PHILADELPHIA -- If you want to understand the wider repercussions of the war between Hezbollah and Israel, buy a brilliant and very readable new book called The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future.
The author, Vali Nasr, is a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., and a top expert on Shiite Islam and the historic conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims. He just briefed President Bush on internal Iraqi religious and political dynamics. One can only wish the meeting had come three years sooner.
The United States is now caught in the middle of the Shiite-Sunni conflict in Baghdad, and the Lebanon war has worsened the precarious U.S. position. This sectarian struggle will determine the outcome of America's Iraq venture. Nasr believes it will shape the future of the entire Middle East.
Shiites make up only 10 percent to 15 percent of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims. U.S. Mideast policy has traditionally been focused on Sunni countries led by Arab allies in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. But as Nasr points out: "In the Islamic heartland from Lebanon to Pakistan, there are roughly as many Shias as there are Sunnis," and around the geopolitically sensitive Persian Gulf, Shiites constitute 89 percent of the population.
Nasr gives a fascinating short course on the historical differences between Shiites and Sunnis, which stem from a dispute over who were the rightful heirs to the Prophet Muhammad. The Shiites believe his direct descendants should have inherited the mantle, starting with his cousin and son-in-law, Ali. Sunnis endorsed the Prophet's companions and slaughtered Ali's son Hussayn, whose death precipitated a historic Shiite embrace of martyrs. But the differences go deeper. Sunnis emphasized order and coming to terms with secular rulers. Shiites are searching for justice and look to clerics for guidance.
Before 1993, the only country ruled by Shiites was Persian Iran. Shiites were marginalized and persecuted in the Sunni Arab world and disdained by Sunni fundamentalists as apostates. Then came the war in Iraq, which altered the power balance in the Middle East.
When the United States toppled Saddam Hussein, it upended a regime whose Sunni leaders repressed a predominantly Shiite population. U.S. leaders thought Iraq was dominated by a secular middle class. They believed an Iraqi democracy led by elected Shiite officials would encourage Iranian Shiites to overthrow their regime.
