At rare talks between Iran, the U.S. and other world powers, Iran agrees to allow weapons inspectors into its newly disclosed nuclear plant, and both sides agree to continued negotiations.

The People’s Republic of China celebrates its 60th anniversary by parading military personnel and equipment through downtown Beijing and hosting an evening gala complete with fireworks in Tienanmen Square.

Iraq’s Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, forms a new coalition which brings together Sunni and Shia parties to represent “all Iraqis.”

Four bombs explode in Baghdad, killing at least 20 in mostly Shia areas, and continuing a rise in violence throughout Iraq as U.S. troops prepare to pullout from urban areas there by the end of June.

Insurgents attack the convoy of Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, the president of Ingushetia, a tiny quasi-autonomous republic on Chechnya’s western border. Yevkurov is said to be in stable condition, but his country is less so as separtists and Islamic fundamentalists gain momentum.

North Korea warns in an editorial published in the Rodong Sinmun newspaper that it will strike at the US if it is attacked, noting it is “proud nuclear power,” and the US should “take a correct look at whom it is dealing with.” The Japanese newspaper, Mainichi Shimbun reports the country’s heir apparent Kim Jong-un is working as acting chairman of the National Defense Commission to support his ailing father.

A conservative leads the ongoing and controversial race to replace the U.K.’s House of Commons speaker who was ousted for excessive expense claims. Many Labour party members support the young Tory MP, John Bercow, and his campaign for “reform, for renewal, for revitalisation and for the reassertion of the core values of this great institution in the context of the 21st century.”

Teacher Maryam Sepahi (right) on the road to Karbala Photo: Adam Toy

CIA World Factbook: Iran and Iraq
Iran: https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ir.html
Iraq: https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/iz.html
The CIA’s public dossiers on Iran and Iran, providing basic information on population, economics, trade, military, political and cultural issues.

Library of Congress Country Studies: Iran and Iraq
Iran: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/irtoc.html
Iraq: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/iqtoc.html
The Library of Congress’s collection of historical materials on Iran, prepared in 1988 by the Library’s Federal Research Division for the U.S. Department of the Army.

The Online Newshour: Iraq in Transition
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/middle_east/iraq/index.html
In-depth Iraq coverage from PBS’s Online Newshour.

National Public Radio: The Origin of the Sunni-Shia Split
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7332087
A five-part audio series from National Public Radio, originally broadcast in February 2007.

Council on Foreign Relations- The Emerging Shia Crescent Symposium: Is Shia Power Cause for Concern?
http://www.cfr.org/publication/10865/emerging_shia_crescent_symposium.html
Transcripts, audio and video from a symposium on the topic of the emerging “Shia Crescent.” From 2006.

The Pew Forum and the Council on Foreign Relations- The Revival of Shia Islam
http://pewforum.org/events/index.php?EventID=R120
Transcript of a speech and question-and-answer session by Vali Nasr on the topic of Shia Islam.

Slate Magazine: The War Within Islam
http://www.slate.com/id/2159936/
Author and journalist Christopher Hitchens on the sectarian struggle within Islam.

BBC Religion & Ethics: Islam
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/islam/
This BBC site offers an introduction to Islam, with a complete discussion of the Shia/Sunni schism.

Understanding Islam
http://www.understanding-islam.com/
A Web site committed to answering questions and criticisms about Islam and the Qur’an.

FRONTLINE: Terror and Tehran
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/tehran/
A FRONTLINE examination of U.S.-Iranian diplomatic relations, from 2002.

FRONTLINE: Muslims
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/muslims/
FRONTLINE examines Islam’s worldwide resurgence through the stories of diverse Muslims struggling to define the role of Islam in their lives and societies.

Shia Muslims watch a reenactment of the centuries-old battle of Karbala during which Imam Hussein, grandson of Islam’s founding prophet, Muhammad, was slain, as part of Ashura commemorations on Jan. 31, 2007, in Qatif, Saudi Arabia. Banners on the walls praise Hussein. (AP Photo/Hasan Jamali)

The Shia rejected the authority of the Umayyad dynasty, claiming that the Umayyads were usurpers and demanding that leadership go to the direct descendants of the Prophet. The Shia rose in the city of al-Kufah (south of Karbala, in present-day Iraq) and, in 680 A.D., invited Ali’s son Hussein to join them and be their leader. Hussein left Mecca with his family and supporters, but was met at Karbala by an army sent by the Umayyad caliph Yazid. Hussein mustered 72 fighting men against the opposing force of thousands. The result was a massacre in which Hussein and all of his family and supporters were killed and then mutilated.

In observance of the massacre, Sunni and Shia alike regard the 10th day of the month of Muharram as “Ashura,” a day of mourning. For the Sunni the day is merely an optionally observed fast, but for the Shia, it is among the most significant days of observance. The massacre of Hussein added a significant passion element to the Shia tradition, similar to the Christian reverence for Christ’s passion on the cross. Hussein, to the Shia, is a martyr of resistance in the face of oppression, while Yazid represents that oppression. As an often-persecuted minority throughout history, the Shia made these concepts central to their tradition.

Ashura is marked with passion plays and public expressions of grief. All Shia who are capable are expected to make a pilgrimage to Karbala, where Hussein is buried, at some point in their lives to mark the day of Ashura.

Vali Nasr, Professor, U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, and author of THE SHIA REVIVAL

March 20, 2007: Vali Nasr, Professor, U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, and author of THE SHIA REVIVAL, discusses Iran’s emerging regional role and the escalating tensions between Iran and the United States with anchor Daljit Dhaliwal.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: Professor Vali Nasr, welcome to Wide Angle.

VALI NASR: Thank you. It’s good being with you.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: What do you make of what you just saw? Put this all into context for us.

VALI NASR: Well, I think it revealed the depth of the emotional attachment to Shiism within Iran. And I think that’s very interesting because most people in the West look at Iran and they think of the country as being ruled by a theocracy [with] a population that has become secular and anti-regime and is disaffected with Islam. And that’s not the picture that we see. We see an enormous amount of attachment and emotion with the core values of Shiism and particularly with the myth of Karbala. And in the film I was particularly amazed and interested in seeing this associated with this social class in Iran that you often associate with secularism. Families with women who are not wearing the head scarf, have dyed hair; have a dog in their house. And yet their son at one point served in the Revolutionary Guards. And he’s so attached to the popular aspects of the religion that he crawls on his stomach towards the shrine in Karbala. And I think that raises a more important issue. Nowadays in the West we talk about how we can extricate Iran from Iraq, as if the relationship of Iran to Iraq is mandated by the highest authorities in the Iranian government. And when we look at this movie, we look at the footage, we see the amount of attachment at the popular level Iranians have to Iraq, where most of the shrines are, where the myths of their religion come from. One wonders how exactly you can exclude Iran from Iraq now. I mean, this goes to the core of the religion that the Iranians and the Iraqis share, that is Shiism, and the fact that the centers of Shiism are in Iraq. And you cannot get Iranians to turn away from Iraq because that’s where their whole religion is.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: Well, let’s talk about the religion in a little bit more detail. What are the main differences between Sunni and Shia Muslims?

VALI NASR: Well, this is the most important sectarian division within Islam. If you were to look at a Christian parallel, it would be something like the Catholic/Protestant division. In Islam it happened very early on. They separated paths over who should succeed Prophet Muhammad. The Shiites believe that the leadership should go to the family of the prophet, the very saints who are buried in Iraq today, like in Karbala. And the Sunnis want to elect the succession to the prophet. Now, in some ways you might say it doesn’t matter what they disagreed on then. They parted ways. And over the years they developed very different interpretations of Islam. So although they agree on over 90 percent of Islam, they disagree on about ten percent. And there are sometimes subtle differences. They may stand differently at prayer. They have different approaches to Islamic law. For instance, women receive a lot more inheritance under Shia law than they do under Sunni law. But in many ways, they’ve developed into very different historical experiences of Islam, just like the Protestants and Catholics are in Christianity.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: And Sunnis are in the majority. Talk about that a little bit for us.

VALI NASR: Absolutely. I mean, when we talk about Shia/Sunni division, we’re not talking about equal numbers in the Muslim world. The Shias are, at best, about 15 percent of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims. So somewhere about 150 million people. But over 90 percent of that number lives between India and Lebanon. So in the Middle East, the numbers are far more equal. And, in fact, the majority of Shias live from Iran to the east. For instance, after Iran, the second largest Shia country is Pakistan with about 30 million Shias. And India probably has close to as many Shias in it as there are in Iraq.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: And talk a little bit about whether most Americans understand the divisions between Sunni and Shia Islam. And is it even important?

VALI NASR: No, we didn’t. We sort of had a sense about this. Outside of academia, most people didn’t understand this. When they looked at the Middle East or the Muslim world, the issues they saw were the Arab-Israeli conflict, was Islam versus secularism, and was dictatorship versus democracy. We didn’t have a sense as to why this division exists and why it does matter. And it matters now because Iraq has opened a gate. The Shiites have got power in Iraq. It’s the very first time in history that you have a Shia state. The shrine cities of Iraq have opened up. There is connection now between Iraqi Shias, Iranian Shias, Saudi Shias, Pakistani Shias, Lebanese Shias. And the way in which the struggle for power in Iraq has collapsed into a Sunni-Shia power rivalry is now affecting the whole Middle East. We can look at Lebanon. We can look at the Saudi-Iranian rivalry. They all are increasingly finding a sectarian tone.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: And historically was that true when you talked a little bit earlier on about the theological differences and the fact that even though over large periods of time they’ve co-existed peacefully, they have been falling out? But have they been sectarian in nature historically?

