Sidetracking of the arab movement:

History bears witness that great movements seeking fundamental restructuring of state and society often get sidetracked by parochial issues and external manipulation.

In the Islamic world, parochialism has frequently come from sectarianism. There is a long tradition of what Edward Said called western “orientalism” which highlighted ethnic and sectarian fault lines, of which the fast expanding colonial empires made an excellent instrumental use. This tradition has never died out and some western scholars still propagate a form of self-determination that would fragment existing Arab-Muslim states into smaller entities. This is not to say that indigenous centrifugal forces are not at work to achieve a similar result.

BAHRAIN:

Bahrain was amongst the first Arab countries to follow Tunisia. This was understandable because its people had agitated for quite some time for representative institutions with some success.

How the situation is intensified?

It is an essential thrust of the American policy in the region to inject hostility in Arab-Iran relations and the alleged Iranian interference in Bahrain is an obvious element in that policy.

In the heady atmosphere of the ‘Arab Spring’, the opposition in Bahrain might have taken too hard a line and thus strengthened the hands of the hardliners in the government.


SYRIA

The case of Syria is altogether different though, by now, the sectarian factor may be contributing to gratuitous violence in an otherwise highly sophisticated society.

In the current phase of the ‘Arab Awakening’ in Syria, the regime has cracked down hard on areas with a distinct Muslim identity and conversely the attacks on security forces have mostly come from the same segment of population. A valid question today is whether the quest for democracy and freedom has now become a sectarian battle to terminate the Alawite dominance of the Syrian power structure.


Comparing Bahrain and Syria