It may seem as though the Middle East has always been divided between Sunni Islam, which represents about 85 percent of the world’s more than 1.8 billion Muslims, and Shiite Islam. But that divide owes much to the political rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran after 1979.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Inspired in part by Iran’s Islamic Revolution, a young Egyptian army lieutenant emptied his machine gun into President Anwar Sadat in 1981, killing a leader who made peace with Israel and offered the shah a refuge after his overthrow.
The assassination carried out by Khalid al-Islambouli and others from a Sunni Islamic extremist group showed the power of Iran’s Shiite-led revolution across the religious divides of the Muslim world.
Islamists initially saw Iran’s revolution as the start of an effort to push out the strongman Arab nationalism that had taken hold across the Middle East.
But those divisions now feel inflamed by the sectarian bloodshed that followed the U. S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Syria’s long civil war and the regional rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
It may seem as though the Middle East has always been divided between Sunni Islam, which represents about 85 percent of the world’s more than 1.8 billion Muslims, and Shiite Islam. But that divide, stemming from a disagreement centuries ago over who should succeed the Prophet Muhammad, owes much to the political rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran after 1979.
Long before the Islamic Revolution, Islamists had wanted to wed governments to their faith. One of the most prominent was the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni group founded in 1928 in Egypt that spread across the Arab world. Another was the Iranian Shiite Islamist group “Devotees of Islam,” who assassinated pro-Western Prime Minister Ali Razmara in 1951.
The aftermath of World War II instead saw the rise of pan-Arab nationalists, chief among them Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. Military strongmen took power, pushing for rapid modernization that shunted religion aside.
The nationalists “see themselves often as critical of religion because religion is ‘backward.’ It’s what’s been holding the Arab world back,” said Daniel Byman, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor at Georgetown University.
