Both Nasr and Yitzhak Nakash, a professor of Middle East history who has published a similar but more tightly focused study of Shiite politics, Reaching for Power, lay out historical reasons Iraq has become an arena for open Sunni-Shiite conflict. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, Iraq was a literal and figurative battlefield between the Sunni Ottomans and their bitter rivals the Safavids, whose empire was based in Iran. Since the Safavid Empire and its successor Qajar dynasty were Shiite states, the Ottomans worried constantly that Shiites in the water-rich Iraqi breadbasket would be a fifth column in Iranian service. As Nakash details in his earlier book, The Shi'is of Iraq (1994), the Sublime Porte's concerns became particularly acute in the mid-1800s, when they began to receive (accurate) reports of large-scale conversion of Iraq's Sunni nomads to Shiism as they settled in the river valleys. In a series of ineffectual countermeasures, the Ottomans dispatched Sunni clerical missionaries, ordered Sunni clerics to denounce Shiites as rawafid (those who reject true Islam), banned public observance of Shiite rituals and even prohibited the distribution of Korans printed in Iran. As historian Karen Kern documents in the latest Arab Studies Journal, in 1874 the sultan also outlawed marriages between Ottoman women and Iranian men, fearing that the (presumably Sunni) women would convert to Shiism and that their Shiite offspring would grow up to be Benedict Arnolds in the Sixth Army, tasked with securing the far eastern frontier.

If the sultan's trepidation sounds familiar, that is because Saddam Hussein, like his Baathist and Arab nationalist predecessors in the Iraqi presidency, also suspected the Shiite conscripts in his army of disloyalty. In the 1970s, during Iraqi disputes with the Shah, thousands of Shiites were expelled from Iraq because of their "Persian" ancestry. As Nakash recounts, the closely tied accusations of Persianness and sectarianism dogged Iraqi Shiites under successive postmonarchy regimes, despite the fervent embrace by Shiite clerics and lay intellectuals of Arab nationalism or a specifically Iraqi nationalism rooted in the cross-sectarian resistance to British colonialism during the 1920 revolt. Shiites flocked to Communism and Baathism as well, in order to be considered full members of the polity. So sensitive were Shiites to the charge of sectarianism that the writer Hani al-Fukayki bequeathed his late father's personal library to a state ministry instead of a Shiite institution that needed the books more.

Yet the innuendo from the regimes and their mouthpieces did not abate. Postmonarchy Iraq, indeed, offers the clearest examples of state sectarianism masquerading as secular, even progressive, Arab nationalism. The turn to an explicitly Shiite politics by followers of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr in Najaf--as with disciples of (the distantly related) Musa al-Sadr in Lebanon--is an indictment of Arabism's failure to accept Shiites on equal terms. Nakash makes this point well; so do Nasr and Fouad Ajami, who go further in hailing the assertion of Shiite identity as a welcome development.

The question, however, is whether a "Shiite revival"--and the backlash it has aroused among Sunni rulers--is the best way to understand the reconfiguration of power and the violent conflagrations in the Islamic world today, as Nasr and (albeit less polemically) Nakash both argue. Recent events in Iraq would seem to lend support to this view. The prevailing thumbnail history of the Iraqi civil war goes something like this: Shiite Arabs are the majority in Iraq, very possibly 60 percent of the population, though there is no recent census upon which to rely. Having chafed for centuries under the oppressive yoke of Sunni Arabs, of whom Saddam Hussein was only the most brutal, Shiite Arabs have now empowered Shiite religious parties to rule Iraq in uneasy tandem with Kurds, who were also battered by Sunni Arab-dominated regimes. The Sunni Arabs resent the loss of their power, and hence they are attacking the new Iraqi government and the US soldiers who back it. After restraining themselves for years, Shiite militias--some allied with the Iraqi government and some inside it--are striking back.

