their own peril, all the more since many in the Middle
East suspect that Western powers have deliberately
manipulated the Shia-Sunni split all along in order to
serve their own interests. The chaos unleashed by the
invasion of Iraq in 2003 may have resulted in yet
another unintended consequence in American eyes, but
it was not so unintended in Iraqi eyes. “The invader has
separated us,” declared Muqtada al-Sadr in 2007. “Unity
is power, and division is weakness.”
The idea of fitna has now achieved yet another level of
meaning, and a still more incendiary one: discord and
civil war within Islam manipulated from without,
deliberately fostered by enemies of Islam in order to turn
Muslims against one another and thus weaken them.
This may be giving Western powers credit for more
understanding than they have ever demonstrated, but if
they have indeed tried to exploit division, the attempt
has only rebounded against them. By now it is clear that
anyone so rash as to think it possible to intervene in the
Sunni-Shia split and come away unscathed is at best
indulging in wishful thinking. It may be tempting to
imagine that if the Bush administration had known the
power of the Karbala story, American troops would
never have been ordered anywhere within a hundred
miles of the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, but that too
is wishful thinking. As with Yazid in the seventh
century, so with George Bush in the twenty-ɹrst, history
is often made by the heedless.