British colonialists in Iraq in the 1920s used an elite of Sunni army officers to suppress a Shia rebellion, paving the way for Saddam's Sunni minority rule, in which Shia clerics were regularly executed.
Over the years the division has been exploited by outsiders. Some of them consider the Shia to be not merely heretics but apostates - and the punishment for apostasy, they say, is death. The fanatics of al-Qa'ida have been nurtured in this Wahhabi ideology. Some Saudi scholars brand Shi'ism as a heresy "worse than Christianity or Judaism". With the rise there of the Sunni fundamentalism known as Wahhabism, severe restrictions have been placed on Shia practice and its leaders jailed. But early in the 20th century the Saudi royal family made discrimination against the Shia official and destroyed most of the Shia holy places. In Azerbaijan, where the Shias are in the majority, there are mixed mosques where both sects pray together. In 1959 the most influential centre of Sunni scholarship, al-Azhar University in Cairo, admitted Shia jurisprudence to its curriculum. There have been periods and places of concord. Inter-communal violence has recurred in Pakistan.
Mughal emperors in India between the 15th and 19th centuries routinely executed Shia scholars, burned their libraries and desecrated their sacred sites. In 1514 an Ottoman sultan ordered the massacre of 40,000 Shia. Some mystical sufi movements created a bridge between Sunni and Shia but hardline Sunnis regard the Shia practice of venerating saints and visiting shrines as heretical - which is why Sunni extremists bomb Shias on pilgrimage in places like Karbala in Iraq today.įrom time to time, however, violence has flared in which the Shia, in the main, have been brutally and even genocidally persecuted. Various Shia sub-sects formed, including the fanatical Assassins, the Alawites in Syria and the Ismailis, whose leader is the Aga Khan. The chief Shia religious festival became Ashura when devotees would beat themselves to commemorate the death of the Prophet's grandson Hussein at the Battle of Karbala in 680. The Sunnis became happy to depend upon the state, which their adherents mostly controlled. By contrast, Sunni Muslims felt no need of intermediaries in their relationship with God - an approach which has abetted the rise of extremist zealots like al-Qa'ida. A clerical hierarchy, topped by imams and ayatollahs, became crucial in Shi'ism. Diverging traditions of ritual, law and practice soon emerged. The two sides agreed on the Quran but had different views on hadith, the traditions recorded by Mohamed's followers about what he had said and done in his life. But a minority thought the Prophet's closest relative, his son-in-law and nephew Ali, should succeed. The majority of his followers thought his closest associate, Abu Bakr, should take over. And his inheritance was spiritual as well as political.
Often succession would pass to the leader' s son. Tribal alliances in Arabia in those days usually disintegrated on the death of the leader, or after the short-term military objectives had been met and the spoils divided. Around 100,000 people had submitted to the rule of Mohamed and of Allah. In the last 10 years of his life Mohamed inflicted total defeat on the pagan tribes of Mecca and by doing so united the entire Arabian peninsula.
By contrast the rift between the two biggest Muslim factions goes right back to the beginning - and a row over who should succeed the Prophet Mohamed as leader of the emerging Islamic community when he died in the early 7th century. The two Christian denominations had a shared history for 1500 years. The division between the two factions is older and deeper even than the tensions between Protestants and Catholics which bedevilled Europe for centuries. That situation is the mirror opposite of Iraq under Saddam, where a Sunni strongman lorded it over a Shia majority - until the invasion of Iraq, when elections put the Shia in charge, insofar as anyone can be said to be running that chaotic country. The Alawites, the sect to which President Bashar al-Assad and much of his army officer elite belong, are Shia. What makes Syria different is that there a Sunni majority is ruled by a Shia minority.