deɻecting its impact at home. The Saudis became major
exporters of Wahhabi extremism and its bitterly anti-
Shia stance, from Africa to Indonesia, countering a
newly strengthened sense of Shia identity and power
—“the Shia revival,” as it’s been called—energized by
the Iranian Revolution. The Sunni-Shia split had again
become as politicized as when it began.
In such a confrontation, the Sunnis would seem to
have a clear advantage since the Shia are only some
ɹfteen percent of all Muslims worldwide. But raw
numbers can be misleading. In the Middle East heartland
of Islam, the Shia are closer to ɹfty percent, and
wherever oil reserves are richest—Iran, Iraq, and the
Persian Gulf coast, including eastern Saudi Arabia—they
are in the majority. So long as oil dominates the world
economy, the stakes are again as high as they were at
the height of the Muslim empire. And the main issue is
again what it was in the seventh century—who should
lead Islam?—now played out on an international level.
Where Ali once struggled against Muawiya, Shia Iran
and Sunni Saudi Arabia today vie with each other for
inɻuence and political leadership of the Islamic world, a
power struggle demonstrated most painfully in the cities
of Iraq and in the mountains of Afghanistan and
Pakistan.
As the United States has at last recognized, with
thousands of American troops killed in Iraq and
Afghanistan, Westerners enter such a power struggle at