VALI NASR: Well, by virtue of having sects, you have rivalries. I mean Protestants and Catholics fought for decades and then co-existed and then have fought for decades. And you still have Northern Ireland. And you have the same with the Shias and Sunnis. They saw Islam early on very differently. But they’ve fought not always over theology and religion. They’ve also fought over power. They’ve fought over territory. Today in Iraq they’re not fighting over the succession to Prophet Muhammad.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: It’s political, isn’t it?

VALI NASR: It’s political. They’re fighting over the future of a country. Iraq is up for grabs. We shattered the state. There is no state that has replaced it. It remains to be decided who wins it.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: By “we,” you mean the Bush administration.

VALI NASR: The Bush administration and its allies, England, the United States. But it’s the same deal in Lebanon. I mean, the pressure from the Shiites is that they’re the largest single community in Lebanon, but they don’t have a share of the power. So you have another sectarian conflict there. And across the Arab world in particular, Shiites, whether they’re majority or minority, have not enjoyed the seat at the table. And they want a seat at the table. And Iraq has provided that expectation. And that’s exactly what the Middle East is dealing with. With the aftermath of Iraq, of heightened Shia expectations for power and with the disappointment and backlash coming from the Sunnis.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: And let’s talk a little bit about that backlash. How has that been expressed and, if you can, talk about that within the Saudi Arabian context.

VALI NASR: Well, the Sunni powers established in the Middle East have had a manifest belief in a manifest destiny to rule since the time of the caliphates when they defeated the Shiites and killed the Shiite saints who are buried in places like Karbala we saw in the film. They have ruled over the Muslim world, particularly over the Arab world. And that comes down right to the modern period. Now that has been changing in a sense that Iraq has opened a new way. Now, what we have seen since the collapse of Iraq is that you’ve had resistance coming from very early on from people like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi from the al-Qaeda groups, whose rhetoric in Iraq was very distinctly anti-Shia. They targeted Shias as individuals and they targeted Shia shrines. The shrine that was destroyed on February 22nd, 2006, in the city of Samarra, about a hundred kilometers north of Baghdad was equal in importance for many Shias as Karbala. Imagine the psychological blow that it would be to an Iranian, Iraqi, Lebanese Shia to see a shrine destroyed given the kind of attachment we saw in your footage. But it doesn’t remain to al-Qaeda attacks. We’re seeing governments in the Arab world speak sectarian language. We saw the king of Jordan talk about the Shia crescent. We’ve seen the president of Egypt accuse all Shias of being Iranians a fifth column in the Arab world.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: Were you surprised that King Abdullah said something like that?

VALI NASR: I wasn’t. I was surprised at how quickly he saw the Shias as a threat. I mean, I think he was correct in identifying that Iraq had changed everything. But I was surprised at how quickly he saw this as a threat. And he’s neither a religious man nor is he a cleric nor is he a die-hard Sunni. He’s a secular Arab king. And that goes to the point that this may be a theological dispute [that is] 1,500 years old. But today they’re fighting about power. What the king of Jordan, the king of Saudi Arabia, the president of Egypt saw in Hezbollah’s victory or so-called victory in the summer war

DALJIT DHALIWAL: Against Israel.

VALI NASR: Against Israel was not that somehow the Muslim world is going to become Shia and you’re going to open the dispute over the succession of the prophet. They saw this as a power shift, that they were being diminished with this surge that is coming up in Iraq, that Shias are more popular. The weight of events is on their side. They’ve gained in Iraq, and the Arab governments that were relying on Sunni leadership in Iraq have lost. And the Middle East is dealing with this.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: But do you think the Sunni elites in countries like Saudi Arabia, for instance, have anything to fear from the Shia revival?

VALI NASR: Saudi Arabia in particular does for two reasons. One is that it is probably the most anti-Shia of all the Sunni countries. It has a Shia minority of about 15 percent that live in the oil-rich eastern province. They have literally no power in that country. For a very long time they were not even allowed to call their mosques, mosques. They are treated as heretics in many ways. So whereas we may look at Lebanon or look at other parts of the Arab world or South Asia and say there is a period of coexistence, and, therefore, sectarianism is somehow counterintuitive to us. That’s not true of Saudi Arabia. So the Saudis greatly worry about what Iraq means for the Shia-Sunni relations within the kingdom. If they gave more power to the Shias, they’d have to deal with the hard line Sunnis in their midst. If they don’t give power to the Shias, how are they going to contain them, given the fact that the Middle East has changed? Secondly, Saudi Arabia and Iran now for over two decades have been rivals. They both have claims to being the leaders of the Muslim world. One as a Shia country, one as a Sunni country. We look at Iraq, we look at Lebanon, we see the glass is half full for Iran. It’s half empty for Saudi Arabia. And, therefore, it’s not surprising that Saudi Arabia sees everything that’s happened since Iraq as being damaging to its national interest, as empowering its main regional rival which happens to be benefiting from this Shia revival in the region.

Vali Nasr, Professor, U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, and author of THE SHIA REVIVAL

DALJIT DHALIWAL: And how good are we, in terms of our policy, in understanding the regional shifts that have taken place and the new alliances that are being made especially vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia?

VALI NASR: Not very good. First of all, before we went into Iraq, for a good portion of time we went into Iraq, we sort of didn’t really systematically, coherently take sectarianism into account. I know it’s become popular in the Arab world to blame sectarianism on America, that it had a sectarian agenda going into Iraq. But that’s not quite true. I mean, sectarianism was there, was embedded in the Saddam regime, which, for instance, brutally suppressed Shiites in 1991 when they rose up after the First Gulf War, killing something like 300,000 of them. We took the lid off. And then we weren’t careful about what was happening. We were talking about Baathists and we were talking of the insurgency as something that was going to die out at a time when sectarianism was on the upswing. We really didn’t come to terms with sectarianism until it exploded after the bombing of the Samarra shrine in Iraq. Then we were very slow to understand that sectarianism was becoming regional. It’s no longer in Iraq. It’s part of the regional rivalry between Iran and the Arabs. It’s part of the regional rivalry over Hezbollah’s popularity on the Arab street. It is not necessarily coming from below. Arab governments, official clerics in the Arab world have been fairly vocal in anti-Shiism. It’s become a tool of foreign policy in Arab capitals about how they contain the Iranian threat. And we sort of have been playing catch-up with this changing mood. And as a result, I think we have not been well positioned to either contain it, to redirect it, or to avert its worst violence from coming to the fore.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: Is the rise of Shia power cause for concern for the West, I mean, it clearly is a cause for concern in the Arab world?

VALI NASR: Well, it shouldn’t have been. And it need not necessarily be the case now. It’s very clear that the Arabs are worried about Iranian power. And they’re using the issue of fear of Shias, particularly among their own population, the sectarian card, to rally the populations against Iran. There are worries that the sectarian conflict has for the United States, for instance, sectarian conflict is a radicalizing force on both sides. It brings out the worst among the Shias, the kind of militia groups radical groups. It also brings the worst among the Sunnis, the so-called Salafi, Jihadi, pro-al-Qaeda types. Those are the ones who bubble to the surface in an environment of sectarian conflict. We saw this happen in India and Pakistan in the 1980s and the 1990s as well. But by itself the current Shia organizations and power do threaten our allies. But our reliance on our allies has to do with our belief in the fact that they represented the power in the region. If they don’t, then the United States has to recalibrate its relationship to the region so that it better reflects where the center of gravity in the Middle East is. And that center of gravity clearly is no longer just in Amman and Cairo. But it’s also in Baghdad and Tehran. The U.S. already has relatively good relations with the Shias in Iraq. It is supporting a Shia government. The question of its relations with Iran so far has not been because of Shiism. It is because of outstanding issues between Iran and the United States that now go back three decades to the beginning of the Iranian revolution, to the hostage crisis and to Iran’s nuclear issue. So, I think the United States should remain focused on issues as opposed to on taking sides in this sectarian conflict.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: Why do you say that it’s taking sides? Who is it taking sides with or against?

VALI NASR: Well, the U.S. strategy in Iraq throughout 2006 began to increasingly reflect the anxiety of the Arab world. It gradually became more and more distant from the Shias and more and more critical of Iran. Even though the Arab governments have not been supporting the United States and Iraq. Most of them had not even recognized the government that the U.S. installed in Iraq. A lot of them also are supporting the insurgents in various ways. Yet, the United States adopted, if you would, the Arab fear of Iran as the mantra for its own policy in Iraq and in the region. And that in some ways is playing into the sectarian issue. Because we embrace the Arab position on Iran and Hezbollah, which is highly sectarian in tone as America’s foreign policy in the region.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: You are an Iranian. I mean, you lived there until the revolution in 1979. How do you think that Iran has fared in this conflict?

VALI NASR: Iran has fared well since the Iraq War for the very simple reason that Iran was isolated in the Middle East. It was caged by two Sunni powers around it, supported by Saudi Arabia at least partly. One being the Taliban in an alliance with Pakistan. The other being Saddam. The wars of necessity and the wars of choice since 2001 have removed the stumbling blocks there. What has come in place of what was there before, especially in Iraq, is friendlier to Iran, is open to Iran. Iran had been at war with Iraq for over 50 years, going back to the [Shah Mohammed Reza] Pahlavi period.

