Sectarianism and Boundaries: Much More to Explore
7th Nov 2022 by Mustafa Menshawy
During a Q&A at the latest BRISMES conference, my passion and enthusiasm for my paper on ‘sectarianism’ at dramatically and quickly dissipated. A pioneering high-profile scholar on the field, Dr. Morten Valbjørn, asked me a simple question: ‘What if we strike out the word ‘sectarianism’ and replace it with other words such as ‘identity’ for example?’
Admittedly taken somewhat by surprise at the question, I proceeded to mumble my way through an answer with a typical response: ‘Thank you, this is an interesting point’. As I began my excursions into literature to find a real answer it - as part of a grand tour facilitated by a Post Doc at SEPAD - I really found Morten’s point interesting and, even more, worthy of writing a whole manuscript.
The burgeoning scholarship on sectarianism has failed to identity or demarcate what is and what is not sectarianism, thus making the concept a catch-all phrase and prompting the likes of Fanar Haddad to suggest abandoning it all together. One consequence of this ‘catch-all’ attitude is that the concept is drawn on contradictory meanings in the debates and battles of definitional ontology.
For example, Morten considered religion as sine qua non of any criteria to identify a sectarian phenomenon. Others concentrate on different factors such ethnicity or caste and highlight concepts such as ‘secular sectarianism’.
Tensions along these lines of enquiry appear to pose another pitfall in literature. As sectarianism is complex, elusive and multi-faceted - or a ‘persistent intersectional issue’ – engaging with the complexities and contingencies of the topic results in a broad range of different disciplinary approaches and ontological and epistemological positions (this breadth is reflected in the range of Fellows listed on the SEPAD website).
In these isolated islands of research enquiries, there exists a very real danger that such approaches will not interact, either personally (at different disciplinary conferences) or intellectually. Perhaps Morten is right to call for the emergence of sub-discipline of Sectarianism Studies! This issue is glaringly obvious in the gap between those investigating sectarianism in the West and those in the non-Western world. How many times have we come across studies comparing sectarianism in Scotland, Ireland, India or Bahrain?! A few.
Indeed, the analytic interest of sectarianism addresses itself primarily to a single-culture configuration, i.e. the Muslim or the Arab world (Actually, SEPAD spotted the gap by expanding its research projects to include countries such as India and Bosnia-Herzegovina (the update on the projects and grants obtained on the website).
How then, should we overcome such challenges?
Boundaries Boundaries Boundaries
The repetition in the subheadings is purposeful. Building on initial endeavours already in place, my research conceptualises and analyses the ‘boundary-making process’ to settle the battles of definitional ontology of what is and what is not.
Taken from sociological traditions of researching ethnicity, the process analyses sectarianism in motion. While some scholars attempt to define sectarianism as a process (henceforth the renaming of it as ‘sectarianisation’, they do not go into detail about the structures, nuances and details of sectarianisation as process itself. This means that different and contradictory directions which sectarianism takes is an asset than leverage since we would be all included in the process.
Take religion: The process religion would situate it as a (not the) factor in sectarianisation by allowing boundaries to expand, thus grouping all Muslims as part of the Umma or the Muslim nation. Religion, at the same time, can allow boundaries to contract, thus excluding sub-sections of Muslims such as the Shia as not part of the Muslim nation. Furthermore, religion can help blur boundaries by obfuscating the space between what is ‘sacred’ or what is ‘profrane’, if we use the terms of Peter Berger in his seminal text Sacred Canopy.
I hope such typologies of ‘expanding’, ‘contracting’ and ‘blurring’ boundaries can help a better understanding of religion and sectarianism itself (as actually proven by the application of the process in understanding equally ambiguous concepts such as ethnicity or race).
As a result, boundaries appear flexible and contingent within these shifts across different stages or levels. This opens the door for the identification and articulation of additional boundaries and further typologies.
For example, religion can play a role in ‘universalising’, ‘historicising’ and ‘essentialising’ boundaries out of the particularising context in which it is made in a specific example or condition. The case is more so in aggravating the Sunni-Shia conflict by clinging to a historic moment of division in the Islamic history and which happened 1000 years ago. In the process, our interest is not the cultural features or content of religion but its ability to move across boundaries.
