Great book on the Arab Shias
Till I read this book I have lazily summed up the religious and racial divide of the Middle East as Arabs-Sunnis versus Iranians-Shias. The whole focus of this excellent book is on the Arab Shias outside Iran, something I knew virtually nothing about in any detail. I don't think there's much out there on this. The author looks at the history of the Shias of Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Iraq and their present position in the political landscape and a strong irony emerges as two contradictory elements in the story keep on surfacing. For these Arab Shias have faced constant discrimination and worse from Sunni Arabs: in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain Shias have not been allowed to join the police or the army; have been deliberately kept at the lower end of the job market, indeed there is a detailed section on how they were all thrown out of the lucrative Bahrain pearl industry; and of course in Iraq there was outright persecution against the Shias in the southern marshes. And yet, though treated as second class citizens in their own lands, these Shias have remained loyal Arabs, best seen when they took the brunt of the attacks of their co-religionists when Ayatollah Khomeini was trying to get to Jerusalem via Baghdad during the Iran-Iraq war. At least this made clear that in times of war patriotism is stronger than religious affiliation, something Europe had already learned. But it has still left the Shias wanting a fair deal in the countries they were willing to fight for. The likely outcome is also clothed in irony. For the same US led invasion of Iraq in the name of democracy has already vastly improved the position of the Shias, but the same US supported regimes in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain is keeping their systems of religious apartheid seemingly in place, or at least there are no imminent signs of Shia and Sunni equality breaking out. I would warmly recommend this book to anyone who wants to deepen their understanding of the Middle East, even though for me it meant abandoning a rather simple way of looking at things.
Till I read this book I have lazily summed up the religious and racial divide of the Middle East as Arabs-Sunnis versus Iranians-Shias. The whole focus of this excellent book is on the Arab Shias outside Iran, something I knew virtually nothing about in any detail. I don't think there's much out there on this. The author looks at the history of the Shias of Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Iraq and their present position in the political landscape and a strong irony emerges as two contradictory elements in the story keep on surfacing. For these Arab Shias have faced constant discrimination and worse from Sunni Arabs: in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain Shias have not been allowed to join the police or the army; have been deliberately kept at the lower end of the job market, indeed there is a detailed section on how they were all thrown out of the lucrative Bahrain pearl industry; and of course in Iraq there was outright persecution against the Shias in the southern marshes. And yet, though treated as second class citizens in their own lands, these Shias have remained loyal Arabs, best seen when they took the brunt of the attacks of their co-religionists when Ayatollah Khomeini was trying to get to Jerusalem via Baghdad during the Iran-Iraq war. At least this made clear that in times of war patriotism is stronger than religious affiliation, something Europe had already learned. But it has still left the Shias wanting a fair deal in the countries they were willing to fight for. The likely outcome is also clothed in irony. For the same US led invasion of Iraq in the name of democracy has already vastly improved the position of the Shias, but the same US supported regimes in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain is keeping their systems of religious apartheid seemingly in place, or at least there are no imminent signs of Shia and Sunni equality breaking out. I would warmly recommend this book to anyone who wants to deepen their understanding of the Middle East, even though for me it meant abandoning a rather simple way of looking at things.
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