increase the economic wellbeing of the victor, but that is different from claiming that the conflict had nothing to do with Islam, and was all about economics. In Syria, even if the Alawites were not corrupt, they would still be Alawites, that is, Shi’a, and the majority Sunnis would still rebel against Shi’a masters. In Bahrain, the majority Shi’a began street demonstrations in 2011 against the Ruler of Bahrain, a Sunni, not over misrule but because of resentment against Sunni dominance. One of the weapons the Shi’a employed in Bahrain was to boycott Sunni-owned businesses. And the sectarian divide has only widened in the small kingdom; even many Sunni-Shi’a marriages (amusingly, called “sushi” in Bahrain) have ended because of the conflict.

Beyond the Arab world, the Sunni-Shi’a conflict has not stopped. In Afghanistan, the Sunni Taliban were in the process of trying to wipe out the Shi’a Hazara in 2001 when the American invasion prevented them from continuing. Now Islamic State forces in Afghanistan have renewed attacks on the Hazara. Does Taspinar think there is any reason driving the attacks on the Hazara other than sectarian hatred? Neither the Taliban nor the Islamic State is moved by “nationalism” or “socioeconomic” factors, as Taspinar appears to believe. And if Iran were to send forces to Afghanistan to help the Hazara, it would be motivated only by a desire to rescue its co-religionists.

Similarly, in Pakistan there is a Sunni terror group, Sipah-e-Sahaba, that exists solely to attack Shi’a mosques and, especially, Shi’a professionals. There is no ulterior motive; they are not trying to benefit economically — what could they gain by blowing up a Shi’a mosque or madrasa, or killing a dozen Shi’a doctors? — but have simply have been taught to hate, and therefore to murder, the Shi’a.

Omar Taspinar would like you to believe that Islam is given far too much attention, and we ought to look at other factors that he says explain the violence in the Middle East. Anything but Islam. So let us end with one last question: what does Omar Taspinar think explains the longest-running violence in the Middle East, that series of Arab wars against Israel? Doesn’t he recognize that those wars are part of a classic jihad, fought against a non-Muslim enemy — the much-despised Jews — that is holding onto land that Muslims once possessed and that, therefore, must be yielded back to them? Can he think of any reason for these wars waged against Israel other than Islam? No, I didn’t think so.