The question of the role that religion – or more specifically theology – plays in driving or even 'causing’ sectarianism is a challenging one, not least because it enters into the tricky territory of trying to discern whether ‘religious’ or ‘political’ motivations explain Islamist behaviour. An illustrative example is the extent to which different Muslim Brotherhood movements, starting from ostensibly similar ideological orientations, have diverged in their approaches to Shias and Shiism.

The Brotherhood’s attitudes towards Shiism have received little attention in the academic literature. In Carrie Wickham’s The Muslim Brotherhood (2013), arguably the most comprehensive modern work on the Egyptian Brotherhood, the group’s efforts to disassociate itself from Iranian theocratic rule are discussed, but nothing on its views on Shias or Shiism per se.

In light of sectarianized conflicts in Syria and Yemen and regional fault lines between Saudi Arabia and Iran, understanding the evolution of Sunni attitudes towards Shiism has grown more important. This article will explore the views of Brotherhood and Brotherhood-inspired groups across the region and then will broaden the analysis to ask what the Brotherhood’s anti-Shiism (or lack thereof) tells us about Sunni Islamists’ theological and ideological orientation and how that intersects with their political priorities.

As we will see, when considering the ‘sectarianization’ of the Middle East (Hashemi & Postel, 2017), the Brotherhood, as both a movement and an ideological orientation, stands as something of an anomaly: It operates in a context shaped by ‘sectarianization’ while remaining resistant – or at least indifferent – to its various temptations.

Anti-Shiism and the Muslim Brotherhood

With the partial exception of Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood, Brotherhood branches and affiliates have not generally been known for anti-Shia sentiment. This does not mean that they find Shiism doctrinally acceptable; they simply have not paid much attention to it. Even the Syrian Brotherhood’s anti-Shia rhetoric tends to be couched in geopolitical rather than theological terms. There is little evidence of any doctrinal divergence between the Syrian Brotherhood and other Brotherhood organizations towards Alawis or Twelver Shias, suggesting that the former’s distinctive attitudes are a product of its particular political environment. Even though many Sunni clerics have condemned Alawis as being outside the fold of Islam, the Syrian Brotherhood’s primary point of attack on the Syrian regimes’ Alawi leadership was not Alawi heterodoxy or heresy. Suffering under the rule of Hafez al-Assad in the 1970s, the group’s main objections were that this was a minority, secular, repressive regime. The Baathists’ secularism loomed large, leading the Brotherhood to label it ‘atheist’ (Talhamy, 2009, p. 566).

The Brotherhood’s normative differences with fellow Sunnis – primarily the authoritarian leaders within their own countries – rather than with Shias were at the forefront for decades. Since the Arab uprisings, these differences have been replicated on a regional level, with the leaders of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates representing the primary adversaries for Brotherhood movements. However, this intra-Sunni conflict has taken on a sectarian hue, with post-Arab Spring authoritarian regimes increasingly labelling the Brotherhood as outside the fold of traditional Sunni thought, treating it as a ‘sect’ apart. The most notable example is former Egyptian Grand Mufti Ali Goma’a’s characterization of the Brotherhood as khawarij, thereby making their blood licit and legitimizing the Rabaa massacre of 14 August 2013 (Gomaa, 2013, see also Elmasry, 2015).

In the months leading up to the July 2013 coup, pro-army media outlets attacked the Brotherhood for its lack of sectarian feeling against Iran, which suggested, again, that the Brotherhood somehow stood apart from its Sunni brethren. With President Mohamed Morsi attempting to warm relationships with Iran (even if the extent of that warming was often exaggerated), the Brotherhood’s opponents wasted no time pointing to the group’s ‘foreignness’ and its lack of nationalist, Egyptian feeling (Badawi & Al-Sayyad, 2018). Under growing pressure domestically and facing a popular upsurge of anti-Shiism, the Brotherhood in its final weeks in power ‘increasingly countenanced, if not participated in, Salafi attacks on the Shi’a to shore up their right flank' (Brooke, 2017).

These observations conform with the scholarly literature on how and why democratizing states, particularly ideologically polarized ones, witness increased bigotry towards minority groups (Hamid, 2014; Mansfield & Snyder, 2007). This also reinforces this article’s key argument that, absent pre-existing doctrinal objections, fluctuations in Brotherhood attitudes are largely contingent on the political environment. In a given period, say 2010 to 2013, doctrine or theological orientation, which is ‘thick’ and ‘sticky’, is unlikely to vary significantly, so any short-term change in attitudes towards Shias or Shiism will almost entirely be a product of changing political fortunes.