Iraq went to war with Iran, annexed a part of Iranian territory. Upwards of maybe a million people died in that war. Iraq used chemical weapons against Iran and was a nemesis to Iran. And it had also the largest army in the Persian Gulf area which could contain the Iranian military. All of that went away in 2003. What came to power in Iraq was a group of politicians who were Shia, who were more friendly to Iran, and who had spent years of exile in Iran. And without authority and government in southern Iraq, Iranian cultural, political, and economic influence has been spreading in southern Iraq. So if Iraq was an Arab bastion against Iran until 2003, now it’s at best a neutral area, at worst a pro-Iranian territory. So Iran’s done better. And the Arab governments have been diminished by Iraq. And then they have continued to diminish under the pressure of Shia forces. Look at Lebanon, summer of 2006. A Shia organization, clearly defined as such by the Arabs themselves, did far better in a war against Israel than the Arab governments who can neither fight Israel as well as Hezbollah did, nor can they offer peace. And overnight Iran and Hezbollah basically hijacked a Palestinian issue over the summer. So Iran is doing very well, in a sense. And Iran wants to assume the kind of leadership that the Ayatollah Khomeini, whom you showed in your film, wanted in the 1980s but didn’t manage to do. And Iran is following the same route Khomeini did. Don’t focus on the Shia-Sunni issue. Focus on Israel.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: You mean President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

VALI NASR: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: He has a lot in common with Khomeini?

Vali Nasr, Professor, U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, and author of THE SHIA REVIVAL

VALI NASR: Absolutely. He not only is trying to sort of equate himself domestically with Khomeini’s period as a way of gaining legitimacy, but the way he sees Iran’s foreign policy as very evidently anti-American as the third world is, as particularly anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian, and as somehow Islamic above and beyond the divisions of Shia-Sunni all harking back to the Khomeini period. In fact, at this point in time when we look at the Middle East, it’s not Iran that speaks the sectarian language, nor is Hezbollah, nor are the Shias in Iraq. This sectarianism is largely promoted in the region as a policy of containing Iran and the Shias. It doesn’t benefit Iran and the Shias to speak sectarian language. They’d much rather focus on issues that bring the Sunnis into their fold, which is the Israel issue.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: You left Iran in 1979 when Ayatollah Khomeini came to power. Have you been back since?

VALI NASR: I have been back. And I’m following on also very closely. I haven’t been back since the new government has assumed power in Iran. But before that I’ve been back.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: And the issues that are raised in the film and will be seen in the film, is that all of Iran today?

VALI NASR: I think it’s very incisive in terms of understanding Iran, that Iran is a very complex country. Iranian people cannot be simply compartmentalized into fanatical pro-theocracy religious people and then secular pro-Western democrats. A large number of Iranians are very difficult to classify.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: Who do you think is doing that compartmentalizing?

VALI NASR: The West has been doing it. In fact, it goes to the whole rhetoric of regime change in Iran, the whole idea that somehow there’s going to be a very simple facile solution to Iran’s theocracy in the form of a secular democracy, which would come to power at elections. And then we had elections in Iran and who won? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And then also the idea that we had before the Iraq War, that Iranians won’t care about Iraq. That Iran will not be a threat in Iraq. That Iran will not benefit from the war in Iraq. And if anything, it is Iraq that will influence Iran. That democracy in Iraq will undo the theocracy in Iran.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: Do you believe that?

VALI NASR: Well, look at the evidence. It didn’t happen that way. Iraq has had zero influence on Iran. Iranians don’t look at Iraq and say, “We want that.” They don’t look at even democracy in Iran as something to emulate. They’ve done more voting than Iraqis have. They don’t look at regime change in Iraq and take heart that this is somehow a cost-free, easy thing to do, let’s do it. On the other hand, it is Iranians who are influencing Iraqis at every level. They are influencing them economically. The volume of trade between the two countries is now exceeding $1 billion. That’s formal non-oil trade. There are millions of Iranians going on pilgrimage to Iraq, booming Iraq’s economy in the south. And Iraqi politicians, militia forces, security in the south are largely infiltrated and influenced by Iran. In many ways, it is not Iraq that’s influencing Iran; it’s Iran that’s influencing the future of Iraq.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: And do the policy makers in Washington understand these complexities, the relationship between Iran and Iraq? And how does that factor into our policy making vis-á-vis Iran?

VALI NASR: No, I don’t think so. I think still in the West, both in London and Washington, they look at Iranian influence in Iraq through the very narrow prism of Iran’s support for militia and the supply of munitions that could be used against British or American troops in Basra. That is there. But I think they would do very well by looking at your program. That, first of all, Iran’s involvement in Iraq is not necessarily government driven. The Iranian people want access to those shrines. They want to go there. They are risking death and car bombs as you showed in your film in order to go to Karbala and back. And then they go again and again and again.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: And they are all so very diverse groups of people as well, aren’t they?

[INSEERT IMAGE HERE]

VALI NASR: Absolutely. In other words, they were fanatical revolutionaries like the brother of the fanatical former Iranian president whom Mahmoud Ahmadinejad actually is emulating as his model. He was in that group, coming from the bazaar, from the traditional classes. You had the cleric going there. You had the traditional, probably middle-class people there.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: Kamran.

VALI NASR: Kamran was I think a fascinating example of the complexity of Iranian society. A former Revolutionary Guard. Extremely pious, at least at a folk level, with religious attachment to a shrine. And yet look at his mother. Look at his fiancée. His fiancée is sitting in front of cameramen without head cover, is wearing Western makeup. And his mother is telling you that Kamran likes to wrestle with the dog, a little puppy. For any pious Muslim household, a dog is an impure taboo. That tells you that people don’t probably pray in that house.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: Right.

VALI NASR: So we cannot say that, is he secular? Is he the kind of Iranian youth that the West constantly speaks of? Or is he one of the fanatical people that voted for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? It’s not that simple. And if anything, Iraq has even raised these issues in Iran because it has allowed that kind of popular attachment to the shrines to be revived. I mean, polls done in Iran now find Ayatollah Ali Sistani, a moderate quietest leader of Shiites in Iraq, to be the singularly most popular leader of any kind in Iran. He now receives more money from Iran in form of religious taxes than he does from anywhere else in the world. So, you know, these things are very deeply interconnected between Iran and Iraq. And if policy makers think that by arresting a few Iranian operatives and putting some pressure on Iran that somehow you can eliminate Iran’s influence or Iranians’ interests in Iraq. They are misguided in that.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: Some of the pilgrims in the film, one in particular, believe that the United States is going to attack Iran. Talk about that. What are your thoughts on that?

VALI NASR: I think a lot of Iranians are expecting this. Maybe they’re hoping against hope it won’t happen. But they’re expecting it. And the government in subtle ways is preparing them for that. It’s part of the rhetoric of Iranian leaders who, unofficially, often say that, you know, within the next two years the United States may very well take action against Iran.

And therefore, this is part of the Iranian political fears and insecurities right now. The Iranians, in many ways, feel very much surrounded by insecurity. They look at Afghanistan. They see it as a country that’s collapsing under the Taliban. And there’s huge amount of drug trade that’s coming from Afghanistan into Iran.

They look at Iraq and they see it as a threat. And then many Iranians say that if your neighbor’s house is on fire, your house is threatened. So they don’t look at Iraq in some way and feel safe. And then this whole nuclear issue and the ratcheting up of rhetoric between Iran and the US and threats of use of military force, including, for instance, the sending of a second aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf, does create a lot of political anxiety within Iran. Now, how will that play itself out remains to be seen. I mean, some would say that partly President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad suffered in recent polls as a consequence of that anxiety. Others would say that Iranians, like every other people, tend to rally to the flag and support their government whether they like it or not, if they’re on a war footing.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: At a recent lecture you presented two very different images of Iran. One you said is a stable authoritarian regime inspired by Islamic ideology. And the other was a state teetering on the verge of collapse. Talk about that a little bit. What did you mean by both of those very different examples?

VALI NASR: Well both images have been dominant in the West. In other words, on the one hand, we believe that this theocracy is weak. The majority of Iranian population is opposed to it. The majority of Iranian population doesn’t want religion. They’re looking past it. They want a secular democratic country that’s part of the world order. I think in some ways your footage does debunk some of that myth, that’s not as simple. This image came under a lot of question when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the elections in 2005 and an election that over 60 percent of the Iranians eligible voters participated in.

The second image that has been there is that this is a brutal authoritarian dictatorship that aside from its radical ideologies and aside from its hostile foreign policy, it nevertheless has the capability to survive and stay in power. It has powerful revolutionary guards. It has powerful intelligence capabilities. And it has a certain base of power among the die-hard revolutionary groups. I think elements of both pictures are there. And that’s, again, why we cannot think of Iran simply as Ukraine, ready to have a velvet revolution. We cannot think of it also as a popular government that’s impervious to pressure from below. I think both elements are there. In fact, both are sort of vying for each other. There is a vibrant civil society in Iran that wants more freedom. It may not be totally secular. It may not be totally anti-regime, but it definitely likes more than what it has. And on the other hand, you have a brutal regime with an enormous amount of capability of suppressing its population.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: Well, let’s talk about US foreign policy in the region. You have said that the Shia revival could present Washington policy makers with a real opportunity to pursue its interests in the region. How come? And what should they be doing?

