https://www.juancole.com/2025/12/sunni-crescent-middle.html
Apart from some clashes between the Sunnis and the Shi’is under the Ottoman and Safavid empires, the Sunnis and Shi’is have lived together relatively peacefully for centuries. After the wars between Imam Ali and the Umayyads in the 7th century and the martyrdom of Imam Hussein in 680, the Shi’a Imams lived quietist lives and did not challenge the rule of the Umayyads and later the Abbasids.
The Iran-Turkey and Iran-Iraq borders have remained largely unchanged since 1639, when the Ottomans and the Safavids ended their wars, a situation that cannot be said of many European borders.
When the British established their empire in India, they also occupied Afghanistan to create a buffer zone between India and Russia. In 1856, Iranian forces under Naser al-Din Shah besieged and captured Herat, which had been separated from Iran, but the British forces beat them, and the borders with Afghanistan have remained unchanged since then.
From the 6th century BC, Bahrain, Qatar and the small sheikhdoms that were later joined together as the UAE were ruled by Iranian empires, with short periods of Ottoman rule, until they became British protectorates and finally achieved independence in 1971, with an agreement reached with the late Shah of Iran.
So, the myth of Shi’a-Sunni hostility has been created mainly by some Arab regimes to please their Western masters and justify their hostility towards Iran. It is often not realised that the populations of most Middle Eastern countries are mixed. The Shi’is constitute between 60-70% percent of the population in Bahrain, 60-65% in Iraq, 10-13% in Syria, 10-15% in Afghanistan, and even 20-23% in Turkiye and as many as 30-35% in Saudi Arabia. On the other hand, around 10% of the Iranian population is Sunni.
Afghanistan has been regarded as the hotbed of militant Islam since the Americans created the Mujahedin to drag Russia into Afghanistan, and then they created the Taliban to pacify the country and bring Turkmenistan’s oil through Afghanistan to Karachi, which did not materialise.
When working at the BBC, I had a number of very good Afghan colleagues. One day, I asked a group of them if they were Sunnis or Shi’is. They looked at each other in amazement, because they genuinely did not know which sect they belonged to. Then, one of them said, “I suppose we are Sunnis, because we are Pashtuns”.
The use of Shi’a or Sunni affiliation in Iran by the mullahs or in Saudi Arabia and Syria by the Salafis or in the rest of the region has more to do with politics than with religion. These divisions are often created and used by foreign powers in order to divide and rule and to dominate the region.
Nevertheless, this article’s argument is quite valid. Israel will face a bigger threat from a combination of Sunni states, as they constitute a majority of Muslims in the world, and as some of them also have good relations with the West.
https://lnkd.in/e2kjMR8s
F Jahanpour 