Was Sectarian Strife Inevitable? Ctd

A reader grabs the question by the horns:

I am a longtime reader and feel the need to weigh in on this ongoing debate about sectarianism in Iraq. I wrote my dissertation (under the supervision of Juan Cole) about Iraqi anti-colonialism during the era of indirect British rule (1932-1958) and am currently working on a book that expands the project a bit to cover 1914-1963. As of this fall, I will be an assistant professor of history.

In my view, there is something really problematic about the way in which this debate about sectarianism in Iraq is evolving. On one side we have the argument that sectarianism is an inescapable element of a primordial culture, and that the current violence is the inevitable consequence of the (British) colonial myopia that forced Sunnis, Shi’a, and Kurds into an artificial nation-state. On the other side, we have the argument that sectarianism is a fundamentally modern phenomenon, the entirely avoidable outgrowth of an (American) imperial ignorance that insisted on viewing Iraq as a collection of distinct sects and proportioning power and influence along sectarian lines.

Both arguments ignore the basic realities of Iraqi history between 1920 and 2003.

The constructionists, as you have noted, often fail to take seriously the significance of sectarian violence in the aftermath of the Gulf War, either ignoring the brutal suppression of the Shi’a intifada or dismissing it is an act of political brutality that was statistically (but not ideologically) sectarian. The primordialists, though, are guilty of ignoring an earlier period of communal coexistence in the 1940s and 1950s. Fanar Haddad, Reidar Visser, Sinan Antoon and other constructionists are on very solid ground when they point to this period, which was absolutely not an historical mirage or a superficial alliance of collective interests, as the casual observer might assume. It is true that the Kurds were never entirely integrated into this burgeoning sense of Iraqi collectivity, but the Kurdish issue is not exactly what we have in mind when we talk about sectarianism in Iraq.

So what the hell really happened, then? If we can’t simply wave our hand and bemoan the original sins of British colonialism in setting this whole tragedy in motion OR point our finger at the neo-conservatives for making this avoidable bloodshed inevitable, how can we account for what is happening? Fanar Haddad might be a bit reductive in the Vox interview that you cited – though he does explicitly reference the Iranian Revolution and the rebellion of 1991 as part of a “cumulative process” of deepening sectarianism, but his book Sectarianism in Iraq gives far greater attention to the formation of sectarianism before and after 2003.

The language of today’s sectarianism is a gradual and logical outgrowth of the narrative of shu’ubiyya, a reference to Persian Muslims who supposedly worked to undermine Arab cultural and political unity in the ‘Abbasid period. This narrative was heavily utilized during Saddam during the Iran-Iraq War and during the suppression of the 1991 uprising, but its modern usage really dates back to the way that Arab nationalists talked about the Iraqi Communists during the Qasim years (1958-1963). Again, given the concentration of Shi’a in the Iraqi Communist Party, the casual observer might insist that this was surely just primordial sectarianism cast in different ideological terms, but I contend that the historical evidence weighs strongly against that conclusion. Some of the principle proponents of this anti-communist shu’ubiyya discourse were Shi’a, like the famous poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab. The political violence that followed the 1958 Revolution tended to gradually undermine the secular basis of the dominant political parties and to replace these modern political identities with older loyalties rooted in ethnic and religious ties.

There is obviously a very complex historical argument that lies beneath this brief sketch, but it is really important to note that the tragedy of Iraq ought to be seen as part of the broader trajectory of secularism and socialism in decline. The fact that the decline of ideological and class loyalties in Iraq has given rose to bloody and violent sectarian strife does not necessarily indicate that sectarianism was lurking beneath the surface all along. The failures of British colonialism and Hashemite nation building, the violence of both communist and anti-communist partisans in the early 1960s, the unique depravity of Saddam Hussein, the incompetence and unforgivable ignorance of the American neo-conservatives, the foolish policies pursued by Nuri al-Maliki, the despicable role played by the Saudis, and the grotesque ideology of the Jihadis have all played their own important roles. It would be quite a pity, though, to ignore the historical significance of coexistence in mid-century Iraq and chalk this all up to the primordial hatreds of a backwards civilization.

I do really appreciate and respect you for engaging in this debate at a time when so many Americans simply want to shake their heads.