The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) has finally attained success in proclaiming establishment of the Islamic State in western Iraq and north-eastern Syria, declaring its chief, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as 'Caliph of the Muslims' and decreeing that all national and tribal boundaries spanning the Muslim world are invalid. For now, the ISIS has managed to undo, even if partially, the arbitrary lines of division the British and the French drew under the secret Sykes-Picot agreement, following Turkey's defeat in the World War I, to carve out their respective areas of control and influence from the Ottoman Empire's Arab provinces.
Strangely enough, the ISIS has achieved success not on its own steam, but with the help of leaders of Sunni tribes as well as former officials of Saddam Hussein's secular Baathist regime. A demoralised Iraqi Army gave ground to the rebels without a fight. It remains to be seen how long the Baathists - mostly modern, well educated people- will be able to live under Islamic extremists' rule. Before long, the caliphate is to face internal challenge from these people. And its plan to capture Baghdad and restore the city's past status as the capital of Islamic caliphate seems a bit too ambitious. According to military experts, the Maliki government lacks the ability to wrest back the lost Sunni provinces, but can effectively defend the capital and other Shia dominated parts of the country. The Kurds in the north have already called a referendum on the question of independence. Most likely, Iraq will eventually disintegrate into Shia, Sunni and Kurd countries unless some dramatic political development in Baghdad leads to the formation of a unity government giving Sunnis due share in power.
The coming into being of a Sunni caliphate has prompted some analysts in this country to declare that (a) the Arabs are unfit for democracy; and (b) the old Shia-Sunni divide defines the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Syria. Neither the current facts nor history supports these propositions.
It is all about power politics: local, regional, and international. As proof of the so-called Arab indifference towards democracy, it is argued that wherever given an opportunity to exercise the right to vote, the people return Islamist parties to power, such as Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Islamic Brotherhood in Egypt. Islamists make people nervous, understandably so, because of a tendency to curb social freedoms and bad treatment of religious minorities. Nonetheless, their style of governance is different in different countries, determined by the level of socio-economic development of their respective societies. More to the point, those who come to power through vote, such as the Justice and Development Party government in Turkey, are open-minded and tolerant of pluralism unlike those having relied on the power of the gun, such as the clerics ruling Iran, Afghanistan's erstwhile Taliban, and now the ISIS.
The people in the Arab world for long have lived under oppressive regimes to a dying up to Western governments and protecting, on their behalf, the rogue state of Israel. The Islamists have been standing up to these forces of oppression, and hence winning public support in elections. In Egypt, seen as the leader of the Arab world, the Brotherhood rather than liberal elements consistently gave tough resistance to authoritarian pro-Western regimes of Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak. It should not be surprising therefore if they got the majority vote in that country's first-ever free elections.
It is presumptuous of anyone to say the Arabs do not need democracy. People everywhere aspire to have freedom and democratic rights. The problem with the Arab situation is that there are too many extraneous forces actively working to deny the realisation of these aspirations. What has happened in Egypt is illustrative of the problems confronting the Arab peoples.
Those who say the Sunni-Shia divide is part of a historical conflict between the two sects of Islam conveniently overlook both past and current history. The fact of the matter is that Shia and Sunni sects are about as old as the religion itself. Barring an early period of conflict, the two communities lived in peace. From the four centuries of the Ottoman rule up until the Iranian Revolution there is hardly any instance of violent confrontation between the region's Sunni and Shia populations.
The Arabs and Persians (Arab - ajam) have old rivalries unrelated to religious issues. What lent them intensity in our time was Imam Khomeini's fatwa declaring monarchy as alien to Islam, thus provoking a vengeful reaction from the Gulf's Sunni kingdoms. We are all too familiar how this played out in sharpening of sectarian divisions in this country as well. That was bad enough. Then came George W Bush's illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq in 2003. Contrary to his neo-con cabal's calculus, the occupation forces met with stiff resistance led by officers of the disbanded Sunni-dominated Baathist army. They then deliberately incited sectarian strife between the country's Shia-Sunni populations to divert the resistance fighters' attention. Still, the US faced defeat, and made its way out of the country handing power to a ruthless and exclusionist government of a corrupt and incompetent Shia leadership. Their exclusion from political power rather than sectarian sentiments urged western Iraq's Sunnis to join hands with the ISIS, leading to the declaration of the Sunni caliphate.
Equally important, the region's Sunni kingdoms/sheikhdoms have been busy exploiting unrest in Syria and Iraq for the furtherance of their purposes. It is an open secret that they have been financing, arming and training ISIS and other Islamist groups' fighters to oust Shia-led governments of these countries in order to curtail Iran's growing influence in the Arab lands, from Iraq to Syria and onward into Lebanon. The sectarian conflicts we are seeing in Iraq and Syria arise not from the historical sectarian split, but from the present-day power politics.
Those who have been backing the ISIS and other extremist Sunni groups fighting Baghdad and Damascus, of course, have learnt no lessons from the recent history when they did something similar in Afghanistan alongside the US. Caliph Baghdadi's reign may not last long, but the radicalised men with him will last a long time - as did bin Laden and Mullah Omar - to haunt their creators and backers. They are a destabilisation force that can change the Middle East in unpredictable ways.
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