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The Sunni-Shiite SwitchHow two Islamic sects traded places in the American mind.

By David Plotz
Posted Friday, Nov. 16, 2001, at 11:12 AM ET
Illustration by Robert Neubecker

This is not the first time the United States has become obsessed with an Islamic terrorist menace. For a decade after the Iranian revolution of 1979, Americans had nightmares about militant Muslims. But they were not the same militant Muslims that we fear today.

Ayatollah Khomeini had galvanized Shiite masses—Shiites are a minority sect of Islam who are dominant in Iran—for his revolution, and Shiites were soon implicated in appalling attacks on Americans. In 1979, Shiite militants took U.S. Embassy personnel hostage in Tehran. During the '80s, Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shiite terrorist operation in Lebanon, took hostages, hijacked airplanes, and murdered hundreds of Americans in suicide bombings at the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut. Shiites, as one newspaper put it at the time, "are synonymous with terror in the American consciousness."

American intelligence experts warned that Shiite training camps in the Iranian mountains were preparing thousands of militants for a holy war against the United States. Charismatic, homicidal Shiite imams were providing theological armor for the young warriors, preaching on the corruption of the modern West and on the need to rebuild the Muslim empire. A "Shiite International" in Tehran was allegedly coordinating the anti-American jihad. Americans grew wary of Shiites in the United States: Young Iranian students were suspect.

The Shiite scare was founded partly on the belief that Shiites were inherently prone to anti-Western violence. American analysts examined Shiite religious practices and asserted that the heart of Shiah Islam was a "not rational," "violently reactionary" "extremism." Fascination with martyrdom supposedly defined Shiites. Their central holiday remembers the martyrdom of Hussein, one of Muhammad's descendents, and some Shiites commemorate by flagellating themselves with whips. A reporter dubbed this "a ceremony that spawns suicide bombers."

Still, Americans could console themselves that not all Islam posed such mortal danger. Shiite extremism was contrasted with dominant Sunni Islam, which was "rational" and "moderate" and valued power and stability. We could deal with Sunnis: Sunni Egypt and Saudi Arabia were considered buttresses against Shiite madness.

But now, in the American mind, Shiites have become Sunnis, and Sunnis have become Shiites. We say the same things about the zealous Sunni followers of Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban that used to be said about Shiite militants. According to intelligence experts, Bin Laden's training camps in the Afghan mountains have prepared thousands of militants for a holy war against the United States. Charismatic, homicidal Sunni clerics are providing theological armor for the young warriors, preaching on the corruption of the modern West and on the need to rebuild the Muslim empire. A single group, al-Qaida, is supposedly coordinating the global jihad. Americans have grown wary of Sunnis in the United States, especially young Saudi men.

As with the Shiite anxiety, there is a belief that this particular kind of fundamentalist Islam is inherently violent. The belligerent Wahhabism of Bin Laden and the Taliban is a "warrior religion," a "steel-tipped Islamic fundamentalism." It, too, celebrates the idea of martyrdom and views violence as "a means of purifying a corrupt world."

Our old Shiite enemies, on the other hand, are now seen as moderates. Iran despises the Taliban and Bin Laden: The Taliban has murdered Afghan Shiites and executed Iranian diplomats. So it's not surprising that Iranian elected leaders, notably President Mohammed Khatami, have made friendly overtures toward the United States since Sept. 11. American media coverage now emphasizes that Iran is much more democratic than its neighbors, that it has abandoned—or at least curtailed—its support for Islamic extremists, and that it is the most stable, rational state in the region.

(The Sunni-Shiite exchange has even infected Capitol Hill culture. A few years ago, liberals would call Christian conservatives "the Shiite wing of the Republican party." These days, lefties refer to Christian conservatives as "The American Taliban.")

Of course there are still extremist Shiites, and relatively moderate Sunnis still control the biggest Islamic states. But why have Sunnis and Shiites traded places in the American Zeitgeist? Shiites have shed their dreadful American reputation because Shiite extremists really have moderated. The Iranian revolution is 22 years old. Iran is no longer an infant state: It is an adult. It has lost a war with Iraq and lost its spiritual leader Khomeini. It no longer preaches global Islamic revolution. Iranians lived with militant religion for years, saw how oppressive it was, and have (partly) democratized and (slightly) loosened up as a consequence.

