In June 2014, the Islamic State released a photo of its fighters destroying the barriers that marked the border between Iraq and Syria. According to the organization’s own words, the action contained the intention of erasing the demarcation of Sykes-Picot, in frank allusion to the secret agreement that the British diplomat Mark Sykes with his French colleague François Georges-Picot, and with the consent of the then Russian Empire, concluded in May 1916 with the aim of dividing up the Middle East. The destruction of the physical route between these two countries had as its main objective to demonstrate that the States of the region are artificial creations articulated by the Western powers and that Muslims – only those of the Sunni confession – must unite in a single devout and religious community.
For the “jihadists” the situation was clear: both Iraq and Syria are fictitious states, functional to foreign powers and, therefore, do not have the support of their citizens. Although, in the case of Iraq and Syria, such a statement may contain a half-truth, not all the countries in the area were born the product of spurious foreign secret pacts, but also of the own will of indigenous leaders, as is the case of Kemal Atatürk, in Turkey, and Ibn Saud, in Saudi Arabia. Many others, such as Egypt, the second oldest civilization of humanity, and Iran, formerly Persia, were empires that have always been there, and will continue to do so over the years. Moreover, this condescending and historically incomplete truth, which tries to establish the “eternal innocence” of the native populations, leaves aside the Sunni-Shia divide that predates European intervention (Iraqi tribes, hostile to the Ottoman Sunnis, began to adopt Shiism in the 18th and 19th centuries), as well as the actions of an “own” empire such as the Ottoman, which lasted 600 years, forcibly controlled numerous Sunni populations and kept those of the Shiite confession oppressed.
It is worth remembering that the differences between the two predominant branches of Islam, Sunnism and Shiism – which have evolved over the course of a millennium and a half – began after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, who hailed from a noble Quraysh clan, in the year 632 AD in western Arabia. The Shiites insisted that the prophet should be succeeded by Ali, their cousin and husband of their daughter Fatima, but this dynastic principle was rejected by the group that later became known as the Sunnis, who considered that the leadership of Islam should be in the hands of notables. from the Quraysh clan, whom they viewed as caliphs (“vicars of the Prophet”). Although the first three caliphs were Muhammad’s in-laws, Sunni principles stipulate that any pious man from the tribe of Quraysh can fill that role. Ultimately, Ali was named the fourth caliph (and the first legal one according to Shiism), but a dispute over his succession, when he was assassinated, would forever separate Sunnis and Shiites: Hussein, the Prophet’s grandson and Ali’s son, would claim to be his caliph. successor after his older brother was forced to resign and would face a futile resistance against the ruling Umayyad dynasty, which would end with his martyrdom (and that of all his companions) in the city of Karbala. From then on, the Shiites would consider the Sunnis (and their ensuing caliphates) to have stolen their divine (and birthright) right to lead the world’s Muslims.
The name of the Islamic State, in Arabic Al-Dawla al-Islamiya fil-Iraq wa al-Sham (Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham) referred to the entire area of the ancient Levant, which precedes the current Middle East in time and its borders delimited by the European powers. It is not possible to deny, in the preparation of the current map of the area, the historical legacy of battles such as that of Chaldiran, which in 1514 determined the demographic and religious limits of the Persian Safavid Empire and its Ottoman counterpart, a demarcation that still remains, 500 years later. , defines the boundary between modern Iran, Turkey and Iraq and is responsible for why and where today’s Shiite populations live. However, it is correct to affirm that on the backs of those four territories –Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Iran– and the colonialist intentions of France and Great Britain, five other countries were conceived that would complete the backbone of what is now known as Middle East: Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine (despite the fact that to this day it is a State that has not yet seen the light).
Nation states are a recent idea, therefore there were no states, as we know them today, in the Middle East before World War I. Although not all of those that exist in the region were imposed by European powers, at the beginning of the century, many of its borders were delimited and manufactured in Europe: the maps of Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are British decisions (Jordan is directly a English invention) and the boundaries between Muslims and Christians in Syria and Lebanon were “drawn” by the French.
*Author of The Dispute for Control of the Middle East, Editorial Capital Intelectual (fragment).
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