As predicted by Nasr, the rise of the Shiites in Iraq is also sending shock waves through the palaces of neighboring capitals and eliciting strong anti-Shiite sentiments from Salafi clerics. In Jordan, where nearly half of the Iraqis fleeing the Baghdad inferno have taken refuge, the regime has warned that the Iraqi Shiites will constitute the core of a "Shiite crescent"--make that a "Shiite full moon"--that could eclipse the Sunni US satellites in Amman, Cairo and Riyadh. Salafi religious scholars from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have repeatedly excused armed attacks on "Shiite heretics," including terror bombings claimed by the likes of the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, with reference to "the sons of al-Alqami"--implying that in 2003 Shiites left the gates of Baghdad open to foreign invaders just as the medieval slur said they did in 1258. A week after a meeting between Iraqi Sunni leaders and clerics from nearby countries, one of the Saudi Arabian participants, Sheikh Abd al-Rahman al-Barrak, spat out a fatwa describing Shiism as "the evil among the sects of the Muslim community--a sect founded by a Jew" and castigating its adherents as infidels. Not surprisingly, thus far there has been no royal condemnation of this ruling fusing anti-Shiite and anti-Semitic themes. The House of Saud, its "Islamic legitimacy" dependent on the imprimatur of the Wahhabi clerical establishment, routinely ignores comparably bilious statements aimed at the kingdom's 2 million Shiites.

But it is always ill-advised to draw a straight line, even by implication, between communal animosities past and present. There is, first of all, a fundamental problem of evidence. The recorded fretting of the Abbasids, Ottomans and Saddam Hussein about Shiites proves that these rulers were wary of threats to their power, but it does not prove that social relations between the sects have always teetered on the edge of violence. There is at least as much reason to believe otherwise. Karen Kern's findings, for instance, provide circumstantial evidence that cross-sectarian marriage was common enough in the nineteenth century that the Ottomans thought it worth banning. The first clause of the 1874 law read, "Marriages between Ottoman and Iranian citizens, as in olden times, are strongly prohibited."

Here the Ottomans sought to justify their divisive policy with an appeal to the past. But as Kern writes, prior to 1874 there is no record of an edict forbidding Sunni-Shiite intermarriage. To the contrary, lawyers later prevailed upon Istanbul to rescind the ban because their research in Islamic jurisprudence had found so many explicit writs of approval for such unions. Sunnis and Shiites, especially in Baghdad and other cities, are heavily intermarried today, though the phenomenon is fading as war rages. It is also noteworthy that Col. Abdul Karim Qasim, the first Iraqi prime minister after the fall of the monarchy in 1958, remains a deeply popular figure in Iraq despite decades of Baathist despoliation of his memory and legacy. Born to a Sunni Arab father and a Shiite Kurdish mother, Qasim preached Iraqi nationalism mixed with a kind of cultural Arabism and allied himself with the Iraqi Communist Party, whose near annihilation by the Baathists is a vital (but untold by Nasr) part of the story of how many Iraqi Shiites turned to Islamism and Shiite identity. After the destruction of the left, as in Egypt and elsewhere, the one place where dissidents could organize safely was the mosque, where the authorities still hesitated to enter. Sadr City, the sprawling neighborhood in northeast Baghdad where fighters in Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army make their homes, and which the deposed regime knew as Saddam City, was the locus of the colonel's social base. Many residents still insist on calling the area by its Qasim-era name, Madinat al-Thawra--a pointed simultaneous rejection of both Saddam and Sadr. Finally, the great majority of Arab Iraqis today--including 65 percent of Shiites and 100 percent of Sunnis--want Iraq to remain governed by a single state and emphatically do not support the militias that are perpetrating sectarian cleansing. This preference was poignantly illustrated in late April, when Iraqis of all backgrounds expressed vehement objections as the US Army erected walls around violence-plagued neighborhoods of the capital and then called them "gated communities."

These facts suggest that the Sunni-Shiite split, while deadly and deepening, has not overwhelmed the ideal of a nonsectarian Iraqi nationalism and, crucially, that one should not assume the parties and militias claiming to represent Sunnis and Shiites are necessarily executing the communal will. They also suggest that the murderous intensity of Iraq's sectarian conflict is a product of contemporary history--most important, of the power vacuum created by the US occupation, which made Iraqis desperate to seek protection from co-religionists with guns. Much as many Americans might like to imagine that Iraq's strife is timeless, whether they are seeking absolution for backing Bush's war or a politically painless way to back withdrawal, it cannot be understood without considering the choices the United States made during its direct misrule of Iraq. Those choices have been reviewed many times in these pages, but historians may finger one as the tipping point: US colonial overlord L. Paul Bremer's 2003 decision to allocate seats on the Iraqi Governing Council according to sectarian and ethnic affiliation. Even Hamid Musa, head of the remnants of the Iraqi Communist Party, was given a seat because he is a Shiite. Top jobs in Iyad Allawi's interim government were doled out in the same way, turning ministries into communal party fiefdoms and entrenching a Lebanese confessional system in the "new Iraq."

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