NEW FLASHPOINTS OF NEVER-ENDING FITNAH IN MUSLIM WORLD

Islam has always been marked by perpetual strife for political power. The strife has two facets: confrontation against other faiths and civilizations, called jihad, and clash within itself called fitnah.

Jihad and fitnah are timebombs ticking beneath the very foundation of the civilizational edifice and only liberalization and secularization of Muslim societies across the world will save the from this Islamic apocalypse

The recent military escalation between Iran and Pakistan is the latest episode of the never-ceasing fitnah within the Islamic world. Sistan and Balochistan Province of Iran are the epicentre of the fresh armed conflict. The Sunni Muslim Baloch living in the province have been suffering religious persecution and discrimination in Shia Iran. Iran claims that the main bases of the two main Sunni

Baloch insurgent groups, Jundullah and Jaish-ul Adl, are in Pakistan’s Balochistan province, which shares a long border with Iran. Iranian forces are increasingly carrying out cross-border attacks against these groups, straining relations between Iran and Pakistan and possibly fuelling the Sunni-shia sectarian violence in both countries.

JIHAD AND FITNAH

“From its earliest beginnings, and certainly from the Prophet’s years at Medina, the core of Islam has not been some innerdirected search it is in the teaching of the Buddha, for instance—but the founding, consolidation, expansion of a state. The religion has been an instrument for this—an ideology to define and weld a group, an ideology to rationalize the conquest and conversion and subjugation for others”—arun Shourie rightly opined on the nature of Islam in his “The World of Fatwas”. As Islam is an aggressive political movement, it has always been marked by perpetual strife for political power.

The strife has two facets—confrontation against other faiths and civilizations, called jihad, and clash within itself called fitnah. In modern times, Egyptian Islamist scholar Sayyid Qutb’s Milestones (1964) provided new dimensions to the idea of jihad and has been the ideological force behind violent Islamist groups across the world. In Qutb’s words, the concept of jihad prompts war between believers and non-believers till the ultimate triumph of Islam over the world. Jihad is a menacing gorilla in the modern world’s living room.

The second inherent strife in Islam is the fitnah. Britannica defines fitnah as a heretical uprising, especially the first major internal struggle within the Muslim community which resulted in both civil war (656–661 CE) and religious schism between the Sunni and the Shia. The fitnah began its stride from the times of the first four Khaliphs of Islam. The political rivalry between the Ottoman Empire of Turkey and the Safavid Empire of Persia in the 16th to 18th centuries had religious overtones as the Ottomans claimed the Sunni Caliphate and the Safavids officially declared Shiaism as their official religion. This clash of the titans was an Islamic Great Game. The Ottomans and the Safavids fought many bloody wars to dominate the Muslim world.

The Safavids conquered Iraq and converted a major portion of Sunni Iraqis to the Shia faith by coercion. In 1722, the Safavid Empire fell to Sunni armies from Afghanistan; but the Afghans were unable to change the Shia hue of Iran. When the Baath Party came to power in Iraq in the 1960s, the Sunni minority wielded state power there and the Shia majority was reduced to a second-class citizenry. Saddam Hussain even banned the public observance of Ashura and other Shia rituals. With the fall of Saddam, Iraq became the first Arab country ruled by the Shias. As King Abdullah II of Jordan pointed out, it marked the dawn of the “Shia Crescent” in Muslimdom. Subsequently, the Iraqi Sunni minority aligned with the Islamic State to fight for their survival. They considered Shias as “the lurking snakes” and even pondered the idea of the genocide of Shias.

The Islamic Revolution in Iran (1979) triggered a wave of sectarian violence between Shias and Sunnis in many countries like Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Nigeria. In 2006, Hosni Mubarak, the then President of Egypt, opined that most Shias living in Arab countries were loyal to Iran, and not to the countries they were living in. This underscores the transnational sectarianism in the Muslim world. Iran also promotes their hawkish foreign policy goals through proxies like Hezbollah of Lebanon.

SQUARE PEGS IN ROUND HOLES

Both Shias in Sunni-dominated states and Sunnis in Shia-dominated states are square pegs in round holes. In Pakistan, the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 brought an alternative model of an Islamic state that was opposed to the Islamic state model propounded by Sunni politicians. Deobandi Sunni leaders of Pakistan framed

Shia Islam as an inherent threat to their concept of Islamic polity and society. Shia Islam has been denounced as a blemish on the Land of the Pure.

The Shia community in undivided India had anticipated the future shock during the Pakistan movement itself. The All India Shia Political Conference staunchly opposed the Two-nation Theory and repudiated the Muslim League’s claim as the sole guardian of Muslim interests in India. The Conference was affiliated to the Azad Muslim Conference, the confederation of Muslim organizations opposing the Pakistan movement.

The Shia community feared that the establishment of Pakistan would result in the establishment of a Hanafi Sunni-dominated nation where Shia Imamia Law would be marginalized. In a letter dated 25 July 1944, Syed Ali Zaheer, president of the All India Shia Political Conference, demanded an assurance from M.A. Jinnah that there would be no encroachment on the Shia’s religious freedom in proposed Pakistan.

But Jinnah’s response to this letter was evasive. The history of independent Pakistan proved Shia apprehension to be true. Canada’s International Forum for Rights and Security reported that over 4,000 Shias were murdered for their religious beliefs between 2013 and 2021 in Pakistan.

In Yemen, the Zaydi Shia minority has been fighting for equal rights against the Sunni regime since 2004. They constituted 30-40% of the Yemeni population. The Zaydi-houthi movement has been formed basically to fight the discrimination against the Shia tribes of the northern region by the Yemeni government. The Houthis killed former dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh in 2017 and made a flash airstrike on Riyadh airport in Saudi Arabia with the active support of Iran. Houthis recently launched missile and drone strikes against Israel-linked cargo ships in the Red Sea, in an effort to support the Hamas in their ongoing conflict with Israel. The escalation in Yemen has the potential to be a spark that may ignite a full-blown

Sunni-shia war.

The Syrian civil war is another blood-soaked instance of fitna in today’s world. Bahrain is another theatre of sectarian conflict where a Sunni royalty rules over a Shia majority population. Seventy per cent of the population is Shia. During the Arab Spring, Saudi Arabia dispatched its National Guards to crush a shortlived Shia uprising against the Bahrain monarchy brutally.

Jihad and fitnah are timebombs ticking beneath the very foundation of the civilizational edifice. Some politicians and academicians suggest that promoting Sufism is an alternative to contain militant Islam. But Sufi-barelvi outfits like Tehreek-e-labbaik Pakistan are equally fanatic and aggressive as Wahhabi and Shia entities. Only liberalization and secularization of Muslim societies across the world will save the humanity from the Islamic apocalypse.