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Sectarianism Without Sects
"This volume analyses the transformation of social sectarianism into political sectarianism across the Arab world. Using a framework of social theories and socio-historical analysis, the book distinguishes between 'ta'ifa', or 'sect', and modern 'ta'ifiyya', 'sectarianism', arguing that sectarianism itself produces 'imaginary sects'. It charts and explains the evolution of these phenomena and their development in Arab and Islamic history, as distinct from other concepts used to study religious groups within Western contexts.Bishara documents the role played by internal and external factors and rivalries among political elites in the formulation of sectarian identity, citing both historical and contemporary models. He contends that sectarianism does not derive from sect, but rather that sectarianism resurrects the sect in the collective consciousness and reproduces it as an imagined community under modern political and historical conditions. 'Sectarianism Without Sects' is a vital resource for engaging with the sectarian crisis in the Arab world. It provides a detailed historical background to the emergence of sect in the region, as well as a complex theoretical exploration of how social identities have assumed political significance in the struggle for power over the state"--From dust jacket.
421 pages, Hardcover
Published May 27, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 24, 2026
Before today, I would criticize my companion if my religion was not close to his.
My heart has become capable of every form:
it is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks,
and a temple for idols and the pilgrim’s Kaa’ba and the tables of the Torah and the book of the Quran.
I follow the religion of Love: whatever way Love’s camels take, that is my religion and my faith.
(–Ibn Arabi, quoted in the book)
Love's camels must have taken an awry turn in the desert. Today, sectarian strife in the Middle East appears more prominent than ever. More than a few commentators have analysed the tensions between Sunnis, Shi'is, Maronites and other groups as a deep-rooted cultural conflict that has marked the Levant since time immemorial. Such stereotypes are encouraged both by the claims of sectarian leaders (casting themselves as the eternal victims of history) and by Western observers taking black-and-white narratives at face value. Azmi Bishara sets out to deconstruct this sectarian angle.
To showcase the real dynamics of conflict, Bishara looks at the great historical waves of clashes that shaped the Sunni-Shi'a split: the medieval Fatimid-Abbasid conflict, the early modern Safavid-Ottoman conflict and the contemporary Iranian-Saudi conflict. Each of these was tied to questions of political authority and legitimacy, not so much to abstract theological debates. Theology served as a weapon to delegitimize the rival of the moment. Likewise, even the succession struggle after Muhammad's death was first and foremost a tribal rivalry (onto which the Sunni-Shi'a split was later projected). For the entire pre-modern history of Islam, the tribe was a unit with more real political weight than the sect.
Instead of being eternal, then, sectarianism in the Middle East is a distinctly modern phenomenon (although religious discrimination is ancient). It gained traction as a reaction to the forces of capitalist centralization, Ottoman reforms that upholstered vested elites and the perception that those reforms benefited some creeds at the expense of others. The sect became an imagined community that served to voice grievances. Sectarianism was further encouraged by colonial policy that treated the region as a collection of rigidly delineated communities. French and British administrators mobilized sectarian gangs to enforce repression. In Lebanon, already in the 1860s, the sectarian Mutasarrifate was jointly shaped by the Ottomans and European powers. In Mandate Syria, the French supported sectarian forces against liberal nationalism (here Bishara cites Elizabeth Thompson's famous How the West stole democracy from the Arabs).
Arab secularists and modernizers in turn combated the sectarian wave which they identified as a threat to national unity and sovereignty. They weren't wrong to mistrust sectarian divisions. Bishara points out that the creation of a "representative" sectarian system, of which Lebanon is the most extreme example, is dangerous because it reproduces and reifies sectarian identities. This astute observation reminds me of a (less bloody) process closer to home: the federalization of Belgium since the 1980s, which has probably done more to drag out contradictions between "Flanders" and "Wallonia" than any organic resentments among the population could ever have done.
Aside from such self-fulfilling prophecies, a key role has been played by the fact that groups such as the Lebanese Shi'a are impoverished and discriminated against. The fact that sectarian parties can appeal to them is barely surprising (much like the tradional working class in the West are prey for "populists" of all stripes). These parties are filling a vacuum left by secular forces whose authoritarian impositions were gradually discredited. Some Arab and Western historiography has retroactively reframed those secular forces as "Sunni" or "Shi'a" based on the background of their leading figures. But even if Saddam Hussein took anti-Shi'a stances, it was based on his opposition to Iran, not his Sunni conviction. Hafez al-Assad promoted loyal Alawites to security positions, yet also marginalized Alawi shaykhs and communities. He was not acting on a pro- or anti-Alawi agenda but out of a desire for centralized state building.