VALI NASR: I think to a good extent that moment has passed. That moment passed in 2006, by and large. I would say 2006 is the year the United States lost the Shias. When the war in Iraq happened, regardless of who instigated the war, what the justification there was, the US had, by and large, if not the goodwill, at least the tacit support of Iraqi Shias. They didn’t resist the US. They didn’t join the insurgency. They didn’t have militias in the very first year. They participated whole heartedly in elections in Iraq. They joined the security forces. They joined the police. They supported the U.S. And the Shias across the region did so. It might be amazing to Western observers to know that the senior conservative ayatollahs in Iran issued religious fatwas, religious decrees, encouraging Iraqis to vote in an election which boldly says on the side “made in America.” I mean, they issued fatwas encouraging them to do so. Groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon supported the changes in Iraq. In fact, they adopted for a while the mantra of one man, one vote. The mantra that came out of Iraq, what Shias demanded. In Iran between 2003 and 2005 you still had the reformist president who, at least in 2003, made a peace offer to the United States, an offer of comprehensive negotiations over a host of issues.

Hezbollah was not yet at war with Israel. In fact, it was hedging. It was trying to decide which way it wanted to go: greater participation or greater radicalism. Now, the U.S. did not take advantage of that opening. It did not use Iraq and the fact that Iran was the only neighbor of Iraq to support the US in Iraq, the only neighbor of Iraq to actually recognize the Iraqi government, the only neighbor of Iraq which is even to this day supporting the same government that the United States and United Kingdom are. The U.S. did not use that occasion to create an opening with Iran. And also in 2006 the U.S. decided that it wanted to follow a different policy in Iraq. The U.S. began to distance itself from the Shias and began to try to woo the Sunnis into laying down their arms. As a result, a rift began to open. The rebuffing of the 2003 peace treaty from Iran and the fact that the reformists in Iran could not even use Iraq to approach the United States led to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election to some extent. And in Iraq, you had power shifts to radicals like Muqtada al-Sadr.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: If we’ve lost all these good opportunities, what do we do now?

VALI NASR: Well, you know, you’re correct. In other words, we lost the goodwill of the Shias in Iraq. We also lost the opportunity to try to help Shias and moderates in Iran and Lebanon. And we also have never had the support of Sunni world since Iraq began, whether it was in Iraq or in the larger Sunni world. So, we basically are in a situation where both sides are opposed to the U.S. or at odds with the U.S. What we can do is not to aggravate it further, at this point in time, is not to take sides. And I think a foreign policy on the part of the West, of picking the side of the Arab governments and Saudi Arabia, to do their fight against Iran for them, will only inflame sectarianism and will really divide the region along these lines. In many ways, the way the West deals with the Middle East, is that you’re dealing with an ascendant force in the region. Shias in Iraq, Shias in Lebanon and Iran as a country, and you’re also dealing with the anxiety of the Sunni/Arab world for having lost its position of prominence. We have to deal with each of these challenges differently. We cannot use one against another.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: And just this month, the United States began conversations with Iran and Syria over Iraq. Were you surprised by that?

VALI NASR: I think it was surprising. Because the opportunity to talk to Iran was laid out by the Iraq study group in January. And they did not take advantage of that. In fact, they very clearly adopted a confrontational policy with Iran arguing that they’re not going to talk to Iran until Iran changes its behavior in Iraq and suspends its enrichment of nuclear fuel. And then they made a turnaround and arguing that Iran had learned its lesson or had been softened by American confrontation, that they were going to talk to Iran. So, it was a change in tactic, not a complete change in strategy.

But it hasn’t gone very far. And also, another important issue is that we often look at Iran and Syria as if they’re a package deal. In Lebanon, they are part of the same team. But in Iraq, they’re not. Syria’s actually part of the Arab team. It’s doing what also the Arab street wants. Even though its support for militants is not the same as Saudi Arabia or Jordan, ultimately they are supporting the same side too.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: And why is it a mistake to see them as a package deal in the first place?

VALI NASR: Because Iran and Saudi Arabia and Iran and Syria are seen as an axis in the region. And we often talk about peeling Syria off of Iran. But in Iraq, they are peeled off. They’re not even one. We have to have a very different conversation with Iran over Iraq than the one with Syria. Syria’s supporting the insurgents. Syria’s opposed to the central governments in Iraq. Syria supports the Baathists. Syria supports the very people that Iran’s clients are fighting. Iran, on the other hand, is supporting the same government as the United States is, supporting the Shias, not the Sunnis, is supporting Shia militias, not the insurgency. And therefore, Iran’s role, Iran’s objective, Iran’s interest, are exactly opposite those of Syria. And yes, we ought to talk to them. Because ultimately, every problem in Iraq right now has to do with the fact that there is no state in Iraq. We shattered the state. There are no security forces. We are it. There is a playing field. There is a prize to be won. It’s called Iraq. And until the day that there is a political agreement about the future of Iraq, there’s going to be fighting. And the future of Iraq is going to be decided either around the table or in a battlefield. And ultimately, if we don’t want the future of Iraq to be decided in war, we have to facilitate a political solution. And we cannot have a viable political solution unless it has the buy-in of the countries that have most vested interests in Iraq. And those are the neighboring countries and none more so than Iran. Even your footage, look at how many Iranians are in Iraq as visitors. Look at how many Arabs from other Arab countries are in Iraq. They’re only there as foreign fighters not as participants in pilgrimage, economy, business, et cetera. So there is not going to be a political solution to Iraq unless the Turks, the Syrians, the Jordanians, the Saudis and especially the Iranians, have a buy-in. The idea of having a future of Iraq that excludes Iran is dead on arrival in many ways.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: And what does Iran gain?

VALI NASR: So, the idea of having a political solution for Iraq that excludes Iran in many ways is dead on arrival.

Vali Nasr, Professor, U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, and author of THE SHIA REVIVAL

DALJIT DHALIWAL: And what do you make of these talks? Do you think that in some ways, they indicate a shift in U.S. policy towards Iran?

VALI NASR: Yes, it does. And it might indicate a shift in policy towards Iran. When we began this surge strategy, the assumption was that the biggest hurdle in Iraq would be the Shia militia, that the job of this surge was going to be eliminating the Shia militia. Well, the Shia militia has disappeared. They were nowhere to be fought. The U.S. went straight into Sadr City without any resistance. On the other hand, it is the Sunni insurgency that mounted a surge of its own against the U.S. and against the Shiites, shooting down seven helicopters, using chlorine gas in bombings, attacking pilgrims to Karbala, Shia universities, even exploding bombs in the middle of Sadr City. So, the assumptions that this surge began with, namely that the security problem in Iraq are the Shias and Iran, is not there. And therefore, we have to sort of recalibrate the way we approach this issue. Iraq now does need a tactical shift in terms of strategy; the United States has to make a decision. Either it’s going to war with Iran, or it has to engage Iran. And it can.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: Well, what does it want from Iran? What do you think the United States wants?

VALI NASR: Well, the United States has a host of things it wants from Iran. It wants it to suspend its nuclear program. It wants it to extricate itself from Iraq. It wants it to stop meddling in the Palestinian issue and stop supporting Hezbollah. And then there are those in the West who want basically the Iranian government to dismantle and to go away. But let’s at least say in this order of priority. But the question is not what we want from Iran. The question is: what can we get from Iran? And do we have the means to get it from Iran? And one of the important questions is: can we go to war with Iran? The answer is I don’t think it is very feasible. Because we don’t have the capability to deal with a country of 70 million people which is, you know, three times the size of Iraq. It’s sophisticated. It’s probably even despite all of its misbehaviors, still right now a force for stability in the Middle East. Because it has a government and it has somebody control that huge territory. Secondly, can we get from Iran what we want by confrontation and threat? There is no evidence of that. The Iranians believe rightly or wrongly that they are holding the cards. And the U.S. can try to extricate them from Iraq and escalate. At the end of the day, the Iranians are not budging. As we’re talking, they are not budging. So, if you cannot get what you want by confrontation, you probably have to find ways to influence their behavior otherwise. And the only other way is to begin talking to them.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: And so, if it’s not military confrontation and the dialogue has sort of been blowing hot and cold how do you sort of take it forward and work towards some kind of solution without people dying?

VALI NASR: Well, there has been no dialogue between the U.S. and Iran recently. I mean, whenever you have a two-minute conversation over orange juice between an American ambassador and an Iranian representative making world headline news, you know there’s no dialogue. And that’s probably a good beginning that the U.S. and Iran need to begin talking about outstanding issues. There are areas of common interest like Iraq, like Afghanistan. They actually may find themselves to be roughly on the same side in these areas. And there are areas where they are very far apart, like on the Palestinian issue, on Hezbollah, and on the nuclear issue. But ultimately, the task of managing Iran is probably the single biggest challenge for U.S. and European foreign policy in the coming years. Iran is probably now the most important country in the region in terms of land mass, in terms of influence, in terms of population size, in terms of military capability in the Persian Gulf. So, I mean, we in the West have to address hard questions about what level of commitment, what amount of resources we want to employ with what effect, in order to manage the largest country in the region, which happens to be also the biggest challenge to us on multiple fronts.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: And you think it’s a bigger issue than the Palestinian/Israeli conflict?

