The Fertile Crescent

Outside the Arabian Peninsula, isolation (whether natural or self-imposed) is no longer a major determinant of religious or political attitudes. That is not to say that the physical constraints of geography have not had a role to play in the patterning of religious affiliation (as in the mountains of Lebanon and Sy ria or the marshes of southern Iraq); but the great sweep of fertile lands that loop the peninsula in the north have never been as wholly remote from currents of change as the more secluded sectors of Arabia proper.

On the whole, religion has been a less significant force in the modern period than politics, although there are visible signs that the balance may be shifting again (or, at least, that religious factors are re-entering the political arena in a significant way). In Syria, for example, none of the constitutions promulgated since independence in 1941 has recog­nised Islam as the state refigion. Inevitably, this has led to a state of confronta­tion between religious conservatives and the state, a confrontation which has at times exploded in violence, as in the anti-constitution riots of 1973 or the more recent massacres of the Muslim Brothers in Hama and elsewhere. In Lebanon, the enormous potential for internal divisions along religious lines made it imperative from the beginning that the new state be run on a secular rather than confessional basis, providing a formula for national unity that proved remarkably successful until a deterioration in the political consensus and the introduction of external agents of stress led in recent years to a recrudescence of interreligious feuding.

At the same time, the religious balance is an increas­ingly sensitive and potentially destabilising factor in at least three countries: Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. The rapid growth of the Lebanese Shi'i population in this century means that the Shi‘a are now probably the largest religious minority, while their increasing militancy and the fragmentation of the Christian, Sunni and Druze elements in the country combine to make them potentially the most important force in Lebanese politics. Whereas Shi'i fundamentalism in Iran has gone largely unchallenged by the small Sunni minority there, the Lebanese situation offers the long-term prospect ofa clash between Shi'i and Sunni extremists.

In Syria, the Alawi (Nusayri) faction exercises a disproportionate influence through its effective control of the ruling Ba'th

party and the armed forces. Here again, it is likely that the Sunni-Shi'i division will overflow into armed violence. Although the Alawis have tradi­tionally been regarded with suspicion by mainstream Shi'is and condemned by them asghulat or ‘extremists’, they were recently accorded official recog­nition as legitimate Muslims by the Imam Musa al-Sadr, leader of the Lebanese Shi‘i community until his disappearance in 1978. The brutal treat­ment meted out to fundamentalist Sunnis by the Alawi ruling elite in Syria (which includes President Hafiz Asad) is almost certain to lead to further conflict along sectarian lines.

By contrast, the Iraqi Ba'thists are predominantly Sunni (although the reverse was true at the time of the party’s inception there), a situation that reflects the traditional imbalance of power in the country, where a Sunni minority rules over a largely rural and impoverished Shi'i majority. It is not only its proximity to Iran that threatens Iraq, but also the presence within its borders of a religious community which, however deprived it may be in economic terms, has developed an articulate political presence in the past two centuries. It was in the Iraqi shrine centres of Najaf and Karbala during the late eighteenth century that Shi'i scholars first developed the theories of clerical supremacy that gave them a growing voice in political affairs, particularly in neighbouring Iran. In the present century, the Shi'i clergy were active in leading opposition to British rule after the First World War. Although this role waned somewhat from the 1930s, after the coup in 1968 the Shi'a of Iraq again turned in large numbers to their religious leaders. A number of Shi'i groups, of which the Dawa party is the most prominent, are active in organising opposition to the present regime.