The Shia Revival Quotes

“Better sixty years of tyranny than a single day of civil strife.”
― Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future

“We live in an age of globalisation, but also one of identity politics. It is as if our world is expanding and contracting at the same time.”
― Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future

“We live in an age of globalisation, but also one of identity politics. It is as if our world is expanding and contacting at the same time.”
― Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future

“Ultimately, the character of the region [the Middle East] will be decided in the crucible of Shia revival and the Sunni response to it.”
― Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future

“The Shia-Sunni conflict is at once a struggle for the soul of Islam… and a manifestation of the kind of tribal wars of ethnicities and identities… with which humanity has become wearily familiar.”
― Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future

“A grassroots outpouring of sympathy for the victims of September 11 occurred on the streets in only two places in the Muslim world, both within days of the collapse of the twin towers and both among the Shia. The first was in Iran, where tens of thousands snubbed their government to go into the streets of Tehran and hold a candlelight vigil in solidarity with victims of the attacks. The second was in Karachi, where a local party that is closely associated with the city’s Shia33 broke with the public mood in Pakistan to gather thousands to denounce terrorism.34 What followed September 11 in Afghanistan and Iraq has only strengthened these feelings. The Shia in Afghanistan, between 20 and 25 percent of the population, were brutalized by the Taliban. The constitution adopted in that country in 2003 has broken with tradition to allow a Shia to become president and to recognize Shia law. The Shia have come out from the margins to join the government and take their place in public life. The violent face of Sunni militancy in Iraq underscores the divergent paths that Sunni and Shia politics are taking.”
― Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future

“According to one estimate, of the roughly 1200 foreign fighters captured in Syria between summer 2003 and summer 2005, fully 85 percent were Saudis.24 It is not clear who financed their recruitment, training, and travel from Saudi Arabia to Syria and on to Iraq. It is clear, however, that Wahhabi and Salafi clerics and activists in the kingdom encouraged them to join the anti-Shia, anti-American jihad in Iraq. The sermons that call the youth to jihad in Iraq reek of anti-Americanism, but just as important, if not more so, they echo the old Wahhabi hatred of the Shia. War on America is now war on Shiism, and war on Shiism is war on America.”
― Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future

“Iran is the only country in the Middle East where a former head of state has stepped down from power at the end of his constitutionally mandated term of office and continues to live peacefully in his own home. The undeniable and serious flaws in their country’s electoral process have not prevented Iranians from learning about democratic practices and internalizing democracy-friendly values. Indeed, the debate over democracy has been near the heart of Iranian politics for a decade now. The years since the early 1990s have also been a time of intense discussions about religious reform in Iran. A group of Shia intellectuals, including some clerics, have questioned the authoritarian bent of Khomeini’s velayat-e faqih and argued for both limiting the powers of Iran’s clerical leaders and reconciling religion with democracy.”
― Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future

“There are organizational as well as ideological ties that bind Sunni sectarians, Arab and Asian alike, with Sunni Arab extremists. While outside the Muslim world the violent anti-Westernism of the Taliban and al-Qaeda appears most prominent, there can be no question that intense hatred of Shias and Shiism is an important motive for both these Sunni terror groups. The Taliban, al-Qaeda, and various Pakistani Sunni extremists fought side by side during the Afghan internal strife of the 1990s. Indeed, most of the murders of Shias at Mazar-i Sharif and Bamiyan appear to have been committed by Pakistani killers from Sipah-i Sahaba, who nearly started a war with Iran when they overran the Iranian consulate in Mazar-i Sharif in 1998 and slaughtered eleven diplomats.”
― Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future

“Riyadh’s strategy of turning militant Sunnism into a growth stock raised few Western eyebrows right through the 1990s, when Iran and its brand of Shia extremism still seemed to be the most dangerous face of Islam and the main threats to Western interests. It was the Shia who popped first into Western minds when Westerners thought about anti-Americanism, revolution, terrorism, hostage-taking, and suicide bomb attacks. The political fervor that emanated from Tehran and the kind of violence that it perpetrated were seen as flowing naturally from the Shias’ apocalyptic bent and cult of martyrdom. Even hotheaded Sunnis seemed less dangerous by comparison. They may have been hard-shell reactionaries who despised modern and Western ways, the thinking went, but they entertained no religious doctrines bloodthirsty enough to match those of the Shia, with their fixation on killing and dying for the cause. This inclined the West toward complacency when it came to Sunni extremism and its spread, first to Pakistan, then to Talibanera Afghanistan, and then across Central Asia. Also largely unnoticed was Sunni sectarianism’s role in the horrors visited upon Iraq’s Shias after the first Gulf war and the failed uprising of 1991.”
― Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future

“One of Saudi Arabia’s aims was to stretch that Sunni wall from Pakistan north through Afghanistan and into Central Asia. The brand of radical Islam that began spreading across Central Asia and the Caucasus in the 1990s did not come from Iran but was a Sunni radicalism born of the deliberate Saudi policy of containing Iran.”
― Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future

“Beyond the nonnegotiables of rule by the ulama and the enactment of Islamic law, Khomeini had never given much thought to what an Islamic state should look like. He once famously answered a question about his economic policies by declaring that “economics is for donkeys.” Later he observed in his dour way that “we did not make a revolution to slash the price of watermelon.” Khomeini, in short, was a classic big-picture man. To him, the details of governance mattered little, if at all. Still, his lieutenants had a country to run. Many borrowed ideas from the copious works of Sunni fundamentalist thinkers in Pakistan and the Arab world to give shape to the Islamic Republic. The state that Khomeini built would be an intolerant theocracy in which Islamic law was narrowly interpreted and implemented to limit individual and minority rights and erase all Western influences on society and culture.”
― Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future

“That cult of martyrdom proved equally important to Shia politics in Lebanon, where Hezbollah used it to launch its campaign of suicide bombing against the Israeli army in the 1980s. The willingness to die for the Shia cause was a watershed in Middle East politics. It gave Iran’s revolutionary Islamic regime an edge in pursuing its domestic and international goals, and it made Islamic extremism and terrorism more lethal by encouraging what were in the 1980s called “martyrdom missions.” In the Middle Eastern context at least (the Hindu Tamils of Sri Lanka have also extensively used suicide bombers), willingness to die for the cause has until fairly recently been seen as a predominantly Shia phenomenon, tied to the myths of Karbala and the Twelfth Imam.”
― Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future

“Many nights during the war, Iranian soldiers would wake up to see a white-shrouded figure on a white horse blessing them. These apparitions of the Twelfth Imam were professional actors sent to boost morale. The common soldiers, often peasant boys raised in an atmosphere of simple piety, would then carry the tale to their relatives and friends in the villages and small towns they called home, if they lived to make it home.”
― Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future

“It is clear today that America cannot take comfort in an imagined future for the Middle East, and cannot force the realization of that future. Such an approach guided the path to war in Iraq and has proven to be unworkable. The lesson of Iraq is that trying to force a future of its liking will hasten the advent of those outcomes that the United States most wishes to avoid. Through occupation of Iraq, America has actually made the case for radical Islam—that ours is a war on Islam—encouraging anti-Americanism and fueling extremism and terrorism. The reality that will shape the future of the Middle East is not the debates over democracy or globalization that the Iraq war was supposed to have jump-started but the conflicts between Shias and Sunnis that it precipitated. In time we will come to see this as a central legacy of the Iraq war.”
― Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future

“Heed not the blind eye, the echoing ear, nor yet the tongue, but bring to this great debate the test of reason. —Parmenides”
― Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future