There are other reasons why Americans increasingly sympathize with Shiites. The United States used to support despicable Saddam Hussein in order to check Shiite Iran. But since Iraq's 1990 Kuwait invasion, Hussein has been enemy No. 1. Iran, the enemy of our enemy, somehow seemed kindlier, even though its anti-Americanism persisted. Much of the internal opposition to Saddam has come from Shiites in Southern Iraq, a group Saddam has brutalized. Though the United States has abandoned them militarily, their horrible suffering has been a reminder that Shiites are an oppressed minority in most of the Islamic world. And the most bloody-minded Shiite group, Hezbollah, has moderated. Now that Israel has left Lebanon and Lebanon's civil war has ended, Hezbollah has cut back on terrorism. It hasn't attacked American targets in more than a decade. Hezbollah, like the PLO, behaves more like a political operation now than a terrorist army: Its chief goal is winning political power in Lebanon.

We have grown disenchanted with Sunnis because Sunni extremism has surged even as Shiite militancy has waned. Part of the Sunni radicalization can be blamed on blow-back. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the United States, hand in hand with Saudi Arabia, decided to fund Islamic fighters in Afghanistan. The U.S. policy was intended to repel the Communist invasion and check Iranian extremism next door.

The results are now dismally familiar. Thousands of fervent Sunni Arabs—such as Bin Laden—traveled to Afghanistan to join the war, supplied and armed by American dollars. The Saudis have ended up funding thousands of Islamic schools—madrasahs—that indoctrinated tens of thousands of boys in militant, jihad-centric Islam. (Also, in order to mollify domestic Wahhabi zealots, Saudi Arabia allowed them to effectively take over its universities, which are now churning out extremist clerics by the hundreds.) After the Soviet defeat, the "Afghan Arabs" returned home, bringing jihad ardor back to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, and the rest of the Arab world, galvanizing nascent Islamic rebellions.

In the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the Palestinian Authority has lost influence throughout the past five years as Palestinians recognized its corruption and weakness. Hamas and Islamic Jihad, extremist religious organizations, have filled the vacuum, proselytizing and radicalizing the secular Palestinian population and turning Arafat's political struggle for a Palestinian state into an Islamic holy war against Israel.

As there was a generation ago, there is a surging Islamic jihad, fomented by zealous clerics and soldiers who preach the glory of martyrdom, the corruption of most Arab governments, and the villainy of the United States and Israel. It has taken two decades, two massive regional wars, and an Israeli retreat for the Shiite fire to cool. Who knows how long it will take for this newer Sunni rage to burn itself out?

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David Plotz is Slate's deputy editor. He is the author of The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank. You can e-mail him at .
Illustration by Robert Neubecker.
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Mr. Plotz's excellent review of U.S. shifting attitudes between Shiite and Sunni Moslems seems the most practical demonstration yet that the war on terrorism is probably not fundamentally against, nor caused by, Islam. Rather, anti-U.S. sentiment in the Middle East, and our reaction to it, seems driven primarily by economic dissatisfaction, with some political, ethnic, and (yes) religious issues thrown into the mix. In addition, of course, there is the traditional U.S. foreign policy of dividing the world up neatly into the good guys (i.e. just like us) and bad guys (i.e. evil empires). Hence, the change in attitude towards Shiites in Iran is partly influenced by the stabilization of the Islamic revolution into a national government and partly our perception of Shiites as a common enemy to an immediate threat. The lesson seems to be that we could help assure friendlier relations with Afghanistan, over the Iranian model, from day one by helping to ensure not only a more stable government but also a more stable and prosperous economy. In addition, judging the future government by its actions rather than its rhetoric toward us may also be helpful.

--The Bell

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Might it be possible that the current disputes aren't actually caused by Sunni Islam, but that the Islamic countries that are now aggrieved at the United States happen to be predominantly Sunni? Might it be also possible that older U.S. disputes with Iran and Lebanon had nothing specifically to do with Shiite Islam either? Since the 80s, the U.S. hasn't changed course to pursue a political agenda that's particularly anti-Sunni but more tolerable to Shiites (unless you think the Gulf War was undertaken to please Iran). It seems we're just pissing off people in different countries now, and those countries happen to be predominantly Sunni.

--Captain Roy Voyager

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The one problem with this article is that it views Shiite as a single group. They're not. Just like Christian protestants, Shiites are divided into several different sects. There are the Twelvers who dominate in Iran, the Ismailis, the Alawis, whose numbers include the Assads of Syria, the Druze, the Zaidis and probably others... Talking about Shiite radicalism would be like looking at the Southern Baptists and speaking of Protestant fundamentalism.

--W.E.White

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(11/19)

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