Anti-Sunnism and Anti-Shiism: Are They the Same Thing?

- April 9, 2018

As part of a larger inter-disciplinary research project entitled Sectarianism in the Wake of the Arab Revolts (SWAR), the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University, Denmark, convened a one-day workshop last month on “Shi’a and Sunni-Islamism(s) in a sectarianized Middle East.” The workshop took its point of departure in the observation that the debates around “Islamism” have traditionally focused on Sunni Islamist movements with little attention paid to the differences and similarities between Sunni Islamists and Sh’ia Islamists. The workshop therefore sought to address some important questions such as whether or not we should distinguish between Sunni and Shia Islamism or is there enough of a family resemblance for them to be subsumed under one analytical category? What are the differences within Sunni Islamism and Shi’a Islamism? And how do Islamist movements fit into the rise of sectarian identity as a category of political relevance in the contemporary Middle East.

MEI Senior Research Fellow Fanar Haddad’s contribution to the workshop looked at anti-Sunnism and anti-Shi’ism and the widely presumed equivalence between the two. Dr. Haddad’s paper challenges this normative assumption and argues that demographic facts and the relations of power between Sunni and Shi’a political actors have shaped anti-Sunnism and anti-Shi’ism in fundamentally different ways. This has had profound implications for how these identities are imagined and instrumentalized. By assuming equivalence between Sunni-centric and Shi-a-centric actors we not only skew our understanding of what drives competition and conflict between the two, Anti Sunnism and anti-Shi’ism: minorities, majorities and the question of equivalence. but also of what makes for realistic resolutions going forward. As such, neglecting to recognize and analyze this issue creates an intellectual blind-spot in our understanding of sectarian relations that carries considerable policy implications.

Click here for the full paper.