Is the Middle East heading for a full-blown religious war? | World news | The Observer
▻http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/08/middle-east-full-blown-religious-war
It has become a cliche in recent months to talk of an inevitable and intractable sectarian divide between Sunni and Shia, over a schism in Islam that occurred 1,400 years ago. The reality is that the present rising tensions in the Middle East are far more complex than simple religious hatred. Rather, they reflect a growing friction rooted in more recent competitions over power, rights and identity which have been exacerbated both by the war in Iraq and by the reconfigurations of the Arab spring.
At the very heart of the debate is how much sectarian tensions themselves are driving the new conflicts or whether Sunni-Shia tensions have been co-opted into local and regional competitions whose nature is as much about power, politics and the distribution of resources as it is religious.
The split in the two branches of Islam is almost as old as Islam itself, resulting from a political struggle for leadership between followers of the Prophet Muhammad after his death. What emerged were sometimes subtly different – and sometimes quite radically different – interpretations of Muhammad’s teachings. Despite that, there has been no equivalent in Islamic history of the Thirty Years’ War that pitted Protestant against Catholic in Europe, while for long periods and in many places – not least Iraq despite its recent problems – Shia and Sunni have not only coexisted but widely intermarried.