OPINION: Sectarianism is a Dangerous Oversimplification
The Syrian National Congress, Syria’s first national parliament, convened in 1919 to discuss the future of “Greater Syria,” including Lebanon. They recommended that Lebanon nor Palestine be split from Syria. (Wikimedia Commons)
April Artrip (SFS ‘20) and Advait Arun (SFS ‘22) are the former editors for the Caravel’s Middle East and Central Asia section and guest writers for the Caravel's opinion section. The content and opinions of this piece are the writers’ and the writers’ alone. They do not reflect the opinions of the Caravel or its staff.
From the Iraqi civil war to the Saudi Arabia-Iran rivalry to the Islamic State (ISIS), commentators across governments and media outlets describe the Middle East with one common adjective: “sectarian.” Officials, reporters, and analysts alike assume that the people of the Middle East primarily identify with their religious sect—above all else.
“Sectarian” simplifies explanations for violence and identity. It glosses over historical roots of conflict, the West’s complicity in the conditions that bring about that violence, and the complex nature of identity. It ignores that many people do not view their sect as an important characteristic. Furthermore, acting on its principles can entrench autocratic, clientelistic political systems.
The Western media’s use of “sectarian” to explain away the Middle East’s problems is worse than an oversimplification. As Western governments increasingly adopt the language of Middle Eastern sectarianism, their policies, too, reflect the notion that sect is the basis of identity, that different sects inherently distrust each other. Policies to partition weak states, like Iraq, along these nonexistent, clean sectarian lines crop up not infrequently—despite the massive population displacement that such a plan would entail anywhere.
The media bears some responsibility for this growing phenomenon. Particularly as non-experts report on complex issues, “sectarian” becomes a simple and digestible way to summarize the Middle East. But, for those who live in the region, there are real consequences to such language. The media must stop portraying the Middle East as inherently sectarian and move toward a nuanced understanding that is faithful to the experiences of Middle Easterners.
Unitary authoritarian governments are not inherently better than ineffectual sectarian democracies, and political and ethnic violence deserve the same condemnation as sectarian violence. The Middle East is still an unstable place, no matter how its conflicts are viewed. Still, affirming the untrue, hurtful narrative of sectarianism, with its dangerous long-term societal implications, perpetuates how these problems started—with short-sighted colonial meddling.
Iraq
Iraq stands as the most prominent example of the West imposing sectarianism on the Middle East. Media organizations, government agencies, and academic institutions produce a wealth of maps dividing Iraq into three regions: Kurdish, Sunni Arab, and Shi’a Arab. The Ohio State University, the Economist, the University of Texas, and Vox (among countless others) have reproduced, more or less, the same map that uses religious and ethnic divisions to “explain” Iraq’s conflicts, both real and imagined. An Atlantic article in 2018 blamed decades of violence in the Middle East, whether in Iraq, Iran, Yemen, or Bahrain, on sectarianism.
First, these maps are inaccurate. No town or city is 100 percent one ethnicity or religious group. Most tribes include both Sunni and Shi’a families. People of different ethnicities and religious sects have coexisted in the Middle East for centuries, with one’s sect seldom defining one’s identity. Georgetown student Mariam Alsoudi (SFS ‘20), when discussing U.S. policy in Iraq in a class on the Arab world, related, saying, “My mother, who is Iraqi and is from a Sunni family, didn’t even know what sect she was growing up, whether she was Sunni or Shi’a.” In fact, the word “sectarian” for Iraqis bears a negative connotation.
Second, the notion that sectarian violence dates back decades (even centuries, according to Senator Rand Paul) is wrong. As Iraqi sociologist Sami Ramadani explains, the vast majority of Iraq’s conflict before the 2003 U.S. invasion was political. He could find only one incident—the looting of Jewish neighborhoods in 1941—that unequivocally qualifies as sectarian. Politics and class, not religious sect or ethnicity, divided Iraqis. Only after the U.S. invasion and occupation did political organizations began defining themselves by sect, as the U.S. imposed its sectarian lens on its contrived new Iraqi political system.
