Civilizational Clashes

"It has become clear over the last year that the upheavals in the Islamic and Arab world have become a clash within a civilization rather than a clash between civilizations.
"The Sunni versus Alawite civil war in Syria is increasingly interacting with the Sunni versus Shiite tensions in the Gulf that are edging Iraq back toward civil war. They also interact with the Sunni-Shiite, Maronite and other confessional struggles in Lebanon."
Anthony Coresman, Center for Strategic and International Studies

An interesting, and actually irrefutable opinion. With perhaps one qualifier. The gross intolerance of the faithful of Islam who embrace their version of Islam and none other, claiming Ismailis and Ahmaddiya, for example, to be despicable heretics deserving of slaughter for disgracing Islam typifies the Wahhabist and Salafist brand of unforgiving Islamism. That being said, it is debatable how much of a "civilization" as far as civilizing humanity goes, can really apply here other than as a veneer.

It is partially the heritage of the Middle East -- the Bedouin who were and continue to be desert-dwellers who adopted a religion foisted upon them by violent conquest unseating their original desert deities, that was specifically tailored to fit the dimensions of their limited world view of human affairs -- inscribed in the suspicion and ready combativeness for territory and assets that inform tribal communities that describe the problem.

That territorial imperative driven by the most basic instincts of human survival has been tardily overlaid with a facade of civility toward others not of their clan, their tribe, their religion. The traditional scarcity of resources ensured that tribes would always view one another as competitors in the struggle for existence. That modernity has made resources more readily available doesn't appear to have made much of a dent in the consciousness and humanity of people derived from Bedouin culture.

The interference by more advanced societies whose technologies and wealth allowed them to enter the Middle East in a rapacious rush to take advantage of its natural resources, becoming overseers after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the end of World War I, when the geographic spoils were administered by European powers deciding imperiously to construct borders and grant new countries and empower new tyrants loyal to the West has served to complicate already existing trials.

More latterly, the competing interests spawned by Middle East fossil fuels so readily accessible and so abundantly available, continued the oppression of the masses living their poverty-vulnerable, religion-inspired lives of humble acquiescence. Dictators and tyrants give scant quarter to those living under their controlling fists, after all. And it can be said for those dictators and tyrants that they preferred submission to their rule, echoing Islamic precepts, taking care to separate the sects hindering them from mutual outrage.

And so because they had little choice, they lived together as amicably as possible, understanding in their tribulations as underdogs that their neighbour whatever his version of Islam lived under the same sorry strictures of oppression and degradation. Liberated from the control of a strict rule and with the creeping message of fundamentalist Islam flooding their minds like a mass vaccination, they see their rival sects in a new, damning light and condemn and attack where they once accepted.

Now more than ever before the two major sects, Sunni and Shia struggle for the advantage. Their paranoia is transformed into a mass psychosis of blinding hatred for one another, mitigated from time to time for their hatred of the Christian sects and Jews who still remain among them with whom they also lived in peace before Islam became so intolerantly imperious and impervious to reasonable pluralistic acceptance.

Now the restive populations of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tunisia, Somalia, Mali, Sudan, Algeria, Libya, Lebanon and the Palestinian Territories are infused with blind hatred for political factions, tribal affiliations, religious sects and cultural deviations not wholly reflective of their own. And all claim to be faithful to Islam, a religion they fondly speak of as one of peace and brotherhood.

The common enemy has become the West, and most particularly the United States. Whose penchant for intervention in attempts to stifle conflicts and in the process producing even more overheated bloody assaults upon one another even as they attempt to foist terror on symbols of the Great Satan to some success and even more failures, remains unabated. Jihadists boast of their love of death and their scorn of those who fear death.

For death reunites them with the glorious predecessors whose venerated names give credence and glory to Islam. And their rewards for fulfilling their sacred duties to Islam as martyrs in the great cause of violent proselytizing are adoring virgins to embroider their spiritual lives everlasting.

Yet another human construct incapable of surmounting human fallibility.