The Shia Revival: The Effects of Khomeini's rise in the Scope of Middle Eastern History

The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future
Author: Vali Nasr

Vali Nasr is currently a Professor at Tufts University and formerly worked as a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School and was a Senior Adjunct Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. In the preface to this work he mentions that it is “not a work of historical scholarship,” which is seemingly contrary to the stated objective of this blog’s analysis. However, by providing “the new ideas and arguments…it brings to an understanding…the Islamic world and Middle East history and politics,” that are the core focuses of this study. How and why did the Iranian Revolution, The Arab-Israeli conflict, and the War on “Terror” come to produce such large amounts of refugees, where did they go and does the California Bay Area represent an adequate portion of these refugees? Beyond the fundamental reasons why Nasr’s work is valuable to this study, his sheer weight in the realm of Shia politics and culture suggest that any study that wishes to claim any range of historical accuracy need to at least analyze Nasr’s work cursorily.

The Shia Revival
This piece was written soon after the collapse of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and its main argument is that the fall of such a polarizing dictator would inevitably shift the political discourse of the entire Middle East. More so Nasr argues that, as a result of United States foreign policy, that the rise of the majority populations of Shia within Iraq will destabilize the entire region and cause a new struggle. Overtly, this is far to large in scope to contribute to my localized work, but the specific chapters and examples used in this piece provide unparalleled wisdom into the cultural, political, and practical reasons that so many immigrants fled the Middle East from 1950-Present. Before progressing into the bulk of his source work and methodology one concept must first be clearly stated, “Shias and Sunnis [Muslims] are not monolithic communities,” and therefore no action, statement or theory of any one person should be projected onto his community as a whole, because just as diversity in the United States proves, we are all different and individual (Nasr, 24).
The pieces of this work that are relevant to the purposes of this study are interspersed among plentiful peripheral examinations of Islamic culture and politics. Therefore I will divide the sections into easily digested pieces that will summate key themes relevant to our cause and leave out more cursory information. The Middle East is classified by centuries old conflicts between Sunni’s, Shias and various secular pairings of both (Nasr, 83). This dynamic feud was greatly altered by the rise of globalization, more specifically in the form of Nation-States that helped dissolve once strong communal ties and helped further fragment Middle Eastern society (Nasr, 83). Concepts such as modernization, democracy, fundamentalism, nationalism, secularism and an array of other terms have been used as blanket descriptions of Middle Eastern socio-political reasoning in the past, mostly by “Orientalist Scholars.” Nasr takes painful care to point out that these western concepts do not adequately address the complexities of Middle Eastern society and following an Edward “Saidian” discourse, one could suggest that this would be because of Western colonial/imperialist cultural biases. While not directly using the words of Said to claim this belief, Nasr shows how uniquely complex the society and political culture of the Middle East is, and therefore it, like the Western world cannot be boiled down into simple paradigms, at least not ones that are accurate.
While Khomeini was purging Iran of his Sunni, Secular and leftist opponents his neighbor Saddam Hussein was doing the very same thing to Shias, Kurds and members of the al-Da’wa party (Nasr, 140). These concurrent purges of various Middle East minority groups led to large scale migration, either directly forced or out of fear of persecution. Following the Iran-Iraq War that ended in 1988 fractious battles between different “fundamentalisms” took the place of dictatorial purges (Nasr, 148). For example clashes between Khomeini and the Saud rulers of Saudi Arabia led to violence between the two countries and a rise in tensions and political suppression of opponents in both states (Nasr, 151). The increasing tensions that followed the Revolution in 1979 had a ripple effect that spread further and further away from Iran and moved closer and closer to the United States. This has spread even to the United States since the beginning of the War on “Terror” following the 9/11 attacks. The presence of U.S. troops in first Afghanistan and eventually Iraq created a deeper, fractious split between Sunni’s and Shias who now were trying to use the power of the United States military to spur their political gains (Nasr, 206-7). Inevitably this led to violent, covert acts by Islamic fundamentalists groups (in this case Sunni) such as al-Qaeda and the Taliban fought to suppress Shia political power. These sectarian and religious divisions have only increased as the United States has increased its presence in the region. While not digressing to far from the point at hand, Nasr proves that the enduring divisions within the Middle Eastern community were exacerbated by not only the 1979 Islamic revolution but the 2001 War on “Terror” as well. The increased tension in the area has led to millions of refugees that have fled or been displaced by war, these statistics will be evaluated and presented as the blog progresses.