VALI NASR: No. The Palestinian/Israeli conflict is an important issue. And its resolution will do much to shore up the legitimacy of our allies and to also ameliorate the anti-Americanism on the Arab street. But it does not change the strategic balance of the region. The rise of Iran does. That’s why the Arab world is so viscerally reacting to the rise of Iran, much more so than it is due to the Palestinian/Israeli issue. What you have in the Middle East is a complete change in the balance of power. You have a claimant to great power status in the Middle East. It doesn’t mean they’re going to get it. But in demanding it, Iran is completely changing the balance of power. And it presents a challenge to the United States and Europe, which is of a different order of magnitude than the challenge of Arab/Israeli issue. The challenge there is to get Israelis and Palestinians talking. We know what the end result would be. It will have a major impact on the region, how the region thinks about the West. But it’s not going to change the balance of power in the region, about who’s the top-tier country, who’s the second-tier country, which country gets to dictate to whom, which country gets to decide oil policy, which country gets to decide who does what. The Palestinian/Israeli resolution of that conflict will not decide these things. The resolution of Iran’s challenge to the region will decide these things.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: And what does Iran have to gain from having a conversation with the United States?

VALI NASR: I think the Iranians are debating that point. I think there was a point where the Iranians were more afraid of the United States in 2001, 2003, where they assumed that regime survival and protection of their interests in the region would not be possible without ultimately accommodating the West. But now after Iraq, after Lebanon, you also have a different trend in Iran reflected in the behavior of the current Iranian president who would like to borrow more from Ayatollah Khomeini, saying the West can’t do a damn thing. And therefore, Iran can get whatever it wants without accommodating anybody. And he almost flaunts, if you would, his disregard for international opinion. I mean, when he held a Holocaust conference in Iran, irrespective of the offense that he gave to many people in many quarters, what he was really saying is that he really doesn’t care about what the public opinion is, that Iran doesn’t have to listen or accommodate anything or anybody. So, he represents one faction. The other faction does believe that Iran is ultimately part of the region, is ultimately part of the world system, and ultimately Iran’s ambitions have to take account of those things. And it would be better for Iran to talk to the United States and get the United States to a point which would benefit Iran’s interests rather than to try to fight against the United States. And I think U.S. policy in the coming months, as well as dynamics of Iran’s own internal politics, will decide which faction in Iran is going to come [out] on top, the rejectionist or the accommodationist.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: Some people suspect that the overall U.S. policy to put pressure on Iran is just a prelude to a military engagement of some sort or another. What do you think about that?

VALI NASR: I think there is a chance for a military conflict between the U.S. and Iran. Either a premeditated attack on Iran, to take out Iran’s nuclear sites or that you might have an escalation as a consequence of the tensions between the two, out of a place like Iraq. In some ways, Iraq is like Europe in 1914 where you have mistakes made or you can have unintentional crossing of red lines between Iranians and Americans that can then escalate into a conflict. The problem is that a conflict will actually destabilize the region far more. And it will not serve what the United States and the West want from Iran. In other words, attack on Iran would only solidify the position of the Iranian government within Iran. And it’s likely to take away any incentives it has to play by the rules of the game, maintain the diplomatic relations that it has with its neighbors, and it may very well retaliate by escalating support for Hezbollah and Hamas, as well as for militias within Iraq itself.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: So, in your opinion, what would the correct approach be then?

VALI NASR: Well, we’re stuck between a stone and a hard place. In other words, our ability to coerce Iranians into a position that we want, is now rather limited. They’re far less than they were in 2003 or in 2001. Iranians look at the public mood in the U.S. or the Congress, and calculate that the American people really don’t have the stomach for another major conflict, that the United States already has 150,000 troops in Iraq and may well have to put additional troops in there. And then there is Afghanistan looming on the horizon, that the U.S., at best, can strike Iran. It cannot invade Iran. And that gives the Iranian leadership a lot more breathing room. They didn’t think like this in 2003. Because America’s military power was untested. We didn’t know whether it was capable of actually carrying out a successful regime change or not. On the other hand, there are things that we want from Iran and we legitimately should want from Iran, namely that it should not pursue a nuclear weapons program, that it should stop supporting radical groups in the region, that it should not support violence.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: Well, you know what? The Iranians say that they’re not pursuing a nuclear weapons program. It’s all about energy. Do you buy that?

VALI NASR: Well, no. I think there is a will within Iran to have nuclear weapons capability, if not nuclear weapons itself. In fact, many Iranians may look at Japan as a model, one screwdriver short of a bomb. You have the capability. You have the knowledge. But you don’t build it. So, you remain within the international norm. It doesn’t matter what the Iranians say or don’t say. The question is: can we get them to change their behavior on a host of issues? If coercive capability is limited, there is no point in us continuously relying on it. We have to adopt a broader set of tools to influence Iranian behavior. We cannot, at the current moment, force Iran to do what we want.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: Do we have those tools within our arsenal?

VALI NASR: We do. The other tools are diplomacy. The other tool is the fact that the current Iranian leadership, because it has no relationship with the United States, has nothing to gain from a relationship with the United States or from preserving that relationship with the United States. Iranians assume that the United States is only interested in regime change, that it doesn’t want to talk with Iran because it doesn’t want to legitimate the Iranian government, which means that it wants the Iranian government to go. If that’s the case, then what’s the point in conceding to the U.S.? The other important issue for us is that what comes after an attack on Iran? Since 2001, what we should’ve learned is that the greatest threat to the West does not come from world regimes, per se. It comes from no regime. We have been hurt by areas of the world which have failed states or don’t have governments. It was Afghanistan that hurt the U.S. ultimately, not Iraq. And therefore, an Iran that falls apart because of a massive military campaign will be a far greater danger to the region than it is today. And Iran without a government, the territory, the size of Iran with 70 million people, with the amount of weapons, nuclear material, its just strategic location, will only destabilize, Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf, Iraq, Afghanistan, Central Asia and the Caucasus.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: that’s a total doomsday scenario, isn’t it?

VALI NASR: It is. But it is something we need to think about. Because we often think about the military punishment of Iran in a uni-dimensional way, namely you either do what we want or what the international community wants, or you pay the consequences. But there is also a set of consequences to the consequences that we will visit on Iran. Namely, we have to be prepared to deal with the post-conflict era. If we aren’t successful in war, we’re going to deal with a belligerent, radical, vindictive Iran. If we’re successful in destabilizing and dismantling this regime, what comes next? I mean, we should have learned from Iraq that regime change is not that, you know, dictators leave out of one door and democrats coming out of the next one. We’re going to be dealing with a messy Iran that may well make Iraq look like child’s play.

DALJIT DHALIWAL: Okay. Professor Vali Nasr, thank you very much for joining us on Wide Angle.

VALI NASR: Thank you for inviting me.

In the below excerpted article, Vali Nasr explains the connections between the Shia in Iran and Iraq, and discusses how the war in Iraq has caused a power shift in the Middle East, with the Shia ascending.

Reprinted from the From July/August 2006 edition of FOREIGN AFFAIRS

A bus carrying Shia pilgrims from Iran to the holy Iraqi city of Karbala Photo: Adam Toy

The war in Iraq has profoundly changed the Middle East, although not in the ways that Washington had anticipated. When the U.S. government toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003, it thought regime change would help bring democracy to Iraq and then to the rest of the region. The Bush administration thought of politics as the relationship between individuals and the state, and so it failed to recognize that people in the Middle East see politics also as the balance of power among communities. Rather than viewing the fall of Saddam as an occasion to create a liberal democracy, therefore, many Iraqis viewed it as an opportunity to redress injustices in the distribution of power among the country’s major communities. By liberating and empowering Iraq’s Shiite majority, the Bush administration helped launch a broad Shiite revival that will upset the sectarian balance in Iraq and the Middle East for years to come.

There is no such thing as pan-Shiism, or even a unified leadership for the community, but Shiites share a coherent religious view: since splitting off from the Sunnis in the seventh century over a disagreement about who the Prophet Muhammad’s legitimate successors were, they have developed a distinct conception of Islamic laws and practices. And the sheer size of their population today makes them a potentially powerful constituency. Shiites account for about 90 percent of Iranians, some 70 percent of the people living in the Persian Gulf region, and approximately 50 percent of those in the arc from Lebanon to Pakistan — some 140 million people in all. Many, long marginalized from power, are now clamoring for greater rights and more political influence. Recent events in Iraq have already mobilized the Shiites of Saudi Arabia (about 10 percent of the population); during the 2005 Saudi municipal elections, turnout in Shiite-dominated regions was twice as high as it was elsewhere. Hassan al-Saffar, the leader of the Saudi Shiites, encouraged them to vote by comparing Saudi Arabia to Iraq and implying that Saudi Shiites too stood to benefit from participating. The mantra “one man, one vote,” which galvanized Shiites in Iraq, is resonating elsewhere. The Shiites of Lebanon (who amount to about 45 percent of the country’s population) have touted the formula, as have the Shiites in Bahrain (who represent about 75 percent of the population there), who will cast their ballots in parliamentary elections in the fall.

Iraq’s liberation has also generated new cultural, economic, and political ties among Shiite communities across the Middle East. Since 2003, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, coming from countries ranging from Lebanon to Pakistan, have visited Najaf and other holy Shiite cities in Iraq, creating transnational networks of seminaries, mosques, and clerics that tie Iraq to every other Shiite community, including, most important, that of Iran. Pictures of Iran’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the Lebanese cleric Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah (often referred to as Hezbollah’s spiritual leader) are ubiquitous in Bahrain, for example, where open displays of Shiite piety have been on the rise and once-timid Shiite clerics now flaunt traditional robes and turbans. The Middle East that will emerge from the crucible of the Iraq war may not be more democratic, but it will definitely be more Shiite.

