Flawed Summaries of the Sunni-Shi'i Split
More than two decades after 2003, why can't Western news outlets get the basics right?
The FT, on the new Saudi Arabian television series Muawiya:
The high-profile series with lavish sets and epic battle scenes depicts the life of Muawiya ibn Abi Sufyan, a companion of the Prophet Mohammed, who fought a war against the prophet’s cousin and son-in-law Ali ibn Abi Talib, who is revered by Shia Muslims.
[…]
The Shia or Shi’at Ali, meaning the partisans of Ali, refers to those who believe leadership of the Muslim community should remain in the prophet’s bloodline. While Sunnis — who did not support Ali’s claim — now make up the majority of the world’s Muslims, Shia represent an estimated 10-15 per cent of Muslims globally. Iran, Iraq and Bahrain are Shia-majority countries.
This description of the basics of the Sunni-Shi’i schism is a mixture of broadly accepted facts (the percentage of Shi’a in the world, for example, and the countries that are majority Shi’i) and serious distortions and omissions. Here are the key problems:
‘Ali bin Abi Talib (d. 661) was the fourth Caliph and is considered by almost all Sunnis these days to have been one of the Rashidun, meaning the “rightly guided” caliphs. (True, there were some early proto-Sunnis who were much less enthusiastic about ‘Ali than they were about the first two Caliphs, Abu Bakr al-Siddiq and ‘Umar bin al-Khattab, but that kind of perspective is fairly rare today.) So to say that ‘Ali “is revered by Shia Muslims” somehow suggests that he is not revered by Sunnis, which would be a serious mistake. Some Sunnis might prefer a different phrase, perhaps, since “revered” could be a little strong - “held in high regard” might be better - but the key point is that ‘Ali is claimed by both sects, just in different ways.**
Similarly, to say that “Sunnis…did not support Ali’s claim” is actually to make several unwitting interventions in the debate. First, the FT seems to be deciding what ‘Ali actually claimed, which is itself a point of contention. The Shi’a hold that ‘Ali felt himself to be the rightful Imam/leader, and even some Sunni sources indicate that ‘Ali felt he should have succeeded the Prophet Muhammad immediately, but beyond that, Sunni and Shi’i accounts of how ‘Ali reacted to the first three Caliphs’ succession differ markedly. Second, what would it mean precisely to say that “Sunnis…did not support Ali’s claim”? Sunnis today overwhelmingly consider ‘Ali, at the time of his conflict with Mu’awiya, to have been the rightful Caliph and the person with the more correct interpretation of how the conflicts of the time (the aftermath of the killing of the third Caliph, ‘Uthman, above all) should have been handled. So if what the FT means is that Sunnis don’t support the idea that leadership of the Muslim community rests exclusively with the Prophet’s descendants, that’s correct; if what’s meant is that Sunnis didn’t support ‘Ali’s claim to the Caliphate or that they rejected him as a leader, that would be blatantly incorrect.
If one delves into the Western scholarship on the schism, one finds many authors arguing convincingly that the Sunni-Shi’i split took a while to crystallize. The leadership conflicts from the 650s-680s were the origins of the split, but by no means the only decisive period. The academic literature refers to “proto-Sunnis” and “proto-Shi’is” in the first two hundred years or more of Islam. So to say that “Sunnis…did not support Ali’s claim” is problematic on more than one count, and here we could add that it postulates the existence of a group that only existed in very blurry form, at best, at that moment. That kind of point is probably a little too complex to be captured in brief journalistic writeups, but it is crucial - the struggles one sees today over how all these people and events are to be remembered are not struggles over the split, such struggles are the split itself. In other words, the Sunni-Shi’i split is a constant process of remembering, narrating, and debating. It’s better to represent these identities as moving targets than to treat them as historically fixed quantities stemming from a single key moment.
The brief write-up by the FT also misses the real contemporary political significance of Mu’awiya. After all, it was Mu’awiya who did in fact institute a system of dynastic succession, namely the Umayyad Caliphate (661-750). And it was Mu’awiya’s son and successor Yazid who effectively ordered the killing of ‘Ali’s son Husayn at Karbala, present-day Iraq in 680. Yazid’s succession also triggered another conflict with another rival, ‘Abd Allah bin al-Zubayr, who challenged the Umayyads for the Caliphate. Many Sunnis give Mu’awiya a high degree of respect, but I have never heard anyone count him among the Rashidun, and when it comes to the Companions of the Prophet, Mu’awiya and those who converted after the Conquest of Mecca in 630 are almost always given a lower rank by Sunnis (and in the Qur’an itself, one might add) than those who converted before. In any case, the contemporary political significance of Mu’awiya and particularly Yazid has to do with (a) sectarianism and (b) obedience to rulers versus the more revolutionary politics embodied by ‘Abd Allah bin al-Zubayr and Husayn - and it should be noted that even though Husayn is arguably the ultimate symbol for the Shi’a*, one can find many Sunnis who are much more sympathetic to Husayn than to Yazid. And one can find serious sympathy for Ibn al-Zubayr in the Sunni milieu too. Meanwhile, obedience to rulers is a major point of debate in the contemporary Sunni world and especially in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, with some prominent clerics in the Gulf and elsewhere arguing that political quietism is a religious duty and that stability is better than purity. So, bottom line, a series that centers and valorizes Mu’awiya, at this particular moment in time, is inevitably intervening in complex ways in a debate about the relationship between Muslims and their rulers.
I’m picking on the FT because throughout the whole of my adult lifetime, Western politicians and journalists have been obsessed with the Sunni-Shi’i conflict but often without accurately capturing even the basics. So many politicians refer to “ancient hatreds in the Middle East” without considering (or, perhaps, acknowledging) that recent politics has enflamed sectarian identities. And then the efforts at summarizing the roots of the Sunni-Shi’i split often falter, as in this example from the FT, because of hasty characterizations and a lack of attention to how the key claims actually overlap in crucial ways. Misunderstandings of the Sunni-Shi’i split, and external efforts to impose hard and fast sectarian identities on people, can have real-world consequences, especially if Muslims today are assumed to act reflexively on the basis of identities supposedly derived in a straight line from the events of the seventh century.
There are some fairly lucid and concise ways of explaining the Sunni-Shi’i conflict, but somehow they prove elusive for many commentators. So be alert, in policy and journalistic contexts, for the many deliberate and unwitting misrepresentations that circulate.
*For example, when Qasem Soleimani was killed in 2020, propaganda depicted him meeting Husayn.
**Note too that figures such as Muhammad al-Baqir and Ja’far al-Sadiq, the fifth and sixth Imams for most Shi’a, are also claimed by Sunnis, albeit as scholarly authorities rather than as political leaders.