Muslims are currently spending a lot of energy arguing about which side of a historical political dispute (Sunni/Shia) was more justified, while in Iran, Gaza, Sudan and Kashmir, Muslims are being killed daily. The people causing that death are very comfortable with us having this conversation. It serves their agenda which should be blindingly clear to everybody now: the total defeat and emasculation of Islam as a and the continued colonial domination of Muslim lands.

Make no mistake, if Iran falls so does al-Aqsa, and Israel and the US get to enjoy absolute, unhindered dominance of the Muslim world. If you doubt it, you only need to look at the tattoos sported by the United States Secretary of War Pete Hegseth: one says “kafir” and the other is the Crusader battle cry “God Wills it”.

The Prophet ﷺ explicitly warned against tribal/factional pride — what he called asabiyyah. He said:

“He is not one of us who calls to asabiyyah, fights for asabiyyah, or dies for asabiyyah”. Keeping score of which Muslim faction has caused more historical damage and using that to delegitimise the other side is almost a textbook example of the sectarian asabiyyah he warned against.

The civil war in Syria is a festering wound that continues to be exploited by mischief makers and enemies to sow disharmony and division. It was a messy conflict in which no one’s hands are clean. War is a dirty, bloody business and the Syrian civil war has left many wounds on all sides. Instead of fostering more animosity, Syria, like Iraq before it, should serve as an object lesson in the dangers of sectarianism.

History shows that whoever holds state power tends to enforce their version of Islam on the population — Sunni states did it, Shia states did it, and both did it for largely political reasons. The solution isn’t to establish whose team has the cleaner historical record.

The Safavids didn’t convert Persia to Shiism out of religious fervour, it was for political reasons. They were originally a Sunni Sufi dynasty that drifted towards Shiism and formally adopted it as a counterweight against the rival Ottomans. The Ottomans did the same with Shia communities which they perceived as a threat to their rule, as did the Seljuk dynasty before them.

Politics rarely hugs the contours of theology. It’s worldly, unpredictable, dirty and oftentimes even contradictory. Understanding that not everything can be reduced  to a Sunni/Shia dichotomy  can help forge the Ummatic unity that is so sorely needed in the current context.

We must realise that this is a war against Islam, not just against one section of it and that our enemies have successfully picked off one country and one community after another under the guise of their “war on terror”. All the dominos have fallen bar one. Iran is the last remaining obstacle to their victory.

In recent days I have heard many influencers and maulanas who display little or no political acumen framing the issue as a theological one. Under the pretext of Quran and Sunnah they hurl fire and brimstone polemics at Iran and the Shia in general saying they don’t represent Islam and they don’t deserve our support.  Some even go to the extreme of branding them non-Muslim, against the modern scholarly consensus. This is wrong. The most influential Sunni authority in the world, Al-Azhar University, issued a fatwa in 1959 recognizing Twelver Shi’ism (Jafari jurisprudence) as a valid school of Islamic law. The Amman Message (2004), endorsed by many Muslim scholars worldwide including the well-known Pakistani mufti, Taqi Usmani, recognized the validity of Twelver Shiism.

These kinds of speeches are counterproductive at any time, let alone when the order of the day is unity. We have more in common with our Shia brothers and sisters than what divides us. Allowing the differences to take precedence only makes us weaker as a body and places an axe in the hands of our enemies. When they attack Muslims they don’t distinguish between Sunni or Shia. The ongoing genocide of Sunnis in Gaza and the current attack on majority-Shia Iran is proof of this.

Let us hold fast to the rope of Allah and not let our enemies divide us. Let’s keep in mind that the Ummah is a single body. Allah’s Messenger (ﷺ) said, “You see the believers as regards their being merciful among themselves and showing love among themselves and being kind, resembling one body, so that, if any part of the body is not well then the whole body shares the sleeplessness (insomnia) and fever with it”.

May Allah grant us the purity of heart to love and be merciful to one another and the wisdom, understanding and strength to confront our enemies.

  إِنَّ اللَّهَ يُحِبُّ الَّذِينَ يُقَاتِلُونَ فِي سَبِيلِهِ صَفًّا كَأَنَّهُم بُنْيَانٌ مَّرْصُوصٌ

[ الصف: 4]

“Indeed, Allah loves those who fight in His cause in a row as though they are a [single] structure joined firmly.” [61:4]