Sunnis, Shi'is, and the Third Sect

Since things seem to have gone quiet in Bahrain apart from hunger strikes, continuing Iran-GCC recriminations, deportation of random Lebanese nationals, the trial of Mansur al-Jamri, and perhaps soon that of Nabil Rajab, I thought I would take a moment to address one issue that's been raised often, both in general commentary on Bahrain and by those who've written in to this site.

Particularly in reference to my Bahrain survey results, a standard retort is something like the following: "Your view of the Bahrain conflict in terms of Sunnis against Shi'is evidences both your misunderstanding of the situation and your having been duped by the Bahraini government, which uses the false Sunni-Shi'i dichotomy for its own political purposes--i.e., to ensure its own survival--when it fact no such thing exists. If you really looked hard, you would see that the basis of political conflict in Bahrain is [insert favorite topic] and not a difference between ordinary Sunnis and Shi'is."

And with this sort of sentiment I would tend to agree--to a point. I would agree and indeed it's indisputable that it is a useful thing for governments--not just Arab Gulf governments or the Bahraini government but all essentially non-democratic governments--to accentuate latent social divisions like ethnic/religious affiliation to foster competition for its patronage. In fact, Bahraini rulers make little secret about the fact that they attempt to play each group off the other. In the words of Justice Minister Khalid bin 'Ali in the run-up to the 2010 elections, the Al Khalifa position themselves a "buffer zone between Sunni and Shi'a." That is to say, the Al Khalifa ensure that neither group gains too big an advantage over the other that it begins to focus its energy on the government itself, just as the U.S. aided both sides of the Iran-Iraq War depending on who seemed to be winning at the time.

Yet at the same time, it makes little sense to deny that the latent social division exists in the first place, to say that Iran and Iraq were essentially not at odds with each other but only went to war as a result of some U.S. scheme to divide and conquer. A women can pit two potential suitors against each other and make them enemies, but that does not mean that they were not essentially in competition to begin with.

Thus it is, I would say, in Bahrain. The "third sect"--the Al Khalifa and their longstanding tribal allies (also known in parliament as "independents")--may be skilled in maximizing societal differences to their own ends, but we shouldn't therefore conclude that there is otherwise no independent source of these differences.

How then would we explain why some cars in Bahrain display the prominent sticker decal "اللهم صلّ على محمد وآل محمد", while others not? Why some houses fly black flags or those exclaiming, "يا حسين يا شهي", while others have the red and white flag of Bahrain? Why the 'Isa Town Mall has separate Sunni and Shi'i mosques at either end? Why each of Bahrain's three main political societies is based on religious affiliation? And so on. The point, again, is not that Bahraini Sunnis and Shi'is are locked in some epic war to decide good and evil, but that it's equally nonsensical to deny altogether any basis of societal division apart from political puppeteering.

Political scientists have long recognized that in patronage-based societies such as describe the Arab Gulf, the only real basis for political coordination is ethnicity or religion. "Consider," says Yates of a rentier society, "the following options for class-based politics: a declining rural-agricultural sector; a state-sponsored industrial sector; a booming service sector. Whence the revolution?" And Luciani, writing in 1989, predicted that in regimes such as Bahrain "parties will develop only to represent cultural or ideological orientations. In practice, Islamic fundamentalism appears to be the only rallying point around which something approaching a party can form in the Arab allocation states."

In the Bahrain of the 1960s and 1970s, socialism/Arab nationalism was (and for Wa'ad supporters perhaps still is) an alternative ideology around which political coordination could occur. That this function has since been overtaken by religious ideology is not unanticipated, and those who point it out are not automatically "sectarian" thinkers "reading from the script that [they] are regurgitating parrot fashion from the Shi'ites," to use the expression of one recent commentator here.

Finally, with specific regard to the results of my Bahrain survey: the Sunni-Shi'i differences that manifest themselves in the answers to survey questions, and that are often highlighted in my analysis, exist. Whether they exist because of machinations by the Bahraini government is another matter entirely. The point is that in Bahrain today ethnicity/religion has become a proxy for the extent to which one supports (tends to gain from) or opposes (tends not to gain from) the socio-political status quo. Most Shi'a oppose the regime on principle insofar as they are outsiders looking in; Sunnis support the government on principle, in order, as 'Adel al-Ma'awdah said in attempting to spur Sunnis to the polls in 2002, "to counter probable harm" that would come from not supporting it. This is the primary lesson of my Bahrain survey, and we continue to see the consequences of it today. So let's stop chalking it up to "sectarian thinking" or lack of familiarity with the "real" bases of politics of Bahrain.

(Also: in the spirit of survey research and not unrelated to this point anyway, don't forget to vote in the new poll I've opened: "Why do you hate this blog?" You have many fine options to choose from.)