Sectarian polarisation threatens Arab spring

Bahrain’s leading Sunni politician finds nothing abnormal about the fact that the Shia, a majority in his country, are rarely recruited into the security services. Their ultimate loyalty is questionable, says Abdelatif al-Mahmoud, and after this year’s uprising they can be trusted even less.

Sadly, this discourse has become more pronounced in Bahrain amid alarming sectarian polarisation after a Shia uprising that was crushed by the Sunni regime with the help of Sunni allies from the Gulf.

As Bahrain faces international pressure to democratise and end discrimination against the Shia, voices such as those of Mr Mahmoud, who heads a coalition of Sunni parties, will add their resistance.

But well beyond Bahrain, intensifying religious and ethnic suspicions are emerging as a big threat to the Arab spring. The collision of popular uprisings with ethnic and religious tensions is damaging the cause of freedom espoused by young protesters and playing into the hands of governments.

Take Syria, where the minority Alawite regime of Bashar al-Assad has accused radical Sunni Islamists of leading the challenge to the regime, thereby consolidating the support of minorities. Fears of an Iraq style descent into civil war in Syria have contributed to an awkward Arab silence over the violence perpetrated by the regime. Many western officials are also reluctant to embrace Syria’s uprising, insisting that the society is too complicated and ethnically diverse to produce a stable post-Assad outcome.

Even in post-revolution Egypt, religious tensions rose to the surface soon after Hosni Mubarak was ousted, as clashes erupted between Salafis and Christians.

The scourge of sectarianism has long blighted the Middle East, destroying Lebanon in a 15-year civil war between Christian and Muslim parties in the 1970s and 1980s and devastating Iraq in the aftermath of the US-led invasion of 2003.

Since the civil strife in Iraq, which pitted extremist Sunni groups against the empowered Shia community, the rift among the two Muslim sects has extended outside the country’s borders, provoked in large part by political rivalry between an increasingly powerful Iran and Sunni powers in the region, led by Saudi Arabia.

Today, the anti-Shia sentiment in Bahrain appears to be a case of deep seated religious mistrust exacerbated by the Iranian-Arab standoff. The royal family in Manama and its supporters in Riyadh maintain that Tehran was behind the Shia uprising, a claim disputed by western officials who point to signs that Iran tried to exploit the revolt but had no hand in igniting it.

Mr Mahmoud argues that Bahrain’s Shia follow religious sources who are outside the country – leading religious scholars in the Shia world are in Iraq’s Najaf and Iran’s Qom – and insists that religious authorities are acting as both spiritual and political guides. “Sectarian polarisation makes people think twice about democracy,” he says. “Democracy needs a normal atmosphere where religion does not interfere in politics.”

Sectarian polarisation also colours reality. When it is pointed out to Mr Mahmoud that he too is a religious scholar who is heavily involved in politics, he pauses. “I’m a sheikh but I’m a politician,” he says.

According to Ali Salman, head of Shia party al-Wefaq, some Bahrainis follow Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but many more look to Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani for religious guidance. Ayatollah Sistani represents the quietist approach in Shia Islam, which believes in staying out of politics.

As both Shia and Sunni parties are mostly Islamist, Mr Salman, also a sheikh, argues that Sunni politicians are making excuses to justify discrimination. “The Sunni-Shia issue in Bahrain is not new but who escalated it? The government, which puts non-Bahraini Sunni in the security forces, gives them most ambassadorial posts and most government posts,” he says.

Dismissing the loyalty issue as a “lie”, he says Shia parties are demanding a constitutional monarchy, not an Islamist state. “We’re not asking for a religious state so what do our sources of emulation have to do with it? The issue is political.”