The second benefit of the process is methodological. As the process is synthetic and more of an approach than a specific method, it borrows from different directions. For example, the process borrows from the New Social Movement Theory, based on three levels of the individual (micro), the social or political movement(meso) and the state (macro)
This is very significant to bridge another gap in literature. With a few exceptions, there is a predominant focus on the state and geopolitical interest in its relations with other states (as is the case in the dominant parts of literature on Saudi-Iranian rivalry as a political manifestation of the Sunni-Shia feud (A phenomenon that you can tell by tracing the production of leading scholars in the field such Simon Mabon).
Moving into ‘everyday’ levels below the state is made easier as we can agree by now that contingently negotiable character where different agents would struggle on drawing and re-drawing boundaries.
Bringing Agency Back
In this vein, agency is linked with power since this struggle makes sectarianism a site of contestation over power, resources and control. This is easily seen in Syria, where the regime of President Bashar al-Assad acts the main agent imposing and enforcing boundaries, thus reducing the degree and levels of negotiation. These boundaries are based on denying, falsifying and hiding sectarianism as if it not there.
Assad’s sectarian boundaries expand to construct the ‘nationalist’ or ‘Pan-Arabist’ identity as the overarching umbrella. The expansion dilutes or erases boundaries at the internal level but replace with external boundaries where the enemies lie outside.
The direct consequence is that sectarianism is described as an external import plotted by the ‘West’, ‘colonisers’ or regional collaborators such as ‘Turkey’ or ‘Saudi Arabia’ (Assad’s speeches systematically analysed in my report of SEPAD shows a frequent and repeated mention of them’
One additional consequence is that boundaries between sectarianism and de-sectarianisation also blur as Assad’s sectarianising practices are disguised in its opposite (he even confidently endows on himself the status of a ‘de-sectarianisation keeper’ by maintaining a state of ‘sectarian chastity’ in the country).
Equally important is the way this process also shapes inter-communal relations in the country. The Alawi minority sect, to which Assad belongs, maintains its privileges by linking the latter to sectarianism. Every Syrian has been aware that to talk about the special status of the Alawis, in the job employment for example, can be constructed by the regime as an act of sectarianisation. She or he is thus aware that both topics are the same boundary not to be crossed!
Furthermore, expanding the boundaries to ‘pan-Arabism’ can protect the Alawis by including them into broader ‘bonds of solidarity’ and diluting the Sunni majority within an expansive definition of social or political membership (i.e. being an Arab).
In contrast, Kuwait is often heralded as a ‘success story’ in eradicating sectarian difference. Yet Syria and Kuwait both operate the sectarian boundary-making process albeit at different volumes and degrees.
The process is traced through ‘symbolic’ and ‘objective’ boundaries (further typologies in case you are less confused by those mentioned above!). The regime’s relationship with the Shia community is not based on discriminating them but drawing and re-drawing boundaries to serve the regime’s interests. This means that the boundary-making process is not only based on discrimination against the Shia community but also opportunities (and this perhaps justifies the main allegations among many Sunni interviewees whom I met in Kuwait during my field trip and who feel victimised and discriminated by the ‘dominant powers of the Shia’).
It is here where I am able to draw upon my previous research on the Muslim Brotherhood, with the aim of challenging a key stereotype which frames Egypt’s opposition group just as the recipient of the state’s sectarianising policies. Instead, I argue that the Brotherhood also engages in its own processes of sectarianisation through specific practices and discourses, seen in Egypt and in the diaspora.
Building on my previous book - about dynamics of interactions through reflecting on engagement and disengagement – my current research seeks to articulate how the group operates across external boundaries, separating it from the outside world and its ‘established order’, and internal boundaries, where it accentuates insulation through a collective identity forged through claims to uniqueness.
This uniqueness emerges in three ways: religion, as the group claims itself as the ‘sole’ representative of Islam and the propagator of its truer version; practices, having banned the formation of ‘political parties’ for decades; and social behaviour, such as inter-group marriage patterns.
In this sense, or so I claim, the Brotherhood is a sectarian movement as its process of boundary-making is mainly based on practices of established antagonism and othering.
Its interaction with the outside world entails criteria for limited membership into its ranks or exclusion from other groups (a claim validated also by methods such as discourse analysis of texts produced by the leaders of the Brotherhood).
The analysis is always contextualised, also showing how these internal and external boundaries intersect to reduce differences, create solidarity, generate congruence of values and codes inside the Brotherhood within a hostile environment.
It is within this dynamic process of making and un-making boundaries that we can better understand sectarianism and perhaps give it a distinctive shape enough to help me answer foundational questions in the next BRISMES conference!