We are led to believe that a 7th century religious division is the best explanation for a 21st century political disease. We are to accept that an ancient hatred between two major trends of Islam, Sunni and Shia, explains a very secular and very modern project of organising people around the concept of a nation state. Some go so far as to assert that the current wars in Iraq and the wider region are the Middle-East’s own version of Europe’s Thirty Years’ War, which led to the fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire.
On the face of it, it’s hard to contest this narrative, not least because of the sectarian divisions that plague Syria and Iraq, plus the armed mobilisation of militant Sunni and Shia groups across the region. The fighting has all the appearance of religious proxy wars. This popular narrative, though, is misleading; it is a very lazy assessment of regional ills.
Taking questionable assumptions about western history and using them to explain the Middle East is even more suspect. The widely held (but inaccurate) belief in religion’s unique capacity for violence has become an established way to present explanations; a cultural meme, in fact, and the first to be invoked when violence is unleashed. Aside from its inaccuracy, we are also guilty of historical reductionism if we apply this belief to the Middle East. Islam and, by extension, the region from which it sprang lack the familiar features to make a useful historical comparison because the religion did not spawn an equivalent of the Holy Roman Empire.