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Ibrahim Al-Marashi (DPhil, Modern History, University of Oxford) is Assistant Professor of History at California State University San Marcos. He is the co-author of Iraq’s Armed Forces: An Analytical History (Routledge, 2008), and has authored several articles on the history of Iraq, and violent conflict in the Middle East.
Reconceptualizing Sectarianism in the Middle East and Asia
Sectarianism as a concept has gained renewed prominence following an offensive by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in early June 2014, which resulted in the fall of Mosul and a string of Iraqi towns. These land grabs have resulted in a flurry of commentaries blaming the conflict on sectarian differences between Iraq’s Shi‘a and Sunnis and predicting the fragmentation of Iraq along sectarian lines. This piece seeks to provide an analysis as to whether sectarianism, in and of itself, is the driving factor behind the renewed conflict in Iraq or the three-year civil war raging in Syria.