It may also be more fractious. Just as the Iraqi Shiites’ rise to power has brought hope to Shiites throughout the Middle East, so has it bred anxiety among the region’s Sunnis. De-Baathification, which removed significant obstacles to the Shiites’ assumption of power in Iraq, is maligned as an important cause of the ongoing Sunni insurgency. The Sunni backlash has begun to spread far beyond Iraq’s borders, from Syria to Pakistan, raising the specter of a broader struggle for power between the two groups that could threaten stability in the region. King Abdullah of Jordan has warned that a new “Shiite crescent” stretching from Beirut to Tehran might cut through the Sunni-dominated Middle East…

Yet the emerging Shiite revival need not be a source of concern for the United States, even though it has rattled some U.S. allies in the Middle East. In fact, it presents Washington with new opportunities to pursue its interests in the region. Building bridges with the region’s Shiites could become the one clear achievement of Washington’s tortured involvement in Iraq. Succeeding at that task, however, would mean engaging Iran, the country with the world’s largest Shiite population and a growing regional power, which has a vast and intricate network of influence among the Shiites across the Middle East, most notably in Iraq. U.S.-Iranian relations today tend to center on nuclear issues and the militant rhetoric of Iran’s leadership. But set against the backdrop of the war in Iraq, they also have direct implications for the political future of the Shiites and that of the Middle East itself.

The tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini Photo: Adam Toy

Since 2003, Iran has officially played a constructive role in Iraq. It was the first country in the region to send an official delegation to Baghdad for talks with the Iraqi Governing Council, in effect recognizing the authority that the United States had put in power. Iran extended financial support and export credits to Iraq and offered to help rebuild Iraq’s energy and electricity infrastructure. After former Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari’s Shiite-led interim government assumed office in Baghdad in April 2005, high-level Iraqi delegations visited Tehran, reached agreements over security cooperation with Iran, and negotiated a $1 billion aid package for Iraq and several trade deals, including one for the export of electricity to Iraq and another for the exchange of Iraqi crude oil for refined oil products.

Iran’s unofficial influence in Iraq is even greater. In the past three years, Iran has built an impressive network of allies and clients, ranging from intelligence operatives, armed militias, and gangs to, most visibly, politicians in various Iraqi Shiite parties. Many leaders of the main Shiite parties, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and Dawa (including two leading party spokesmen, former Prime Minister Jaafari and the current prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki), spent years of exile in Iran before returning to Iraq in 2003. (SCIRI’s militia, the Badr Brigades, was even trained and equipped by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.) Iran has also developed ties with Muqtada al-Sadr, who once inflamed passions with his virulent anti-Iranian rhetoric, as well as with factions of Sadr’s movement, such as the Fezilat Party in Basra. The Revolutionary Guards supported Sadr’s Mahdi Army in its confrontation with U.S. troops in Najaf in 2004, and since then Iran has trained Sadrist political and military cadres. Iran bankrolled Shiite parties in Iraq during the two elections, used its popular satellite television network al Aalam to whip up support for them, and helped broker deals with the Kurds. Iraqi Shiite parties attract voters by relying on vast political and social-service networks across southern Iraq that, in many cases, were created with Iranian funding and assistance.

Throughout the 1980s and after the anti-Shiite massacres of 1991, some 100,000 Iraqi Arab Shiites also took refuge in Iran. In the dark years of the 1990s, Iran alone gave Iraqi Shiites refuge and support. Since the Iraq war, many of these refugees have returned to Iraq; they can now be found working in schools, police stations, mosques, bazaars, courts, militias, and tribal councils from Baghdad to Basra, as well as in government. The repeated shuttling of Shiites between Iran and Iraq over the years has created numerous, layered connections between the two countries’ Shiite communities. As a result, the Iraqi nationalism that the U.S. government hoped would serve as a bulwark against Iran has proved porous to Shiite identity in many ways.

Ties between the two countries’ religious communities are especially close. Iraqi exiles in Iran gravitated toward Iraqi ayatollahs such as Mahmoud Shahroudi (the head of Iran’s judiciary), Kazem al-Haeri (a senior Sadrist ayatollah), and Muhammad Baqer al-Hakim (a SCIRI leader, killed in 2003), who oversaw the establishment of Iraqi religious organizations in Tehran and Qom. Those organizations have wielded great influence in Iran since the 1980s thanks to the role they played then in opening up the Shiites of Lebanon, who had traditionally been turned toward Najaf, to Iranian influence. Many senior clerics and graduates of the Iraqi Shiite seminaries in Iran have joined Iran’s political establishment. Several judges in the Iranian judiciary, including Shahroudi, are Iraqis and are particularly close to Khamenei. And those Iraqi clerics who returned to their homeland after 2003 to take over various mosques and seminaries across southern Iraq have created an important axis of cooperation between Qom and Najaf.

So much, then, for the conventional wisdom prevailing in Washington before the war: that once Iraq was free, Najaf would rival Qom and challenge the Iranian ayatollahs. Since 2003, the two cities have cooperated. There is no visible doctrinal rift between their clerics or any exodus of dissidents from one city to the other. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani’s popular Web site, www.sistani.org, is headquartered in Qom, and most of the religious taxes collected by his representatives are kept in Iran. Despite repeated entreaties from dissident voices in Iran, senior clerics in Najaf have kept scrupulously quiet about Iranian politics, deliberately avoiding upsetting the authorities in Qom and Tehran.

Iranian Shia on the road to Karbala Photo: Adam Toy

This nexus extends well beyond the elites. The opening of the shrine cities of Iraq has had an emotional impact on regular Iranians, especially on the more religious social classes that support the regime. Since 2003, hundreds of thousands of Iranians have visited the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala every year. This trend has reinforced the growing popularity of devotional piety in Iran. Over the past decade, many Iranian youth have taken to adulating Shiite saints, in particular the Twelfth Imam, the Shiite messiah. Many more Iranians recognize Ayatollah Sistani as their religious leader now than did before 2003, and many more now turn their religious taxes over to him. Although largely cynical about their own clerical leaders, many Iranians have embraced the revival of Shiite identity and culture in Iraq…

Granted, the legacy of the Iran-Iraq War, Iraqi nationalism, and, especially, ethnic differences between Arabs and Persians have historically caused much friction between Iran and Iraq. But these factors should not be overemphasized: ethnic antagonism cannot possibly be all-important when Iraq’s supreme religious leader is Iranian and Iran’s chief justice is Iraqi. Although ethnicity will continue to matter to Iranian-Iraqi relations, now that Saddam has fallen and the Shiites of Iraq have risen, it will likely be overshadowed by the complex, layered connections between the two countries’ Shiite communities. These connections, moreover, are likely to be reinforced by the two communities’ perception that they face a common threat from Sunnis. Nothing seems to bring Iraqi Shiites closer to Iran than the ferocity and persistence of the Sunni insurgency — especially at a time when their trust in Washington, which has called for disbanding Shiite militias and making greater concessions to the Sunnis, is sagging…

If there is an Iranian grand strategy in Iraq today, it is to ensure that Iraq does not reemerge as a threat and that the anti-Iranian Arab nationalism championed by Sunnis does not regain primacy. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and many leaders of the Revolutionary Guards, all veterans of the Iran-Iraq War, see the pacification of Iraq as the fulfillment of a strategic objective they missed during that conflict. Iranians also believe that a Shiite-run Iraq would be a source of security; they take it as an axiom that Shiite countries do not go to war with one another.

All this is small consolation for the Sunnis in the region, who remember the consequences of Iran’s ideological aspirations in the 1980s — and now worry about its new regional ambitions. A quarter century ago, Tehran supported Shiite parties, militias, and insurgencies in Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. The Iranian Revolution combined Shiite identity with radical anti-Westernism, as reflected in the hostage crisis of 1979, the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, and Tehran’s continued support for international terrorism. In the end, the Iranian Revolution fell short of its goals, and except for in Lebanon, the Shiite resurgence that it inspired came to naught.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, at press conference in Tehran Photo: Adam Toy

Some say the Islamic Republic is now a tired dictatorship. Others, however, worry about the resurgence of Iran’s regional ambitions, fueled this time not by ideology but by nationalism. Tehran sees itself as a regional power and the center of a Persian and Shiite zone of influence stretching from Mesopotamia to Central Asia. Freed from the menace of the Taliban in Afghanistan and of Saddam in Iraq, Iran is riding the crest of the wave of Shiite revival, aggressively pursuing nuclear power and demanding international recognition of its interests.

Leaders in Tehran who want to create a greater zone of Iranian influence — something akin to Russia’s concept of “the near abroad” — view Tehran’s activities in southern Iraq as a manifestation of Iran’s great-power status. Yet none of them holds on to Khomeini’s dream of ruling over Iraq’s Shiites. Rather, Tehran’s goal in southern Iraq is to exert the type of economic, cultural, and political influence it has wielded in western Afghanistan since the 1990s. Although Tehran clearly expects to play a major role in Iraq, it may not aim — or be able — to turn the country into another Islamic republic.

Predictably, Iran’s growing prominence is complicating relations between sectarian groups in the region. Sunni governments have used Tehran’s ambitions as an excuse to resist both the demands of their own Shiite populations and Washington’s calls for political reform. Since 2003, Sunni leaders in Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia have repeatedly blamed Iran for the chaos in Iraq and warned that Iran would wield considerable influence in the region if Iraqi Shiites came to hold the reins of power in Baghdad. The Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, sounded the alarm last April: “Shiites are mostly always loyal to Iran and not the countries where they live.” Such partly self-serving rhetoric allows Sunni leaders to divert attention away from their own responsibility for Iraq’s troubles: Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia have so far supplied the bulk of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s army of suicide bombers. It also provides them with a subterfuge to resist U.S. calls for domestic political reform. If bringing democracy to the Middle East means empowering Shiites and strengthening Iran, they argue, Washington would be well advised to stick to Sunni dictatorships.