These authoritarian secularist systems caused sects to become a "black market for politics", a dissident playing field as anti-sectarianism was associated with oppressive regimes. This in turn strengthened the view of those regimes as voicing specific sects' interests, seeing as they now had to combat Sunni, Shi'i, Alawite or Christian militias, and were relying on rival sects more than before. Thus sects as (a) a "black market for politics", especially for the downtrodden, and as (b) a new source of legitimacy for otherwise discredited regimes are two complementary faces of modern sectarianism.
For Bishara this sets the modern Arab state firmly apart from Ibn Khaldun's asabiyya, the medieval polity that was formed from pre-existing tribal bonds. The opposite was true under the likes of Gaddafi or Hussein. They fostered tribalism(s) to enforce loyalty to an existing state. The Syrian Ba'ath, no matter how much Sunni histories like to paint it as an Alawite force, even empowered Salafi groups to take away momentum from the Muslim Brotherhood. Neither is the Lebanese model any closer to the asabiyya: rather than being inevitably formed by sectarian or tribal undercurrents, it reproduces those undercurrents itself. (This criticism was a welcome one as it reminded me of Thomas Barfield's annoying insistence on applying Ibn Khaldun to the modern world in his book on Afghanistan.)
Perhaps none of Bishara's theoretical conclusions are very surprising, at least coming from a framework that emphasizes material interests over ideology. However, it's one thing to make those claims a priori and another to back them up with the amount of textual rigour mustered here. That makes the longer historiographical chapters of the book the truly insightful ones.
Bishara's rigour also means the book is written in a fairly unpleasant style. The meat is mostly concentrated in the middle part, which is nested between several sleep-inducing chapters at both the beginning and the end. Disappointingly, the final prescription for how to put Love's camels back on track – a plea for "democratic pluralism" – remains vague. What we get instead are deep-dives into Arab intellectual history and innumerable pages dwelling on the semantics of concepts like "community", often making it feel like Bishara is aiming to reach some wordcount. But there was no wordcount involved, because in the introduction he says he already had to drop chapters for reasons of space! I wish he had kept those chapters and made the rest of the book five times as concise instead.
My heart has become capable of every form:
it is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks,
and a temple for idols and the pilgrim’s Kaa’ba and the tables of the Torah and the book of the Quran.
I follow the religion of Love: whatever way Love’s camels take, that is my religion and my faith.
(–Ibn Arabi, quoted in the book)
Love's camels must have taken an awry turn in the desert. Today, sectarian strife in the Middle East appears more prominent than ever. More than a few commentators have analysed the tensions between Sunnis, Shi'is, Maronites and other groups as a deep-rooted cultural conflict that has marked the Levant since time immemorial. Such stereotypes are encouraged both by the claims of sectarian leaders (casting themselves as the eternal victims of history) and by Western observers taking black-and-white narratives at face value. Azmi Bishara sets out to deconstruct this sectarian angle.
To showcase the real dynamics of conflict, Bishara looks at the great historical waves of clashes that shaped the Sunni-Shi'a split: the medieval Fatimid-Abbasid conflict, the early modern Safavid-Ottoman conflict and the contemporary Iranian-Saudi conflict. Each of these was tied to questions of political authority and legitimacy, not so much to abstract theological debates. Theology served as a weapon to delegitimize the rival of the moment. Likewise, even the succession struggle after Muhammad's death was first and foremost a tribal rivalry (onto which the Sunni-Shi'a split was later projected). For the entire pre-modern history of Islam, the tribe was a unit with more real political weight than the sect.
Instead of being eternal, then, sectarianism in the Middle East is a distinctly modern phenomenon (although religious discrimination is ancient). It gained traction as a reaction to the forces of capitalist centralization, Ottoman reforms that upholstered vested elites and the perception that those reforms benefited some creeds at the expense of others. The sect became an imagined community that served to voice grievances. Sectarianism was further encouraged by colonial policy that treated the region as a collection of rigidly delineated communities. French and British administrators mobilized sectarian gangs to enforce repression. In Lebanon, already in the 1860s, the sectarian Mutasarrifate was jointly shaped by the Ottomans and European powers. In Mandate Syria, the French supported sectarian forces against liberal nationalism (here Bishara cites Elizabeth Thompson's famous How the West stole democracy from the Arabs).