One telling example of this is a ‘secret meeting’ between the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps in Istanbul where the two considered ways they might cooperate, according to leaked Iranian intelligence documents (Risen et al., 2019). Although nothing significant came out of the meeting itself, the very fact that it was held suggests that the Brotherhood – out of desperation after the Egyptian military coup – was willing to consider doing things it otherwise would not have done.

The Tunisian ‘model’

It was Ennahda co-founder and leader Rachid Ghannouchi who, among Brotherhood-linked thinkers, probably thought most about the Iranian revolution. During his time as a student in Paris, he participated in the Islamic students’ association, which was headed by an Iranian student. That student introduced him to the work of Mehdi Bazargan, briefly Khomeini’s first prime minister in February 1979. In his biography of Ghannouchi, Azzam Tamimi (2001, p. 27) writes that ‘for Ghannouchi, the arrangement reflected a high degree of tolerance, for no one objected to the Shiism of the Iranian student or considered it an impediment to his election as head of a society the rest of whose members were all Sunnis’. Ghannouchi recalled later that ‘the Iranian revolution came to give us a new set of Islamic discourses. It enabled us to Islamize some leftist social concepts and to accommodate the social conflict within an Islamic context’ (Tamimi, 2001, p. 53). According to Tamimi, Ghannouchi considered Khomeini one of the three mujaddids (renewers) of the twentieth century along with Hassan al-Banna and Abul Ala Mawdudi.

To say, however, that Ghannouchi had thought much about Shiism – as theology – would be misleading. He had not, but this allowed him to more easily embrace the Iranian revolution as something that could transcend sect. Like other mainstream Islamists, however, Ghannouchi would soon sour on the Iranian experiment (Matthiesen, 2017). The leftism that initially inspired him became obscured by the Islamic Republic’s intensifying authoritarianism and intolerance of dissent.

Politics – and geopolitics – over theology

The evolution of the Syrian Brotherhood demonstrates the primacy of politics in shaping attitudes towards Shias. Explicitly, anti-Shia rhetoric only begins to figure prominently in the Syrian Brotherhood's rhetoric in the 1980s, which is no accident. Initially, the Iranian Revolution was welcomed by mainstream Sunni Islamists, including the Syrian Brotherhood. They saw Iran as a potential ally against their own repressive regimes. This was also the first instance in which a large-scale protest movement – led by Islamists – managed to unseat a secular dictator. The Iranian Revolution reflected a broader cross-sectarian religious revival throughout the region. Shared ideology around Islam’s political and legal role in politics took precedence over sect. Thus, Sunni Islamists had more in common with Shia Islamists than they did with Sunni secularists – at least at first. Khomeini’s political theology, which diverged from much of the traditional Shia religious establishment, argued that direct clerical engagement in governance did not require waiting until the return of the Imam. Interestingly, the writing of Sayyid Qutb, in many ways the Egyptian Brotherhood’s last true revolutionary, had become influential among Iranian elites (Ünal, 2016).

It was only after revolutionary Iran solidified its alliance with Syria that the Syrian Brotherhood’s criticisms of the Assad regime became more anti-Shia. Syrian Brotherhood ideologue Said Hawwa began attacking Shias as deviating from the true Islam (Talhamy, 2009, p. 572). Even here, though, Hawwa’s evolving position was a product of geopolitical changes, rather than any deep theological reassessment of Shiism. In the more than three decades since, the Syrian Brotherhood has settled into a fairly consistent anti-Shia discourse, focused around fears of Shia hegemony (a Shia ‘crescent’) over Sunnis in Syria and the broader Sunni world.

While this might offer evidence for the fundamentally ‘political’ nature of changes in sectarian attitudes, the very attempt to demarcate ‘religious’ and ‘political’ motivations is problematic since it assumes that, for Islamists, they can ever be truly disentangled. The case of the Syrian Brotherhood illustrates that they are intertwined in complex ways.

Other Brotherhood affiliates with recent anti-Shia orientations are the pro-regime al-Minbar society in Bahrain (due to the country’s Shia majority asserting its rights during the Arab Spring), the Iraqi Islamic Party, and to a lesser extent the Brotherhood faction within Yemen’s Islah party. In the case of Iraq after the 2003 U.S. invasion, Sunni Islamists, rather than having Saddam Hussein as their primary enemy, now had to contend with a Shia-led government, which they came to see as the bigger threat – even, for a time, bigger than the Islamic State (Sowell, 2015). As these examples illustrate, the main determinant of Sunni Islamists’ views towards Shia Islamists, and Shias more generally, appears to be whether their primary political challengers, or oppressors, are Sunni or Shia.

