Who Will Win the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Arab Street: Turkey or Iran?

The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs has come out with a new study.
Here is the summary:

Who Will Win the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Arab Street: Turkey or Iran?

Harold Rhode

• Iran and today's Turkish government are engaged in a battle for the hearts and minds of the Arab street. Iran represents the Shiites and Turkey represents the Sunnis. The Arab world is largely Sunni, with the exception of many of the Persian Gulf Arab countries and Iraq.
  
  
• Iran and the Turkish government are also working together against the non-Muslim world - most specifically against the U.S. and Israel.
  
  
• Both the Saudi government and private Saudi individuals are funding Islamist extremism throughout the Muslim world, most importantly in Turkey. They have a willing partner in the current Turkish government.
  
  
• It appears that the Saudis and the present Turkish government are interested in reestablishing the Caliphate - at first culturally, but later possibly even politically - most likely in Istanbul, the seat of the last Sunni Caliph until the early 1920s.
  
  
• Iran is Shiite and is appealing to the Arab Sunni street by trying to co-opt the agenda of the Sunni masses - the existence of Israel and the sanctity of Jerusalem - neither of which are traditional Shiite issues.
  
  
• In doing so, Iran seeks to undermine the existing autocratic and dictatorial Arab Sunni regimes by going over the heads of their leaders and appealing directly to the Arab street. That is the major reason why almost all of the regimes in the region hate the Iranian regime more than they hate Israel.

Read the whole thing.

One of the examples Rhodes gives of the Sunni/Shiite divide is Jerusalem, which each side sees very differently:

Jerusalem Is Not Holy to Shiites

Jerusalem is an important case in point in understanding the Iranian-Turkish battle for the Arab street.

Jerusalem does not matter for traditional Shiites. They see the city's sanctification as a Sunni innovation and therefore summarily reject it. In the late 680s CE, the Sunni Umayyad rulers of Damascus built a dome over the Rock on the Temple Mount as a way to help smother a local revolt in Mecca at that time. The Umayyads were afraid that people who made the pilgrimage to Mecca would join the rebels' cause, and therefore blocked pilgrims from going to Mecca. That is when and why they turned the Temple Mount into an alternative pilgrimage site. Jerusalem, in short, became holy in Islam as a result of a local revolt in Mecca, some 55 years after Muhammad's death.

The Shiites hate the Umayyads and all that the Umayyads did. Some Shiite Grand Ayatollahs even have argued that Jerusalem was given to the children of Isaac, while Ishmael, Abraham's older son, received Najaf, which is in Iraq. In other words, from a Shiite perspective, Jerusalem is a Sunni heresy.

Why then did Shiite Iran adopt the Jerusalem and Israel issues as its own, given Shiism's historical antipathy to the Sunnis? Because these issues are so close to the hearts and minds of the Arab Sunni masses whose leaders have been unable to dislodge Israel from Jerusalem or to eliminate that country.

Additionally, the Iranians named their most elite unit the "Quds/Ghods" forces - the Arabic and Persian Muslim names for Jerusalem.

The Jerusalem/Israel issue has proven to be a wonderful tool for Iranian leaders to use to garner support for the Islamic Republic in its fight against the Arab Sunni rulers. The Iranian Shiite interest in Jerusalem is, therefore, nothing more than a political tool the Iranian government uses to bash their Arab Sunni enemies.

In regards to the odds of which side is likely to be victorious over the other, Rhodes concludes:

In the end, Iran will always remain at a tremendous disadvantage. The Turkish government has only been engaged in efforts to win the hearts and minds of the Arab street since 2002, when Erdogan's party came to power, while the Iranians have been at this for 31 years. Only if Sunni Muslims converted en masse to Shiism would Iran really be able to gain the upper hand. This does not seem to be in the cards for the foreseeable future.

Then again, Iran appears to be on its way to getting a nuclear bomb and has consistently thumbed its nose at the US with impunity--and I imagine that will count for a lot with the Muslim street.

Dr. Harold Rhode studied in Iran at Ferdowsi University in Mashhad in 1978 during the early and middle stages of the Islamic Revolution. In 1979, he received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in Islamic history. He joined the Office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense in 1982 as an advisor on Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. Since then he has served in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and as advisor on Islamic affairs on the Pentagon's policy planning staff. From 1994 until his recent retirement, Dr. Rhode served in the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment. He is currently a Senior Advisor at the Hudson Institute, New York. This Jerusalem Issue Brief is based on his presentation to the Institute for Contemporary Affairs of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs on October 21, 2010.

Technorati Tag: Turkey and Iran and Sunnis and Shiites.