Taking up the gauntlet, Robert Spencer purports to answer my challenge to name two wars fought between the Shia and the Sunni. The context for my question was this. I argue that the Shia-Sunni conflict in Iraq is not a religious war. Nor have the Shia and the Sunni fought religious wars in the manner of the Catholic Protestant conflicts in Europe. Rather, I contended that this is a gang fight between two groups over who gets to rule the country.
Spencer proceeds to give a list of Shia Sunni conflicts of the past. Interestingly, all but one occurs before the middle of the seventeenth century. That's right! Spencer can name only a single Shia-Sunni clash in the past three hundred and fifty years. So my argument isn't holding up badly at all so far.
Spencer gets no points for mentioning the battle of Karbala, since I mentioned that in my original post. That was one of the earliest battles in Islam, and it defined the dividing line between Shia and Sunni. Every other conflict that Spencer lists is not a religious conflict. Spencer is simply listing dynastic and political wars that happened to have Shia and Sunni on opposite sides. For example, Iran used to be a Sunni country. When the Safavid rulers came they imposed Shia rule on Iran. That's how Iran became Shia. For the Safavids this was a way to consolidate power and to build alliances. Spencer lists their arrival as a Shia-Sunni war, as if the two sides were fighting over theological issues.
Similarly Spencer lists the ongoing power struggles between the Ottomans and the Safavids as a Shia-Sunni clash. But when there are five Islamic empires all trying to expand, we can expect these dynastic clashes. They occured just as often between Sunni and Sunni as between Sunni and Shia. That's because religion had very little to do with it.
To test Spencer's logic here, ask yourself this question. Was the 30 year war between England and France a religious war because there were Protestants on one side and Catholics on the other? Of course not, because the parties were not fighting about religion. Transubstantiation was not the issue. This was a war over territorial control and power. Another example: in the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the British and the French fought several battles in India. Were these Anglican-Catholic wars? No, both countries wanted India as their colonial prize.
Now I come to Spencer's recent example, and please don't laugh. It is the Iran-Iraq war. Here we see Spencer's power of discernment in full gear. Saddam was a secular dictator whose Baathist party drew its inspiration more from European fascism than from Islam. How can his eight-year fight with Khomeini be counted as a Shia-Sunni struggle? Spencer is unfazed. After all, Saddam was himself a Sunni and many of his henchmen were Sunni. Yes, Spencer, but the majority of Iraqis are Shia. If this truly was a Shia-Sunni conflict, why didn't the majority of Iraqi Shia fight on Khomeini's side? Khomeini was the leader of the Shia armies of Iran. The very fact that the Iraqi Shia fought on Saddam's side and were willing to kill their fellow Shia in Iran shows that they did not view this war as a Shia-Sunni conflict. Khomeini tried to make it one, in order to win Shia defectors from Iraq, but in this he was completely unsuccessful.
With intellectual adversaries like Spencer, I never have to worry. He specializes in launching boomerang strikes that leave him gasping in a heap. I wish him well, but the poor fellow is quickly establishing himself as the Alan Wolfe of the right.
Reader Comments ( Page 1 of 1)
1. There are continuous fights between Shias and Sunnis in places like Pakistan and India. Of course, one can be technical and say that these are incidents, and not wars. But then these incidents have been going on for a very long time.
Namaste.
Ashok Chowgule, Goa, India
Ashok Chowgule at 12:02PM on May 28th 2007
2. It is interesting that in answer to Mr Spencer, you point out all the secular aspects of the conflicts he names. Using your approach to interpreting history, one could end up arguing that the Crusades were not religious wars. Indeed, many fought under the guise of religion, but we all know that there were other motivations. The real motives were often not religious, unless you count the pursuit of wealth and power as a religion. One could say that the War for Independence in the United States was not really fought for independence, since some involved might have had other motives as well. As you state in your "rebuttal", the wars were between Sunni and Shia. That is what was shown, and that is what was asked to be shown. Spencer wins, sorry.
John at 3:05PM on May 28th 2007
3. Nice attempted re-write of your original atrgument that you lost miserably with Dinesh. You have been open-hand slapped by Spencer, YET AGAIN.
