The sectarian strife that we are seeing (for example, between Sunnis and Shiites) is a byproduct of external factors and the political machinations of the region's leaders. In the case of Iraq, prior to the US invasion, Sunnis and Shiites lived as neighbors and even intermarried. When the US presence destroyed the country's political order, violence engulfed the country. The tension, in turn, caused the social fabric to tear at the sectarian boundaries.
Especially under circumstances of crisis, people band together by what they hold in common: nationality, religion, race, ethnicity, and so on. That sectarian differences became pronounced in wartime Iraq is not a comment on Iraqi or Arab society. As Shabi does well to underline, the Iraqi people long for centralized political stability. They have instead been subjected to the degenerative turmoil created by a foreign power and subsequently exacerbated by insurgency and politics.
In a Zogby report (Nov. 2011) on Iraqi opinion, Iraqis were asked to rate in order of importance a list of issues facing their country, for instance, healthcare, education, democracy, women's rights, and so forth. The two items that came out on top were "expanding employment opportunities" and "combating extremism and terrorism." "These two issues are, by far," the report observes, "the most important to Shia and Sunni Arabs alike."
In Shabi's piece there is an embedded link to a Thomas Friedman column in the New York Times, wherein he addresses the issue of sectarianism, employing his customary mode of analysis:
The [political, military] center exists in these countries [Libya, Syria, Iraq], but it is weak and unorganized. It's because these are pluralistic societies—mixtures of tribes and religious sects, namely Shiites, Sunnis, Christians, Kurds, Druze and Turkmen—but they lack any sense of citizenship or deep ethic of pluralism. That is, tolerance, cooperation and compromise. They could hold together as long as there was a dictator to "protect" (and divide) everyone from everyone else. But when the dictator goes, and you are a pluralistic society but lack pluralism, you can't build anything because there is never enough trust for one community to cede power to another—not without an army of the center to protect everyone from everyone.
Likewise, in 1899, Senator Albert Beveridge drew similar conclusions when, in the context of US operations in the Philippines, he remarked: "the turbulent children know not what they do."
The Beveridge-Friedman perspective offers the pleasure and satisfaction of clarity, tidiness, and conviction, but at the expense of accuracy.
The focus on religion, sectarianism, ethnicity, though real factors, tends to conceal the population. And it's the population—who it is and what it wants—that offers, as Shabi says, "a path to what is possible." As she illustrates:
My father, and many Iraqis like him, often spoke of a pluralism in his home country that was so unselfconscious and everyday as to be remarkable only in hindsight. He defined himself as an Arab-Jew, a hyphenated identity that seemed both obvious and lacking in contradiction. Identities such as his, forged in a different time, are history lessons gifted to us in human form....
Such lessons have much to offer, namely, moving the conversation from false certainty to actual understanding.
