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| Bad rap? Imam Sayyed Hassan al-Qazwini says the Western media focuses only on radicals. Courtesy of Adrian Haddad |
Is the Sunni-Shiite rift mostly politics and media hype?
A panel discussion Tuesday in Doha, Qatar, was dominated by the perception that the Western media hypes up tensions by focusing too much on the minority of radicals.
from the May 1, 2008 edition
Page 2 of 3
While Shiite- and Sunni-dominated countries have fought each other in the past – such as the Sunni Ottoman Empire and the Shiite Safavid dynasty of Persia and more recently the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, those conflicts were not motivated by disputes over religious interpretation.
"They were about power and politics," Mr. Hellyer says.
For Hellyer, the debate provided an opportunity to explore how the image of Islam is shaped by the media's inclination to ignore the silent moderate majority that comprises the bulk of Muslims and follow instead the sensationalist violent rhetoric and militant actions found on opposing fringes, from Al Qaeda leaders to some American commentators.
"The media listens to people on [the far] sides of the equation," he says.
The repeated airing of such extremist opinions has helped mold Western attitudes about Islam that, Hellyer argues, are a distortion of the reality.
It is a sentiment shared by Qazwini, who argues that there is no conflict between Sunnis and Shiites, only between extremist Sunnis and Shiites "who represent 1 percent of Muslims at best."
"Islam is still the fastest-growing religion in the world," he says. "It is a religion of 1.5 billion followers and it is not going to be damaged by the conflict between the extremists. No one says that Christianity was damaged by the conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland."
So far, Sunni-Shiite violence has been confined largely to Iraq, confounding initial fears that the conflict would ignite unrest elsewhere in the region.
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