The U.S. occupation opened the door to further disastrous, misinformed policies that misunderstood—and thereby devastated—Iraq. At the height of the Iraqi insurgency in 2006, then-Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) and Council on Foreign Relations fellow Leslie Gelb proposed to convert Iraq into a federation of three semi-autonomous regions along sectarian lines. Biden cited a similar solution used to pacify what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina. However, Yugoslavia’s ethno-sectarian partition occurred only after years of ethnic cleansing. Populations in Iraq were—and are still—mixed. Furthermore, 78 percent of Iraqis disagreed with the proposal in a poll conducted a month after its release. Though Iraqis and regional experts criticized Biden’s plan, its basic idea remain popular in the U.S. policy-making community. In 2015, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter suggested that a “multisectarian Iraq” may not be possible, and President Donald Trump in 2019 remarked on the futility of U.S. involvement in “ancient sectarian and tribal conflicts.”
Independent journalist Alice Su neatly sums up the West’s problematic fascination with Iraqi sectarianism by saying, “The problem with this kind of thinking is that it’s built on an Orientalist perception of Iraq as inherently riven with primordial conflicts, a picture that’s been inflated by Western media portrayals of Iraq since the US invasion in 2003. Partition as a ‘solution’ overlooks what many Iraqis themselves, minorities included, say they want.”
Western media outlets and academic institutions must be careful not to oversimplify Iraq’s reality in their articles. Otherwise, employing tropes of Iraqi sectarian violence, a simple and misleading explanation for a complex political situation, will continue to misinform U.S. policy and discourse.
Lebanon
As in Iraq, sectarianism was imposed on Lebanon; however, its imposition has been so long-standing that it has metastasized into an self-perpetuating political system. If Iraq demonstrates why we should avoid thinking along sectarian frameworks, Lebanon illustrates the devastating consequences of its entrenchment: civil war without real change, intervention by foreign powers, and a toothless central government unable to serve its people.
In a clear example of colonial meddling, France used its 1920 colonial mandate over Lebanon to enlarge the state’s territory while concurrently cementing the power of Maronite Christians over Muslims, Druze, and other minority groups, even though Muslims were projected to eventually become the overall majority. Lebanon’s unwritten post-independence National Pact preserved Maronite Christian political dominance and tacitly reserved positions of political power by sect, a requirement that still exists today.
Before the 1975 Civil War, Arab leaders advocated for a democratic one-person-one-vote system that would abolish these sectarian guarantees. Yet, 15 years later, with more than a hundred thousand dead and with much of Lebanon in ruins, the peace-securing Ta’if Agreement only further buttressed the system’s sectarian nature. Though this agreement finally achieved political parity for Muslims, it maintained the sectarian allocation of parliamentary seats and top leadership positions.
Like other Levantine states, Lebanon is, in part, an artificial construction of successive Ottoman and European administrations. Yet France’s outsize role in elevating a minority group to power sets Lebanon apart from neighbors such as Iraq and Syria. Modern Iraq and Syria utilized pan-Arabism and Arab nationalism to shape centralized authoritarian states with constructed Arab national identities. For example, the Iraqi Hussein and Syrian al-Assad regimes promised to deal with standard social, economic, and “Arab” issues without elevating religious concerns, while centralizing their state and government around themselves and their party, often brutally.
Questioning the longevity of Lebanon’s sectarian model despite its existence among generally unitary Arab states, the Carnegie Endowment broke down why Lebanon’s sectarian model has endured. Sectarianism “allowed disparate groups to come together…. On the other hand, power-sharing almost necessarily introduced a corrosive machinery for the distribution of spoils. This… translated into state inefficiency and the paralysis of decisionmaking. More important, and this is the main flaw of the sectarian model, is that reinforcing sectarian identities and providing them with full-fledged political and legal status came at the expense of convergence toward a common identity,” the Carnegie report said.
Lebanon, though a self-styled Arab state, fell victim to the self-aggrandizing, self-perpetuating nature of its pre-established sectarian politics.
The Carnegie Endowment credits Syrian influence in and occupation of Lebanon for perpetuating sectarian politics, but the international politicking and interventions that surrounded the civil war also deserve blame. In fact, inflaming sectarian violence toward self-serving ends, perhaps where non-sectarian issues initially claimed salience, seems to be the primary strategy by which foreign powers have intervened in Lebanon since Ottoman times. France and Britain, for example, in a race to snatch the Middle East from Ottoman Empire, often forced their respective Maronite and Druze allies into needless conflict with each other.