In Yemen, antagonism towards Houthis and Zaydi Shias more generally has been more characteristic of Salafi elements in the Islah party (Islah being one of the few Brotherhood-linked parties that includes a considerable number of Salafis). At the start of the uprising against President Ali Abdullah Saleh in 2011, there was significant cooperation between Islah and Houthi youth. Anti-Houthi sentiment was not necessarily the same as anti-Zaydi or anti-Shia sentiment, but this began to change as the conflict intensified. Houthis soon moved to detain Brotherhood leaders and bar them from travel (Yadav, 2017).

While Yemeni Brotherhood leaders have continued to resist overt sectarianism, the rank-and-file appear to have been affected by the sectarianization of the broader population. Islah can no longer assert much control over its members since it has ceased to exist as an organization in the full sense of the word (Yadav, personal communication, 8 March 2018). This is a reminder that civil war and armed conflict, rather than ‘primordial’ theological differences, are the main drivers of sectarianization, particularly in contexts where sectarianism has not historically been the main political cleavage.

In the one country – Kuwait – that has both a large Shia minority and parliamentary competition, there has been a long history of Sunni–Shia cooperation among the opposition. For the Kuwaiti Brotherhood, the other sect is the lesser threat (Freer, 2017). This is in contrast to Saudi Arabia, which has a large Shia minority but no parliamentary competition, and thus no real institutional mechanisms through which Sunnis can cooperate with Shias (Freer, 2019, p. 97).

Conclusion

The fact that most Brotherhood organizations have not been associated with overt anti-Shiism does not mean that they are pro-Shia. Rather, their stance is theological indifference. In this respect, they stand somewhat outside of broader trends in the region – scholars such as Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel focused attention on the ‘sectarianization’ that was increasingly driving political and ideological competition, particularly after the 2003 Iraq invasion. That Brotherhood groups would find themselves resistant to this is itself an interesting finding considering that the Brotherhood is one of the largest organized movements in the Middle East.

In light of both Sunni regional powers and their own regimes treating Brotherhood groups as if they were quite literally a different sect outside of Sunni Islam traditionally understood, we can begin to talk about competing ‘sectarianisms’ (on the difficulty of defining sectarianism, see Haddad, 2017). Intra-Sunni conflicts over the role of religion in public life are conflicts, like Shia–Sunni divides, that reflect deeply held and divergent normative claims (Valbjørn, 2019, p. 132). These intra-Sunni divisions, despite occurring within a sect, may take – and often have taken – precedence over conflicts between sects. It is these divides and, relatedly, a survival imperative in the face of primarily Sunni rather than Shia regimes, that drive the Brotherhood’s political engagement.

In my interviews with Islamist figures in Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, and Turkey over the course of the past 15 years, Shias or Shiism only came up a handful of times. The ‘Iranian model’ came up occasionally but only in terms of what the Brotherhood did not want to do. Discomfort with the Iranian model was couched in political terms, even as it had theological implications.

As Abdel Moneim Abul Futouh, then a senior Brotherhood figure, explained to me in 2010: ‘Putting religion and political authority within one hand is very dangerous. That’s what happened in Iran. Historically, famous preachers were not part of the power structure’ (Interview). But more than suggesting explicitly anti-Shia sentiment, it reflects an important institutional difference between Sunni and Shia Islamist movements due to their historical context and evolution: the former are generally non-clerical or even anti-clerical, while the latter tend to have some affinity towards the Khomeinist emphasis on clerical rule. Even within groups like Bahrain’s al-Wifaq that keep their distance from Iran and do not endorse wilayat al-faqih, clerics play a central role, much more so than in Brotherhood-linked organizations.

The relative political as well as theological ‘indifference’ of many Sunni Islamists to Shias and Shiism tells us something about the ideological orientation of Brotherhood movements. Unlike their Salafi counterparts, these are movements that, for better or worse, are theologically flexible. Religion is more a motivation, a general guide for action, and a means for maintaining organizational cohesion and morale than something that shapes the specific content of policy positions, allowing Brotherhood branches and affiliates to evolve in different directions based on their distinctive local contexts.

This is not to say that religion does not matter. Rather, religion serves a different function for Brotherhood groups than it does for Salafis or Shia Islamists. This can lead to an ‘intellectual deficit.’ Being able to draw on a ‘dense’ or ‘coherent’ discursive tradition (Anjum, 2017) might be useful for success in transforming societies, but most mainstream Islamists long ago lost any real interest, or ability, in such success. They have been preoccupied with survival, a task that requires theological nimbleness. The survival imperative – increasingly important in authoritarian contexts – means that, for most Brotherhood movements, Shias will remain the lesser threat, arguably a much lesser threat.