“ISIL massacres Shi'a in Iraq”, “Iran wants to Persianise the Arab world”, “Sunni extremist blows up Shi'a mosque in Kuwait”. Headlines like these dominate current media reports about western Asia, conveying the impression that sectarian violence sparked by tempestuous ideologies is at the root of the region's conflicts. Most of this journalism is simplistic and some of it is plainly wrong. There are no endemic patterns of hatred between Arabs, Persians, Sunni and Shi'a; narratives based on sectarianism are unconvincing. Serious research reveals that none of the traumas that the people of the region are experiencing can be explained simply in terms of a continuous conflict between Shia and Sunni and/or Arab and Persian.
The emotive issue of Syria is an obvious place to start to expose the flaws in the sectarian approach. Iran supports the Assad government, the argument goes, because the core of the Syrian state is Alawite, a sub-branch of Shi’ism. But there are at least three reasons why the idea that a sectarian bond explains Iranian backing for Damascus is wrong.
First, scholars are well aware that the Assad dynasty did not place its ideological bets on religion or a sect. Under the Assads, the ideological foundation of the Syrian state was engineered around Ba’athism, a branch of secular Arab nationalism. Indeed, as members of a minority sect, the Assads were determined to flush out any sectarian references in the official discourse of the state. Syrian children were taught about the glories of Arab history, not the legitimacy of the Alawites or some kind of Shi'a brotherhood. The same is true for Iraq under Saddam Hussein, the Assads' fellow Ba'athist leader, who was as much non-Sunni as the Assads were non-Shi'a.
