Even as Democrats in the U.S. Congress work overtime to manufacture a U.S. defeat in Iraq, and their domestic supporters and well-wishers outside of America cheer them on, there is another devious battle unfolding in the Middle East.
The sectarian conflict inside Iraq was ignited with demonic precision by the al-Qaida forces. Their publicly announced purpose was to derail the unfolding democratic process set in motion by elections within a constitutional framework, and wreck the hopes of the Iraqi people for freedom and decent living.
But the politics of the greater Middle East are a labyrinth unfathomable to the average Westerner.
Arabs are predominantly Sunni Muslims, and more than 80% of Muslims worldwide adhere to Sunni Islam.
Iran, however, is a majority Shiite Muslim country, ethnically Persian speaking, and has seen itself historically as besieged within the wider Sunni Muslim world.
Conversely, Sunni Arabs have viewed Shiite Muslims in their midst – as in Lebanon and Iraq – suspiciously, even bordering on contempt, as an alien entity. The word for Persian in Arabic is “ajami,” meaning a foreigner, and those who are Shiite Arabs are considered doubly foreign for being disloyal to the collective identity of Sunni Arabs.
More importantly, Sunni Arabs—particularly Arabs of the Middle East, the region between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf—view Shiites as heretics, more contemptible than non-believers. This view was popularized by ibn Taimiyyah (1263-1328), the intellectual mentor of ibn Abd-al Wahhab (1703-1792) whose sectarianism is the version of Sunni Islam officially practiced in and promoted by the Saudi kingdom.
It is this Sunni bigotry that gave birth to radical Islamism of al-Qaida and associates with their ideological fantasy of recreating the medieval Islamic empire (caliphate).
Iraq is the Arab world’s eastern frontier. Here the population is ethnically mixed and Sunni Arabs are outnumbered by Shiite Arabs. Here Sunni consensus of the Arab world is breached by Shiite heresy.
The 1979 revolution in Iran brought the fanatics of Shiite Islam to power and threatened the precarious regional order. Ayatollah Khomeini was Marx and Lenin of Shiite Islam as he went against the prevailing Shiite consensus of political quietism as a minority sect and promoted export of Iran’s revolution beyond its borders.
Conflict between Sunni Arab states and Shiite Iran became unavoidable. Through the 1980s the Iran-Iraq war raged, and the world witnessed the full display of Sunni Arab bigotry and Shiite Iran fanaticism.
The 1990s was an interregnum when the Iraqi tyrant, Saddam Hussein, was caged as a result of his folly over Kuwait.
Saddam’s overthrow offered Iraqi Shiites, for the first time in their history, the opportunity to gain legitimate power based on popular votes. But this was intolerable to Sunni bigots and Shiite fanatics alike, and each driven by their own sectarian impulses went to war to prevent the other from making any gains viewed through the lens of their own respective history.
Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons and regional hegemony are unambiguous. With its Lebanese proxy, the Hezbollah, it has reached into the Mediterranean shores and threatens the making of another Shiite majority Arab state.
In funding Hamas, Shiite Iran has stolen the thunder from the Sunni Arabs’ primary appeal for unity in being against Israel, and confounded Arab tribalism by posing as the champion of Palestine against an Arab surrender to Jews.
If Iran can wrest Iraqi Shiites’ allegiance through bribes and killings it will then have changed in its favour the regional balance while shattering the primacy of Sunni Arabs, and dictate terms of a new scheme for the Middle East with unimaginable global consequences.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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