The Saudi Intervention In Bahrain Will Fuel Sectarianism, Not Stifle It

[Purveyor]

By Madeleine Bunting
Sunday 20 March 2011 21.00 GMT

A man in jeans and a jumper is standing in the road, waving his arms in brave defiance as bullets crackle around him. A few seconds later, he crumples and is loaded, bleeding, into a car to be taken to hospital. It's a few minutes of footage from the streets of Manama in Bahrain and the kind of incident that has become familiar in the last few months of Arab uprisings. But pause a moment, because this image of extraordinary, reckless bravery can become iconic in different ways to its many web audiences. Do we understand all of them?

Westerners see a political activist; some Sunni Muslims see a Shia troublemaker; and Shias across the Muslim world see a martyr. There is no more powerful a mobilising idea in Shia Islam than the martyr. For nearly one and a half thousand years, Shias have revered Ali, the prophet's son-in-law, who was assassinated, and the prophet's grandson, Hussein, who was killed in battle at Karbala; betrayal has become a passionate narrative of identity.

What has filled western observers with optimism is that the spirit of the Arab protesters in recent months has been so unequivocally non-sectarian. Egyptian Muslims and Christians side by side on the streets, Bahraini Shias and Sunnis insisting they were Bahrainis first and foremost, jointly demanding political reform. But as the revolutions grow older, the highly fluid politics shifts, secular national identities can fragment and religious identities gather force; can the latter be contained? Everyone is haunted by Iraq; after the fall of Saddam, Iraqis celebrated "as Iraqis and as Muslims", but what ensued was the deadliest sectarian conflict the region has ever seen. How does peaceful nationalism fail to hold its ground?

The question is emerging in Egypt, the country at the centre of the Arab spring. The recent burning of a church and the rough handling of a demonstration of Coptic Christians in Cairo has set nerves on edge. Christians are anxious about newly confident Islamist groups; their leaders urged them to vote no to constitutional amendments in the referendum at the weekend, while Islamist leaders were urging a yes vote.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/20/bahrain-saudi-intervention-religious-divide

[Demeter]

1. True

And overreaching will bring down the House of Saud at last.

[agentS]

2. This could be more dangerous than Libya's situation

Everybody hates Gaddafi so he won't have much in the way of support.
Meanwhile, Iran could get involved deeply with Bahrainian affairs and accidentally trigger a wider religious war.
This is an issue for us because our 6th fleet is stationed in Bahrain. Talk about picking a bad place to park!