once more divided as it had been under the Byzantines
and the Persians. This time the divide would be between
the Sunni Ottoman empire based in Turkey and the
powerful Safavid dynasty in Persia—today’s Iran—
which made Shiism the state religion. Again, Iraq was
the borderland, the territory where the two sides met and
clashed most violently.
Yet despite the horrendous eruptions of violence in
Iraq—Karbala itself came under attack numerous times,
most savagely by the Wahhabis in 1802 and by Turkish
troops in 1843, when one-ɹfth of the city’s population
was slaughtered—Shia and Sunnis for the most part
accepted diʃerence rather than exacerbate it. On the
everyday level, they sometimes even embraced it. The
ulama would never be able to control popular religious
customs that contradicted official practice. Veneration of
Ali was common among Sunnis as well as Shia, and still
is. Despite oɽcial Sunni abhorrence of “idolatry,”
pilgrimage to shrines and prayer for the intercession of
holy men remained popular among Sunnis as well as
Shia. And while Ashura commemorations sometimes
sparked Sunni attacks, at other times Sunnis
participated in the rituals along with their Shia
neighbors. What happened was less a result of
theological diʃerence than of the politics of the time. As
with any matter of faith, in modern America as much as
in the Middle East of centuries ago, the Sunni-Shia split
could always be manipulated for political advantage.