Westerners believed that the centuries-old struggle between Christianity and Islam ended with their victory at the end of the First World War. Events since the tragedy of 9/11 have now revived in a new form this ancient conflict which was thought to have been settled. In a somewhat similar fashion, Sunni Muslims, the majority in the Muslim world, long believed that the struggle between them and the Shia minority in Islam had been decided in their favour during the first half of the seventeenth century. However, since 1979, and even more so since 2001, Muslims have had to face the fact that the old clash between Sunnis and Shias may be reviving in a new and threatening fashion.
When the Safavid dynasty began to impose Shia Islam on the inhabitants of Iran at the start of the sixteenth century, they were creating the most powerful Shia state since the collapse of the Fatimid empire three hundred years earlier. The Ottoman Turkish sultans, believing themselves to be the leaders of orthodox Islam, decided to crush their new heretic neighbours, but it proved to be a long and difficult struggle.
The Ottoman-Safavid wars lasted from 1514 to 1639 and the area which is now Iraq was an important battleground, where the many local Shias preferred Iranian rule to that of the Sunni Ottoman sultans. Suleiman the Magnificent captured Baghdad from the Iranians in 1534, but the latter retook the city early in the seventeenth century. Sultan Murad IV recovered Baghdad in 1638 and forced the Safavid ruler to make peace in the following year. This treaty marked the end of the long Ottoman-Safavid wars and the Sunni Ottomans had finally gained the upper hand over their Shia opponents. The frontier between the two states would remain largely unchanged until the twentieth century.
To underline Sunni success, Iran, the only Shia state in the world, went into steady decline over the next two centuries. It was no longer a threat to its neighbours and it only narrowly avoided being destroyed by the Russian and British empires. Iran began to revive under the Pahlavi dynasty in the mid-twentieth century, but the Pahlavi rulers were dedicated Westernizers with little interest in religion. Only after the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran did Shia religious fundamentalism once again appear a threat to its neighbours. The Iran-Iraq war from 1980 to 1988 did much to neutralize this threat. Most Sunni Muslims, especially in Arab countries, supported Saddam Hussein in his struggle against Shia Iran.
By 2001 the threat from Shia Iran seemed to have been contained, and the country faced bitter enemies on two sides: Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the Taliban movement in Afghanistan. As a consequence of 9/11, and at no cost to the Iranians, the United States removed both these threats over the next few years. Hezbollah, Iran's proxy in Lebanon, fought Israel to a stalemate in the summer war of 2006, further enhancing the status of Shias in the Islamic world. These events, along with its growing nuclear ambitions, have allowed Shia Iran to pose as a regional superpower in the Middle East, a status it last enjoyed in the early seventeenth century.
Now the talk is of a Shia revival threatening not just the West but all of Sunni Islam. A 'Shia crescent' is said to be spreading across the Middle East, alarming all Sunni Arab countries. How will they respond to this revival of the Sunni/Shia conflict which Ottoman victory seemed to have ended nearly four centuries ago?
Muslim states were ready to join the American-led coalition against Saddam Hussein during the Gulf crisis of 1990-91. Will Sunni Arab countries like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia be ready to join the United States and its allies in a new struggle against Shia Iran? The recent American decision to make huge arms sales to the Arab Gulf states to ensure their security in face of the supposed Iranian threat might seem to indicate a deepening of the Sunni/Shia split.
The dangers inherent in that split have even caused Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's second in command, to stress the need for unity among Muslims. Al-Qaeda's leaders were previously well known for their hostility to Shias, but now apparently they have seen the error of their ways.
The split between Protestants and Catholics in the sixteenth century Reformation destroyed the unity of Christendom. Will a further deepening of the antipathy between Sunnis and Shias create a fatal division within the Islamic world? Since the 1960s Muslims have made great efforts to build pan-Islamic international bodies, such as the Organizaton of the Islamic Conference. Will they now allow themselves to be divided once more? They would do well to rememer that the steady decline of Islamic power in the world from 1700 onwards was not just due to Western technological superiority, but also to chronic divisions within the Islamic world.