Ahmad Nikbakht and his three-year old son on the road to Karbala Photo: Adam Toy

The Sunnis’ public-relations offensive worries the Iranian leadership. Despite its growing clout, Tehran needs its neighbors’ support and the goodwill of “the Arab street” to resist international pressure over its nuclear program. So far, Tehran has avoided sectarian posturing and further antagonizing Sunnis; instead, it has tried to generate support in the region by escalating tensions with the United States and Israel. Iranian leaders have routinely blamed sectarian violence in Iraq, including the bombing of the Askariya shrine, in Samarra, in February, on “agents of Zionism” intent on dividing Muslims. Meanwhile, Tehran aggressively pursues nuclear power both to confirm Iran’s regional status and to minimize Washington’s ability to stand in its way…

…if Washington and Tehran are unable to find common ground — and the constitutional negotiations fail — the consequences would be dire. At best, Iraq would go into convulsions; at worst, it would descend into full-fledged civil war. And if Iraq were to collapse, its fate would most likely be decided by a regional war. Iran, Turkey, and Iraq’s Arab neighbors would likely enter the fray to protect their interests and scramble for the scraps of Iraq. The major front would be essentially the same as that during the Iran-Iraq War, only two hundred miles further to the west: it would follow the line, running through Baghdad, that separates the predominantly Shiite regions of Iraq from the predominantly Sunni ones. Iran and the countries that supported it in the 1980s would likely back the Shiites; the countries that supported Iraq would likely back the Sunnis.

Iraq is sometimes compared to Vietnam in the early 1970s or Yugoslavia in the late 1980s, but a more relevant — and more sobering — precedent may be British India in 1947. There was no civil war in India, no organized militias, no centrally orchestrated ethnic cleansing, no battle lines, and no conflict over territory. Yet millions of people died or became refugees. British India’s professional army was sliced along communal lines as the country was partitioned into Hindu-majority and Muslim-majority regions. Unable to either bridge the widening chasm between both groups or control the violence, the British colonial administrators were forced to beat a hasty retreat. As in Iraq today, the problem in India then lay with a minority that believed in its own manifest destiny to rule and demanded, in exchange for embracing the political process, concessions from an unyielding majority. The pervasive sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing plaguing Iraq today are ominous reminders of what happened in India some 60 years ago. They may also be a worse omen: if the situation in Iraq deteriorates further, the whole Middle East would be at risk of a sectarian conflict between Shiites and Sunnis.

By Vali Nasr. Reproduced with permission from the July/August 2006 edition of FOREIGN AFFAIRS (http://www.foreignaffairs.org/).

Photos: Adam Toy

In the summer of 2006, as the Iranian-backed Hezbollah fought off Israelis in Lebanon and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad faced down President George Bush at the United Nations, a bus full of Iranian pilgrims left Tehran on a journey to the holy city of Karbala, deep inside a shattered Iraq. “Pilgrimage To Karbala” follows this intense journey into the heartlands of Shia Islam, revealing how two ancient crimes — the murder of Muhammad’s grandson and the disappearance of a six-year-old imam became the founding legends of Shiism and increasingly dominate events and attitudes in the Middle East today.

Photos: Adam Toy

BAFTA award-winning filmmaker Kevin Sim directed WIDE ANGLE’s “Beslan: Siege of School No. 1″ about the bloodiest act of terrorism in modern Russia in which Chechen gunmen took over a school and kept more than 1,000 women and children hostage for three days. His other films include “Sacred Ground,” a FRONTLINE episode on rebuilding the Twin Tower site; “Remember My Lai,” also for FRONTLINE; HITLER’S SEARCH FOR THE HOLY GRAIL; THE SHAKESPEARE MYSTERY; and COLLEGE GIRLS, a six-part series chronicling a generation of students at Oxford’s last women-only college.

Muhammad established no church or institutional structure for Islam; indeed, the faith’s basic notion that all believers were equal before God seemed to rule out the notion of a priesthood. But Islam was a social and political movement as well as a religious one, and as it developed, a complex set of institutions grew with it, which over time took on an increasingly religious significance. And as the Arab empire expanded, Islam incorporated elements of the cultures it encountered, giving rise to varying schools of interpretation of the texts of Islamic belief: the Qur’an, the “sunnah” (the exemplary words and deeds of Muhammad) and the “hadith” (the records kept by Muhammad’s companions).

With the rise of religious institutions and the expansion of Islamic scholarship, doctrinal arguments developed, which led to the development of a number of sects and schools of thought. But the most important schism in Islam — the event that split the faith into the majority Sunni and minority Shia branches that persist to the present day — took place at the religion’s very beginnings.

The Caliphate

Muhammad died in 632 C.E. without leaving a son and heir, or clear instructions on who would succeed him. Under his leadership, Islam had become not only a faith, but the driving force behind an expanding Arab empire. Following tribal tradition, three groups of Muslim leaders — those who had accompanied Muhammad on the “hijira” (the flight of the early Muslims from Mecca to Medina), the civic leaders of Medina who initially supported Muhammad, and the prominent families of Mecca who had become converts upon Muhammad’s return — met to decide who would act as head of the growing “ummah” or Muslim community.

The discussions split along partisan lines, which had roots in an existing rivalry between the closely related Hashemite and Umayyad clans. The Hashemites (the clan to which Muhammad belonged), supported Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali (he’d married the Prophet’s daughter Fatima), while the rival Umayyads backed Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s father-in-law. Ali’s followers became known as the Shia, from “shiat Ali” (party of Ali); those who supported the Umayyads came to be called Sunnis, from “Sunna” (one who follows the word and deed of the Prophet).

Eventually Abu Bakr was appointed to the new position, known as the Caliphate (from “khalifa,” the Arabic term for successor), and assumed spiritual and political leadership. The new position was primarily secular: The Caliph led the Islamic community, but was not believed to possess any kind of divine power or prophetic ability, since Muhammad’s teachings had established that he was the final Prophet.

While Abu Bakr’s reign lasted only two years (he died in 634), his successors, Omar and Uthman, continued to expand the empire, moving into Iran and Egypt. But the political struggles between the clans continued, and both the second and third Caliphs were assassinated.

In 656, Ali was chosen as the fourth Caliph. He would be the last of the “rightly guided” Caliphs — the men who had traveled and studied with Muhammad — and his ascent to the throne triggered Islam’s first open civil war.

The Schism

Muawiyah, the Umayyad governor of Syria, challenged Ali’s authority as Caliph, and the empire fragmented, with both men claiming to be Caliph. Muawiyah argued that the Caliphate should continue to be decided by a consensus of the faithful, while Ali’s followers maintained that the Prophet’s bloodline should take precedence. Meanwhile Abu Bakr’s daughter Aisha — Muhammad’s widow — charged that Ali had been an accomplice in Uthman’s murder and led her troops against his. Finally, in 661 C.E., Ali was assassinated by the Kharijites, a breakaway sect whose members rejected both Umayyad and Hashemite claims to the Caliphate.

Ali’s eldest son, Hasan, who was uninterested in politics, rejected the Caliphate, and Muawiyah claimed the position, moving the capital to Damascus, Syria and ending the debate over succession. The Umayyad dynasty went on to rule for a century, expanding the empire as far east as present-day Pakistan and as far west as Morocco, even taking control of Spain in 711. The Umayyads consolidated Islamic rule over what we know today as the traditional center of the Islamic world as seen in the map above: North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. The Caliphate itself existed (with varying degrees of power) as a secular authority in the Islamic world until 1924, ending only when Ataturk abolished it as part of the secularization of Turkey.

The Shia, meanwhile, rejected the authority of the new Caliph, claiming that Muawiyah and the Umayyads were usurpers. They believed that membership in the Hashemite line — in particular descent through Ali and Fatima — should be the basis of authority within Islam. Ali’s younger son, Husayn, gained a following in what is now Iraq, becoming popular with recent Persian and other Central Asian converts to Islam, who felt that the Umayyad Caliphate was treating non-Arabs as second-class citizens. A second civil war erupted as Husayn finally acted, pressing his claim to the Caliphate and leading a rebellion against the Umayyads.

Husayn’s small force faced the Umayyad army at Karbala, in what is now Iraq. Woefully outnumbered, he was killed along with all of his followers; his infant son died later, ending the Hashemite claim to the Caliphate. The Shia, however, did not disappear, but evolved into an oppositional movement within Islam, with its own leaders, doctrines, and ceremonies.

The deaths of Ali and Husayn came to be central parts of Shia spiritual life — the Shia have come to see both men as divinely inspired martyrs who died defending the true faith of Islam rather than victims of a struggle for political power. Shia faith has a deep regard for martyrdom, and has incorporated mourning rituals, “passion play” theatrical reenactments and processions, and other passionate, demonstrative traditions that are absent from Sunni practice.

Perhaps even more importantly, the Shia and Sunni traditions disagree strongly on two related matters: the question of divinity in the succession from Muhammad and the role of the clergy in the practice of Islam. While the Sunni believe that all humans, past and present, have had the same relationship to God, the Shia hold that Ali and the eleven leaders of the Shia faith who followed him — the twelve Imams — were divinely inspired and infallible in their judgements. The Twelfth Imam is believed not to have died, but to have passed into “occultation,” to return someday as the “Mahdi” or guided one, to lead a perfected Islamic society.

