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Rightly did Faiz say on Pakistan’s independence, “This is not the one, the long-awaited morn,” because, for one, communal riots of united India gave place to a bloodier sectarian war in the new country.
Before independence it was Hindus versus Muslims. But with Pakistan’s birth Muslims began to fight Muslims. It started with the Sunnis attacking Ahmadis in 1954. Twenty years later the government threw them out of the pale of Islam (in Pakistan).
But the most enduring and the bloodiest conflict in Pakistan has been between the Sunnis and Shias. During early Mughal rule, particularly because Iran had offered sanctuary to Emperor Humayun, Shias enjoyed much influence at the court. “The anti-Shia trend in India,” pioneered by Sheikh Ahmad Sirhindi, “came as a reaction to Akbar’s policy of tolerance to Shias.”
Title: Sectarian War - Pakistan’s Sunni-Shia Violence and its links to the Middle East
Author: Khaled Ahmed
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Pakistan (2010)
Pages: 402 pages, Hardback
Price: PKR. 995
ISBN: 9780195479560
During Aurangzeb’s reign anti-Shia tilt became more pronounced in his Fatawa-i-Alamgiri, on which the Deobandi School in Pakistan later based its futwahs of apostasy against Shias.
The two communities coexisted peacefully not only in British India, but even in Pakistan for many years. Pakistan’s founder Mohammad Ali Jinnah, and its first president, Iskander Mirza and another president Yahya Khan, were Shia. Moreover, Shias not only supported the Muslim League in India but also the Objectives Resolution in Pakistan.
Nonetheless, differences surfaced quite early, leading to separate Shia and Sunni funeral prayers being offered for Quaid-e-Azam and Miss Fatima Jinnah.
In his book “Sectarian War,” reputed journalist Khaled Ahmed not only discusses Sunni-Shia violence in Pakistan and the Middle East, with meticulous detail, but also traces the very genesis of the Shia-Sunni split from the time when the Prophet (S.A.W.), before breathing his last, asked for pen and paper (to dictate his will). But Omar did not allow it. Shias believe that the Prophet was going to will Ali as his political successor which Omar deliberately prevented, and therefore revile him bitterly.
Shias and Sunnis differ from each other in practically everything except their belief in Allah as One and Mohammad as His Messenger. Their prayers (timing, number and process), fasting, marriage and funeral rites, zakat, fitra and haj; even their azan and kalima are different.
And yet in India, they had lived together for centuries and even intermarried. The drift started when in the eighteenth century Nawab Asafud Daulah’s chief minister began building separate mosques for the Shias in Lucknow and giving “currency to the ritual of tabarra (abuse) ….,” that led to the “first incidence of violent Shia-Sunni encounters in the city. ” (p.103)
In Pakistan “Sunnis and Shias grew up as one Muslim community” up to the 1980s. Things changed with the rise of Ziaul Haq in Pakistan and Imam Khomeini in Iran when the clergy of both sects became aggressive to create awareness about their respective differences.
It was under Ziaul Haq’s “plan to teach the Shias of Jhang a lesson for having opposed his zakat laws that Sipah-e-Sahaba (SSP) was founded in 1985” and Sunnis started issuing apostasy futwahs against Shias. In fact it was due to the fear of the spread of Iran’s Islamic Revolution that the old, long since dormant, schism between the Sunnis and Shias resurfaced in. Saudi Arabia and Gulf States became the hotbed of the schism and Pakistan became a battleground for a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. “Iraq and Saudi Arabia funded the SSP while the Shias were reactively funded by Iran.” (p.32)
“Narrative of a frightful asymmetry” chronicles sectarian killings all over Pakistan, and how the Taliban and Al Qaeda factored in giving it a wider dimension. Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LJ) was banned in 2001, but its association with Al Qaeda produced such actors, as Ramzi Yusuf, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad et al. Yusuf’s “associates were given the task of murdering Maulana Salim Qadri, chief of Sunni Tehrik.” (126)
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and SSP went on rampage against Shias. Shia massacre in Parachinar and later in Gilgit was “allowed” by Ziaul Haq. But it was the killing of their most prominent leader Arif Al-Hussaini on 5 August 1988 that shocked the Shias most. Zia’s plane crash (Aug. 17, 1988) was therefore no accident, but in retaliation of Al-Hussaini’s murder, carefully planned and meticulously executed.
A little known fact of history, revealed is that the Iranian princess Shehr Bano, who was married to Imam Hussain, had come with her sister, Kayhan Bano. The latter was married to Abu Bakr’s son, Mohammad. Her daughter, Umme Farwa, was married to the fifth Shia Imam, Baqar, and was the mother of the sixth Imam Jafar-e-Sadiq.
The chapter “Soldiers of Sectarianism” deals with the famous Pakistani madrasas, the militant sectarian outfits Jaish-e-Mohammad, Lahshkar-e-Taiba, Sipah-e-Mohammad and the profiles of their respective leaders, Masood Azhar (whom the author calls “bridegroom of Jihad”), Raza Naqvi and Hafiz Saeed with some chilling pieces of information.
The chapter “Shias in the Middle East” covers inter-sectarian relations in Bahrain, Azerbaijan, Kuwait, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen. Noteworthy are the observations that “the Shias of Kuwait feel proud of being Kuwaiti in contrast to the Shias of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. (p.257); The UAE remains the most moderate society in the region (p.263); A cultural wall has stood between the Shias of Azerbaijan and Ira.” An “ethnic divide exists between the Arab Shias and the Iranian Shias.” (p.264) In the Iraq-Iran War, therefore, the Iraq Shias fought against the Iran army.
The discussion on Iraq starts from the time of Caliph Omar to the Abbasids but it focuses only on the composition of the army during those periods. And then suddenly fast forwards to the present, up to the elections in 2006. Omitted, astonishingly, is any mention of the sectarian turbulence under the Abbasids that eventually led to the sack of Baghdad in 1258 by Hulaku Khan, the Shia conspiracy with the U.S. to invade Iraq in 2003 and the post-invasion Shia-Sunni violence.
The chapter “Transformation of Al Qaeda” is an extremely fascinating chronicle of the evolution of the organization, its main characters and its anti-Shia activities and predicts that, “The exit of Al Qaeda from Pakistan will weaken the sectarian trend in the country.” (p.313)
In the final chapter the author analyzes sectarian terror in the Tribal areas in great depth and also makes some interesting predictions about the future.
In conclusion, a few observations are called for. One, there is no mention of Shias in Syria. Two, it was not Caliph Umar who added the phrase, “come to the best act” in the azan (p.63) for this is not part of Sunni azan. Three, the Saudi-Iranian hostility as it played out in Pakistan, has been repeated many times under various topics. Four, the lengthy accounts of the financial assistance the Nawabs of Awadh gave to Najaf and Dr. A.Q.Khan’s diabolical activities in connection with sale of nuclear technology, though fascinating per se, are not strictly material to the book’s title. Five, the statement, “In 2006 a Bangladeshi suicide bomber killed …. Allama Hassan Turabi.” (p.283) needs authentication besides the culprit’s name.
Nonetheless, the book with its mass of information offers a rare insight into the Shia-Sunni conflict and reveals many unknown and less known facts which, both researchers and general readers would find useful. 
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