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Haddad - Understanding Sectarianism

Tags: books, sectarianism

Overview

  • ‘sectarianism’ as a term is too broad and doesn’t mean anything
  • he suggests a 4 pillar approach, building on top of Hinnebusch - Identity and State Formation in Multi‐sectarian Societies
    1. doctrinal
    2. substate
    3. state
    4. suprastate
  • Brubaker: Religious Dimensions of Political Conflict and Violence
  • Religion is a necessary but not sufficient event for the formation of sectarian identities
  • Skip past the fetishization doctrine and the pervasive binary of Sunni/Shia
  • Also poor debates that unity is a manichean good that opposes sectarianism
    • coexistence, intermarriage, and kinship are not a bar to the outbreak of hostilities
  • context, flebility, and salience
    • enough for raw symbolisism for everything to be framed
    • everything is correlated - the context, flexibility, and salience make religious markers easy to adapt
  • we cannot view things as a dichmoety of above/below, for elites are also the product of their own systems, so the cynical view of elites manipulating their system is false

Formations of Sectarian identities

“To ask if sectarian dynamics are driven by religion or politics is to ask the wrong question. Seldom is it clearly one or the other: when it comes to how sectarian identities and sectarian relations are produced, both religious doctrine and politics are inescapable factors, with the balance between the two being dictated by context. A particular facet of sectarian identity - for example, personal status codes - may become a political issue, but this is neither inevitable nor impossible. Indeed, rather than a strict binary, politics and religion exist often in a reciprocal relationship characterized by circularity rather than antagonism or exclusivity - two separate but nevertheless intertwined concepts, to borrow from Brubaker’s analysis of religion and nationalism” (Haddad 2020:68)

  • sectarian problems are not reducible to religion
  • shia’s are less than 20% of all muslims
    • excluding zaidi, less than 11%
  • 60% of shia’s are iraqi shia
  • salience of identity does not match with the salience of politics
  • the sunni sect is rooted in more opportunism, the shia idea is rooted in their persecution as a sect
  • shia’s then put a premimum on their minority status
  • terms like nawasib and Wahhabi are used to demarcate who is a “good Sunni” and “bad Sunni”
  • Shia polemics rarely ever frame ordinary Sunnis as a threat, even Yasser al-Habib refrains from this
  • shia are often protrayed as a threat in sunni culture, but this is not the same
  • This is because Shiis need the sunni recongition, while sunnis do not need shia recongition
    • iran portrays itself as the vanguard of Islam
    • sunni led pan-Islam does not need shiis
    • shii-led pan-Islam does need Sunniso
  • Maher - Salafi-Jihadism: The History of an Idea
  • not every binary is balanced!
  • leads to the question of how states shape sectarian relations?
  • Makram Ebeid
  • 2003 and the sectarian wave
  • fears of group identity extinction by assimilation
  • Khan - The Great Partition
  • sectarian identities become seklf reinforcing once tied to political, social, economic good
  • 21st century emergence of sunni victim identity
  • tedency for regimes to securitize identities that treat them as foreign identities
    • shias as iranian fourth pillars as examples

iraq - 2003-2008

Conclusion

  • sectarianism stigmatizes real greviances based on class and ethnic lines
  • sects are often more accomodating than non-sectarian countries
  • “sectarianism” is often instrumentalized
  • each part of sectarianism requires a different theory