Stick to things you have some working knowledge about, whatever that may be, but Islam, historically and as is applied today, certainly is not one of them.
A follow-up piece is warranted however. There's still room for a few more nails in your coffin.
awake at 8:52AM on May 29th 2007
4. Since many of your readers might not see Robert Spencer's response, I will post just a small part of it here (The whole thing can be found at http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/016652.php#comments):
D'Souza says it's not a "religious war," it's a "gang fight between two groups over who gets to rule the country." By making this distinction he betrays his lack of awareness that there is no traditional delineation between the sacred and the secular in Islam (although reading farther into the one authority he claims to have read on Islam, Bernard Lewis, would have apprised him of this). It's not a "religious war" OR a "gang fight." It's a "religious war" AND a "gang fight." Like so many Western analysts, D'Souza is transposing Western assumptions about what a religion is and how religious people act into an Islamic context, where those assumptions don't hold: he assumes that if wars have a political dimension as well as a religious one, the very presence of political considerations means that the conflicts' religious character must be secondary -- as in the cultural identity politics of the Catholic/Protestant conflict in Northern Ireland. But in a cultural and religious setting that considers the religious to be political and the political to be religious, and earthly dominion to be a sign of Allah's favor, this is a false assumption."
Me: You lost this one, Dinesh. He answered your question, so what do you do? You make false assumptions and then claim you won because the wars are sooo old. Nice tactic: change the rules when you lose.
David at 11:17AM on May 29th 2007
5. Mr D’Souza,
All I can tell you is that you are a condemned idiot. Probably nobody can enlighten you in this world. You don’t want to get out of your idiotic mind. Please don’t waste your as well as our times by writing this bullshit.
But I am suer you will not stop this bulshit, because the speciallity about the idiots is that they love to be idiots.
Deva, Goa, India
deva at 11:56AM on May 29th 2007
6. It doesn't seem to me that the current situation is comparable to the Crusades at all(let alone the American Revolution), because the Crusades were fought over control over the 'holy land' and the current conflict is being waged in effort to control Iraq, and by extension to prevent the radicals from gaining power and funding more terrorism.
In effect, there can be either a secular (de facto) tyranny, a (de facto) theocracy,or an 'enforced' democracy, which is where the U.S. comes in. So far none of the examples by either Spencer or the posted comments have included the necessary imposition of a democracy as an opposing thumb. This makes the comparisons invalid. Neither the Ottomans nor the Safavids have ever engaged in acts of international terrorism with the U.S., so the U.S. should not have gotten involved in this conflict almost 700 years ago...HUH? Sounds pretty silly.
That is my understanding, and it seems that making sweeping generalizations and comparing one war during the 12th century to this one is ridiculous. Just as comparing a struggle between sects of the same religion around the 10th century should not be compared to the situations currently engaging Iraq right now. We shouldn't engage in such childish pseudo-logical arguments.
Chris at 2:41PM on May 29th 2007
7. Mr. D'Souza says, " The Shia and the Sunni have not been fighting for centuries. Historically speaking, they have not been fighting at all."
Now he says, "Spencer proceeds to give a list of Shia Sunni conflicts of the past."
We can see how devious Spencer is being here... actually giving D'Souza a list that D'Souza says is not available.
Mr. D'Souza is also prone to couch conflicts in terms of ethnicity as opposed to religion although religion is a huge part of ethnicity.
Very disingenuous, saying things like, just because the leaders of conflicts say stuff like, "God gave us this land." and of course the people believing their leaders and being willing to fight for their leader's cause...
... apparently somewhere deep in the leader's hearts and the people's hearts they 'know' that their struggle is political or or a squabble over land or a gang fight.
Perhaps the people should not be so naive and ask DD what the score is BEFORE drilling out the neighbour's brains. We can imagine these neighbours sincerely apologizing to each other and promising to get the 'skinny' from DD first the next time their Mullah exhorts them to Jihad.(Yea, that oughtta do it.)
pboyfloyd at 7:30PM on May 29th 2007