Most Shia — including the large Iranian Shia population — recognize the twelve Imams, and are thus referred to as “Twelvers” (minority branches of the Shia traditions only recognize the line up to the Fifth or Seventh Imams). The Imams are treated as saints, and their tombs have become pilgrimage sites. Given the messianic belief in the return of the Twelfth Imam, a hierarchical organization of clerics (which some historians have compared in structure to the Catholic Church) grew up to manage Islam until his return; these clerics are themselves understood to hold an elevated spiritual status.

This is in distinct opposition to the Sunni tradition, in which the “ulema” (clerics) function simply as prayer leaders and legal interpreters, recognized only for their learning and expertise in jurisprudence. Furthermore, the Sunni strictly oppose the “saintly” role the Imams play in Shia faith, since in Sunni interpretation this is equivalent to the elevation of humans to godly status, and thus forbidden.

Some minority Shia sects have added two further “pillars” — jihad (understood generally as the duty to perform good works) and allegiance to the Imam — but most of these groups have disappeared and the associated concepts have slipped out of practice. Mainstream Shia legal belief also includes a concept known as “temporary marriage” which the Sunni see as an endorsement of extramarital affairs. Overall, however, Shia and Sunni adherents agree on the core beliefs of Islam: the Qur’an and the Five Pillars. Neither Sunni nor Shia faith has remained static — the body of Islamic jurisprudence includes a mechanism similar to legal precedent, in which new ideas can be incorporated into Islamic tradition using analogy with decisions described in the Qur’an, sunnah, or hadith.

In the twentieth century, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini introduced a major innovation into Shia law, though it has only taken root in Iran. Khomeini’s concept of “velayat-e faqih” (guardianship of the jurisprudent) calls for government and civil society to be guided directly by the clergy. Put into practice following the 1979 revolution, this has resulted in Iran’s hybrid government, in which an elected parliament and president are subject to the power of a body of appointed clerical officials.

Husayn was buried at Karbala. That site and the tomb of Ali, in nearby Najaf, have become pilgrimage sites for the Shia faithful, secondary for them in importance only to Mecca. The anniversary of Husayn’s death, Ashura (the tenth day of the first month of the Muslim year) is one of the major holidays in the Shia calendar.

Mecca is the only pilgrimage site officially accepted by all Muslims, but Iran and Iraq are home to a number of sites considered holy to the Shia faithful, and the primary centers of Shia learning are also located in Iraq and Iran.

Because of this relationship, there have been centuries of intellectual exchange between Iran and Iraq, as scholars and clerics moved between the schools in Najaf, Karbala, and Qom, and visited the pilgrimage sites in both countries. Iran had been officially Shia since the Safavid dynasty, but Iraq had only a brief period of Shia rule, and had been administrated by Sunni leaders since the middle of the sixteenth century, continuing under the Ottomans, the British, and Saddam Hussein.

After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Iranian government sought actively to export its ideas, and the secular (though nominally Sunni) Iraqi government feared that the Shia majority would heed the call and revolt themselves. This led to increased oppression of the Iraqi Shia population, and was one of the causes of the Iran-Iraq conflict. Saddam Hussein’s fears proved groundless, however, as nationalism trumped any pan-Shia feeling on both sides, and Shia troops fought one another throughout the war.

Since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government in 2003, the provisional Iraqi government has had to deal with new fears of an Iranian-inspired Islamic revolution. Shia leaders in Iraq have been debating the appropriateness of adopting “velayat-e-faqih” in that country; the traditional leadership, including Iraq’s senior cleric, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, rejects the idea, while the popular radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr — whose father was assassinated by Saddam Hussein — champions it. As of 2005, the outcome remains to be seen.

Mashhad

The eighth Imam, Reza, is buried in Mashhad, and his golden-domed tomb is the most important Shia pilgrimage site located in Iran itself, visited by hundreds of thousands of pilgrims annually. The city itself is laid out in a circle around the shrine, and the region surrounding the tomb serves as “bast” or a place of refuge; the shrine itself has statelike authority, and can grant asylum to those who seek safety.

Qom

Qom is the center of Shia scholarship in Iran, home to the country’s most important madrassas; the tomb of the sister of the eighth Imam makes the city an important Shia pilgrimage center as well. Khomeini trained here as a student, and returned here in 1979, making it a base for the Revolution. It continues to be a center for Shia scholarship.

Shiraz

The city of Shiraz is an important pilgrimage site — though not for its Shia heritage. Historically, Shiraz has been a center for Iran’s Sufi intellectuals. Sufism is a mystical movement that first emerged in Shia communities during the 8th century (though there are Sufi groups in Sunni Islam as well). While an incredibly wide variety of beliefs and practices exist among the Sufi brotherhoods, Sufis in general reject the literalism of traditional Islamic jurisprudence in pursuit of a personal — and often mystical or ecstatic — relationship with God.

Many of the Islamic world’s greatest writers and thinkers — including Hafiz, the Persian language’s greatest lyric poet — were attracted to Sufism, joining the Sufi brotherhoods. Hafiz is buried in Shiraz, and his tomb has become a destination not just for Sufi adherents, but for Iranians in general, who consult his collected poems as an oracle. It is believed that if one keeps a question in mind and chooses at random one of Hafiz’s poems, the first couplet will provide an answer.

Najaf

Najaf is the site of the tomb of Ali, Muhammad’s son-in-law, the Fourth Caliph and First Imam, and like Qom it is a center of Shia scholarship. The Shrine of Ali is one of Shia’s holiest places, and the city that grew up around it has remained a center of Shia thought, even under Sunni and secular governments. Khomeini moved to Najaf in 1965, after being sent into exile by the Shah, and spent thirteen years there, during which time he formulated much of the political theory he was to put into practice following the 1979 Revolution. Najaf has never been an easy city to govern — its residents revolted against both the Ottomans and Saddam Hussein — and as of summer 2005 it remains a hotly contested place, with radical Shia leader Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi militia fighting the postwar Iraqi government and the U.S. Army.

Karbala

Husayn, Ali’s son, Muhammad’s grandson, and the central martyr in the Shia tradition, died at Karbala and is buried there. For Shiites, his tomb is the holiest site outside of Mecca and Medina, and many make the pilgrimage there — up to a million pilgrims visit the city to observe Ashura, the anniversary of Husayn’s death. Like Najaf the city has become home to a number of Shia madrassas.

At Ashura, Karbala is the site of the “ta’ziya,” a passion play that reenacts the circumstances leading up to the martyrdom. The ritual is practiced elsewhere, but the observance is particularly intense in Iraq in general and at Karbala in particular, including a bloody self-flagellation ritual — in which young men not only whip themselves, but cut their scalps with swords — rarely practiced elsewhere in the Islamic world.

Baghdad (Kazimayn)

The shrines to Musa al-Kazim and Muhammad al-Jawwad, the 7th and 9th Imams, are located in Kazimayn, now a Baghdad suburb. Baghdad itself served as the capital of the Sunni Caliphate on several occasions from the 8th through the 13th centuries; it was only part of a Shia state for the first few decades of the 16th century, when it came under Safavid rule.

Samarra

Samarra is the site of the shrines to the 10th and 11th Imams, Ali al-Hadi and Hassan al-Askari, though more interestingly the city is also the place from which the 12th “Hidden” Imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi, is believed to have entered his period of occultation. There is a shrine built atop the cellar in which the child Imam was last reported seen.

Medina

While Medina is an important, if optional, stop for pilgrims on the hajj, it is a pilgrimage destination for Shiites. The shrines to the 2nd and 4th Imams, Hasan and Ali Zayn al-Abidin, are located there; Muhammad’s daughter Fatima is also buried in Medina.

Mecca

Pilgrimage to Mecca is compulsory, at least once in a lifetime, for all Muslims who can possibly afford it. The “hajj” (pilgrimage) itself centers on the Great Mosque surrounding the Kaaba, the cubical structure thought to have been built by Abraham and Ishmael — the shrine that the world’s Muslim’s face in prayer everyday.

The hajj is tightly regulated by the Saudi Arabian government, which limits the number of visitors (generally to two million) for the annual observance, and forbids political activity or sloganeering during the pilgrimage. Following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, however, Iranian Shia pilgrims challenged this authority, waving portraits of Khomeini and openly chanting anti-Israeli and anti-U.S. slogans along the route and at the Kaaba itself; tensions came to a head in 1987 when 400 pilgrims were killed in fighting between Iranian demonstrators and Saudi police. The Iranian protests were widely seen — as was the 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie — as challenges to Sunni dominance. Since the 1990s, relations have improved, especially following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, and the hajj has been peaceful since.

Map Data Sources: CIA World Factbook 2004; Adherents.com

Essay Sources: Albert Hourani A HISTORY OF THE ARAB PEOPLES (Warner Books, 1991); Nikki R. Keddie: MODERN IRAN: ROOTS AND RESULTS OF REVOLUTION (Yale UP, 2003); Thomas W. Lippman UNDERSTANDING ISLAM: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE MUSLIM WORLD (Plume, 2002); Sandra Mackey THE IRANIANS: PERSIA, ISLAM AND THE SOUL OF A NATION (Plume. 1998); Elaine Sciolino PERSIAN MIRRORS: THE ELUSIVE FACE OF IRAN (Touchstone, 2000).