Before this year’s state-keeling protests, Lebanese society last allied against their government in 2005, when a large protest movement ended the Syrian occupation of the country. Yet, sectarian leaders quickly co-opted the movement as a geopolitical conflict. The current protests remain organic, non-sectarian, and related to domestic concerns, thus preventing the major religious-political parties from hijacking them—for the time being. Turning the narrative of foreign powers intervening in Lebanon on its head, protesters claim that they aim to tear down a system of corruption, clientelism, and patronage fueled by the long-unhealed scars of colonialism. Twenty-five-year-old content creator Aya Abi Haidar said, “Once we get rid of those in power, we would put an end to that dependence and start the process of building a country without this exterior interference.”
The protesters in Lebanon speak loudly and clearly: the country’s sectarianism does not serve them. Still, the Lebanese people cannot justifiably heap all of the blame on foreign powers. Their own government has not taken a census since 1932, before Lebanese independence, and 2016 voter registration lists show a clear discrepancy between shares of voters by sect and allotments of seats in the government. Their government has not even tried to calibrate the sectarian balance.
Lebanese sociologist Rima Majed, dissecting Lebanon’s ostensibly sectarian conflict, concludes that the belligerent “sects” in fact represent and are fueled by larger political and economic issues.“The salience of sectarian divides depends mainly on the ability of opposing groups to compete in terms of size, political power, economic capacity or military strength… In other words, what matters in understanding the dynamics of Lebanese society is not sectarianism per se, but rather the politicization of sectarianism,” she said.
These contrived divides have done far more harm than good, especially when manipulated by the powerful.
A Plaything of the Powerful
Sectarianism has ultimately become a plaything of the powerful in both Iraq and Lebanon. Worse than a plaything, it actively endangers the societies it infects. Establishing a sectarian system, however, grants de jure power to the sect-parties with pre-existing de facto power. Those sect-parties will use their political power to perpetuate their own dominance while turning a blind eye to their collaborators’ corruption in the name of state stability—rather than divide-and-conquer, call it “divide-and-shrug” governance.
After all, the last thing any of these leaders want is to start a fight that they might not win. In the meantime, they can actively court foreign powers for protection and self-aggrandizement, further endangering their own state’s already fragile equilibrium for their own benefit. Should civil war break out, such complicated webs of influence and patronage all but ensure the endurance of these sect-parties even into a postwar peace. Such is the self-perpetuating cycle of sectarianism.
Despite our rejection of political sectarianism, unfortunately, social sectarianism as a phenomenon still exists in the Middle East, as it does everywhere. But, why does most of the focus on this phenomenon fall on the Middle East?
In 2014, President Barack Obama noted the area’s “ancient sectarian differences” and commentator Bill Maher compared the modern Middle East to Europe’s wars of religion. Yet, as Brookings fellow Shadi Hamid observed, “if there is something constant about a culture and its predisposition to violence, then how can we explain stark variations in civil conflict over short periods of time?”
Scholars Nadi Hashemi and Danny Postel propose the framework of “sectarianization,” “an active process shaped by political actors operating within specific contexts, pursuing political goals that involve the mobilization of popular sentiments around particular identity markers.”
They differentiate it from misleading Middle Eastern “sectarianism,” which implies “a static given, a trans-historical force—an enduring and immutable characteristic of the Arab-Islamic world from the seventh century until today.” They mark sectarianization as fundamentally anti-democratic, whereby regimes manipulate identity to perpetuate themselves and deflect demands for real change. The pan-sectarian protests in Iraq and Lebanon, both of which call for regime change against their ineffectual governments, only confirm Hashemi and Postel’s theory that effective “divide-and-shrug” sectarian regimes more easily defuse such demands.
When the media and politicians parrot narratives of immutable sectarian divides, they embolden interested external actors to intervene. The media has convinced them that they cannot be held responsible for ostensible sectarian violence when pursuing their own foreign policy goals. When external actors intervene and inevitably prop up existing sect-parties in the process, they perpetuate a conflict which the media will then reaffirm, ahistorically and ignorantly, as perpetual and inherent.
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