Arab secularists and modernizers in turn combated the sectarian wave which they identified as a threat to national unity and sovereignty. They weren't wrong to mistrust sectarian divisions. Bishara points out that the creation of a "representative" sectarian system, of which Lebanon is the most extreme example, is dangerous because it reproduces and reifies sectarian identities. This astute observation reminds me of a (less bloody) process closer to home: the federalization of Belgium since the 1980s, which has probably done more to drag out contradictions between "Flanders" and "Wallonia" than any organic resentments among the population could ever have done.
Aside from such self-fulfilling prophecies, a key role has been played by the fact that groups such as the Lebanese Shi'a are impoverished and discriminated against. The fact that sectarian parties can appeal to them is barely surprising (much like the tradional working class in the West are prey for "populists" of all stripes). These parties are filling a vacuum left by secular forces whose authoritarian impositions were gradually discredited. Some Arab and Western historiography has retroactively reframed those secular forces as "Sunni" or "Shi'a" based on the background of their leading figures. But even if Saddam Hussein took anti-Shi'a stances, it was based on his opposition to Iran, not his Sunni conviction. Hafez al-Assad promoted loyal Alawites to security positions, yet also marginalized Alawi shaykhs and communities. He was not acting on a pro- or anti-Alawi agenda but out of a desire for centralized state building.
These authoritarian secularist systems caused sects to become a "black market for politics", a dissident playing field as anti-sectarianism was associated with oppressive regimes. This in turn strengthened the view of those regimes as voicing specific sects' interests, seeing as they now had to combat Sunni, Shi'i, Alawite or Christian militias, and were relying on rival sects more than before. Thus sects as (a) a "black market for politics", especially for the downtrodden, and as (b) a new source of legitimacy for otherwise discredited regimes are two complementary faces of modern sectarianism.
For Bishara this sets the modern Arab state firmly apart from Ibn Khaldun's asabiyya, the medieval polity that was formed from pre-existing tribal bonds. The opposite was true under the likes of Gaddafi or Hussein. They fostered tribalism(s) to enforce loyalty to an existing state. The Syrian Ba'ath, no matter how much Sunni histories like to paint it as an Alawite force, even empowered Salafi groups to take away momentum from the Muslim Brotherhood. Neither is the Lebanese model any closer to the asabiyya: rather than being inevitably formed by sectarian or tribal undercurrents, it reproduces those undercurrents itself. (This criticism was a welcome one as it reminded me of Thomas Barfield's annoying insistence on applying Ibn Khaldun to the modern world in his book on Afghanistan.)
Perhaps none of Bishara's theoretical conclusions are very surprising, at least coming from a framework that emphasizes material interests over ideology. However, it's one thing to make those claims a priori and another to back them up with the amount of textual rigour mustered here. That makes the longer historiographical chapters of the book the truly insightful ones.
Bishara's rigour also means the book is written in a fairly unpleasant style. The meat is mostly concentrated in the middle part, which is nested between several sleep-inducing chapters at both the beginning and the end. Disappointingly, the final prescription for how to put Love's camels back on track – a plea for "democratic pluralism" – remains vague. What we get instead are deep-dives into Arab intellectual history and innumerable pages dwelling on the semantics of concepts like "community", often making it feel like Bishara is aiming to reach some wordcount. But there was no wordcount involved, because in the introduction he says he already had to drop chapters for reasons of space! I wish he had kept those chapters and made the rest of the book five times as concise instead.
October 6, 2026
Sectarianism Without Sects is an excellent and intellectually rich book that offers an original theoretical approach to understanding sectarianism beyond conventional explanations based on religious or sectarian identities alone. Bishara provides a rigorous analysis of sectarianism as a modern social and political phenomenon, combining conceptual depth with historical and sociological insight. I highly recommend it to scholars, students, and readers interested in sectarianism, identity politics, and contemporary Arab societies.
July 3, 2022
I expected something more from this book rather than a weak thesis.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews