Back home, however, things feel anything but open. Over recent months, this has been most clear in Sweida, a southern town rocked by anti-government protests. Sweida is home to many Syrian Druze, a syncretic faith born out of Shi’ism, and which claims the loyalty of 3% of Syrians. The protesters waved Israeli flags, and for the first time in Syria’s history demanded self-determination. They have also set up their own “national” guard, born out of the militias that enforced order during the long years of civil war.

No one apart from Israel — which has been lobbying Washington for a weak Syria — wants to see the Balkanization of the country. Al-Sharaa himself is now distancing his country from the putative Abraham Accords. The Americans, certainly, are keen on stability, and have stepped in to avert a civil war. The fact al-Sharaa took time out of his busy New York schedule to meet both Secretary of State Marco Rubio and General David Petraeus, the ex-commander of US forces in Iraq, certainly hints at the hopes the White House now places in him.

Be that as it may, the Sweida violence suggests a country spiraling out of control, as do rumors of a resurgent Assadism on the coast. Yet in the end, such pessimism would be to misdiagnose the unrest. For the chaos is not an aberration, a disaster to be averted, but rather represents the birth pangs of a process long underway: the Sunnification of Syria. Whatever al-Sharaa’s claims, as he enjoys the world’s attention in Manhattan, what we are witnessing is the emergence of a new Sunni state — and not the pluralist nation that foreign analysts might like to imagine.

Outsiders often read the Syrian revolution as romantically simple: the people rose up against the tyrant, and after years of brutal struggle finally secured their freedom. But that overlooks other interpretations, especially when it comes to religion. The Syrian conflict, after all, was also about the long-oppressed Sunni majority versus the Alawite minority — another heterodox offshoot of Islam to which the Assad dynasty belonged. Viewed through that lens, the fall of Damascus, and al-Sharaa’s own triumph, was merely the culmination of Sunni empowerment.

I witnessed these tensions first hand, in 2009, while I was teaching business English to staff at the Syrian National Bank. By then, I had lived in the country long enough to discern a student’s sectarian background through dress, mannerisms, attitudes. My classroom reflected the country: Sunnis — including Kurds — made up around 70%; Christians 10%, Druze 3%; and Alawites 13%. The students were all supposedly supportive of the stern-looking president, Bashar al-Assad, whose portrait hung in every room, paid their salaries, and claimed to run the country under the banner of Baathism, a secular pan-Arab socialist ideology which didn’t care about your sectarian affiliation.

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That, of course, was a lie. The Assad dynasty had stayed in power for 50 years by pitting the resentments and fears of the various sects against each other. They promoted Sunni clerics to positions of influence, based Syrian family law on Islamic jurisprudence, even married into a Sunni family — as Bashar did — yet still kept Sunnis out of power. All the while, they propagated the message that only they could protect minorities from Sunni tyranny. It was not uncommon for pro-government rallies to come with banners declaring “no to sectarianism”, the implication being that Sunni domination would result in the marginalization of Christians and others.

Such sectarianism also played out in my classroom. On exam day, no matter how hard the Sunni employees studied, or how rigorously I marked the papers — the Alawite students and those connected to the government would end up top of the class, with the results bitterly accepted by the Sunnis. Of course, I didn’t have the courage to make an issue of it. All of us, whether Syrian or not, knew what happened to the unruly. The horrors of Tadmor prison lived alongside us, as did slaughters of 1982, when the Hafez al-Assad crushed a Muslim Brotherhood-led uprising in the central Syrian town of Hama.

In 2011, that brittle sectarian order shattered. Bashar al-Assad repeated his father’s strategy and tried to crush the Sunni-led discontent. The Sunnis, in turn, went from peaceful demonstrations during Friday prayers to violent insurrection, with al-Qaeda-affiliated Ahmed al-Sharaa being one of the rebellion’s most effective leaders. Eventually, his victory came not from the international community, but from a rebellious Sunni redoubt of Idlib, a small town in northern Syria which prided itself on having quite literally thrown a sandal at Hafez al-Assad. The Sunnis, in short, had helped themselves to power: or so they told themselves.

Throughout all this, Syria’s minorities were in an impossible situation. Should they side with the tyrant they knew, or with the revolutionaries, some of whom were jihadists? At the same time, they were bombarded with regime propaganda, plenty of it real. Sunni Islamists, after all, had massacred the Druze at Qalb Lozeh in 2015, and ISIS had attacked them at Sweida. Christians, for their part, had their churches desecrated, their people killed or kidnapped. The prospect of joining the revolutionaries, then, was not as clear-cut as it seemed to many Sunnis. But with victory going to al-Sharaa’s forces, even neutrality could be interpreted as complicity, especially given the terrors Assad had inflicted on Sunni civilians.

Out of this sectarian chaos came Ahmad al-Sharaa. He was a jihadist, aggressively Sunni, who believed that minorities like the Alawites should not only renounce their support for Assad, but also their “heretic” faiths. Yet by 2017, al-Sharaa was courting Druze and Christian leaders in his newly established “Salvation” government in Idlib. Either he had changed — or he was just a political Machiavel.

Whatever the case, al-Sharaa reversed a lot of the damage that his group had been responsible for. On 10 June 2022, for instance, he visited Qalb Lozeh. Many Druze in the area had been forced to convert to Islam, the better to escape the clutches of Sunni extremism. In a marked departure from his earlier rhetoric, however, al-Sharaa publicly assured Druze leaders that there is no compulsion in religion, and that they were free to practice their faith without fear. This statement sent a strong signal to his followers that his Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) Islamist group was changing.

Indeed, according to an informative new book on HTS, its political evolution is not unlike that of far-Right groups in Europe. To wield power, explain its authors Patrick Haenni and Jerome Drevon, al-Sharaa had to move to the center. Of course, there are still radicals on the periphery, but he increasingly relied on a broad Sunni populism over hardcore ideologues. Extremists — notably Osama Qasem, leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and once celebrated for his ties to al-Qaeda — were compelled to step down after being deemed a “liability”.

In al-Sharaa’s Salvation government was also a clue as to how the new Syria might look. His rump in Idlib was essentially a Sunni proto-state, as al-Sharaa transferred power from the warlords to a civilian government, run by a new generation of Islamist technocrats, each intimately connected to al-Sharaa himself. Certainly, Syria’s interim president has followed a similar path once he eventually took power in Damascus, filling state institutions, long hollowed out by Assad, with his own supporters, friends and family.

Maybe that explains why the Gulf kingdoms, which initially viewed al-Sharaa with deep suspicion due to his Islamism, eventually came round. Perhaps, they thought, he was someone who wanted to build a state not unlike their own — conservative, authoritarian, anti-Iran and pro-stability, all elements the emirs could work with. And, what was more, none of this contravened Sunni Islamic jurisprudence: which, as its long history testifies, has always taken a pragmatic approach to wielding power. Sunni Islam, as historians like Marshall Hodgson have shown, is quietist by temperament, and has happily lived alongside caliphs, sultans and presidents.

At the same time, al-Sharaa’s Salvation government was not intolerant of minorities. That was clear enough in his rapprochement with the Druze and Christians, but also his ban on the notorious jizya payments — a tax levied on non-Muslims for protection and exemption from military service.

By the time Damascus fell, Haenni and Drevon write, Syria’s minorities had gone from “dhimmis [protected minorities] no more” to “citizens not yet”. And if that hints at the ambiguous status they enjoy in the new Syria, al-Sharaa’s country is also being shaped by forces not directly under his control. Once again, the experience of Idlib is revealing here. Under years of Islamist rule, the rural hinterland had inevitably become more conservative. Meanwhile, Druze who had initially converted out of fear found that their children had forgotten the tenets of their faith, and prayed and fasted like Sunnis.

Yet if the Sunnification of northern Syria had begun long before the Assads finally fled, this must once again be tempered by al-Sharaa’s apparent moderation. When I last visited Idlib, in March 2025, it was a bustling town like any other, albeit with the occasional shop selling Kalashnikovs. There was no religious police enforcing the hijab, and shops remained open when the call for prayer came, just as they had before the revolution. Islamic laws were adhered to because people in Idlib — devout or not — accepted them. In post-Assad Damascus, too, life continued as before. In the Christian quarter of the Old City, alcohol was available in the bars, just as it had always been, and I suspect this will remain the case.

That’s shadowed elsewhere too. Al-Sharaa has repeatedly emphasized that the Syrian people are one. By March, when the interim government drafted its 2025 constitutional declaration, it confirmed that Syria would remain a republic, its president would be a Muslim and the republic’s source of law was Islamic jurisprudence. All the while, minorities and their personal beliefs were protected. All this is based on the 1973 constitution, and affirmed the secular social contract first drafted by the Assads.

Even so, and as the constitutional primacy of Muslims implies, Sunnis will ultimately shape Syria’s future. In many ways, it didn’t matter whether they’re Islamists, devout Sunnis or liberals. Most Syrian Sunnis, after all, are small “c” conservatives, traumatized by war and shaped by the fight against Assad. This has glued them together, allowing them to stand alone if need be.

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This Sunni supremacism has manifested itself in other ways too. For one thing, Friday sermons have become overtly Sunni in tone. Hezbollah — a Shia militant group — is referred to as Hizb al-Shaytan (“the party of the devil”). Black and white flags emblazoned with the Islamic declaration of faith, long associated with jihadists, are waved by Sunnis as they go about their business. When the bastion of traditional Sunnism Sheikh Osama al-Rifai — someone who has often disagreed with al-Sharaa in the past — returned from exile in January, he received a rockstar’s welcome. In fact, al-Sharaa appointed him the grand mufti of Syria.

All the while, the war’s aftershocks have continued to play out. In February, former Assadists tried to foment a counter-revolution of sorts, resulting in massacres of Alawites near the coastal city of Latakia. Sunni revanchism soon followed, and old scores were settled: former Assadists, paramilitaries and Alawite officers, who had raped and tortured Sunnis, were killed and buried in unknown graves. But so too were many innocent Alawites, simply caught up in the violence, with the sect increasingly seen as a fifth column. The Druze in Sweida have faced similar troubles. After the summer’s violence, Druze leaders accused al-Sharaa of siding with Sunni Bedouins: but then committed political suicide by calling for Israeli support and demanding self-determination. In the eyes of many Sunnis, they, like the Alawites, are edging towards treason.

In the end, though, Syria’s process of Sunnification will conclude only if Damascus manages to incorporate the Kurds into the new state. Most Kurds are Sunnis, and though they have spent years fighting the Arab majority, Damascus could probably bring them on board more easily than the country’s religious minorities. Mazloum Abadi — head of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and one of the de facto leaders of the Kurdish enclave in Syria’s north — is a formidable political operator. But he is fast running out of political road. For one thing, the PKK, the SDF’s sister organization in Turkey, has disbanded. For another, the US have abandoned Abadi in favor of al-Sharaa, and if the former seeks support from Israel, or allies himself with the Druze, he’ll soon become discredited. The SDF, then, are outgunned both militarily and diplomatically, and the resources required to restart another civil war seem politically out of reach.

Either way, each of these stories — Druze unrest, Alawite reprisals, Kurdish bargaining — all point the same way: towards a Sunni majoritarian state. That doesn’t mean Syria will become an Islamist theocracy. But it does likely mean that pluralism, minority rights and perhaps even democracy itself will operate within a conservative Sunni framework. Whether that’s better or worse for the exhausted people of Syria will probably depend on where and how you pray.

Unremovable, the ink fades from the skin in around 48 hours or so. It’s become something of a status symbol; the Iraqi democratic process given corporeal form, quite literally imprinted onto the bodies of those who subscribe to it. 

A fortnight on from the elections and, with no clear winner, the horse-trading to form a new government is only just beginning. It will be a fraught process — for many of the reasons that the wider Middle East is fraught, too: sectarianism, corruption, civil strife and, of course, foreign meddling. These are bad enough. But the problems that strafed Iraq and the wider region throughout the 20^th century are now galvanised by one of the 21^st century’s most powerful forces: digitally powered disinformation.

Understand the Iraqi elections and understand, in miniature, at least some of the wider forces driving instability across the Middle East. The electoral process is theoretically simple: the people elect 329 members of Parliament, who in turn elect the President of Iraq and confirm the Prime Minister. Whichever party or bloc gets 165 seats forms a government. Given Iraq’s fractured polity, this never really happens — and this time was no exception.

The largest party, with 72 seats, is the Sadrist Movement, led by the scowling and barking Shi’ite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Sadr comes from a famous clerical family and his name carries huge weight among Iraq’s Shia, whom he led against US forces following 2003’s Operation Iraqi Freedom. He is a rare animal in Iraqi politics: a Shi’ite leader independent — at least rhetorically — of Iran.

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The other major Shia forces are former Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki’s State of Law party, which got 35 seats, and then the Al-Fatah Alliance, which saw its vote drop to just 15 seats (from 48 in the 2018 election). Officially, its leaders have close ties to Iran, but most Iraqi Sunnis — and indeed many Shia (plus most of the region) — consider them to be a straight-out Iranian proxy. Other Shia parties include the militia (and designated terror group) Kata’ib Hezbollah, which recently formed the Huqooq party, and which got one vote; and the Victory Alliance of Haider al-Abadi (another former PM), which got four seats. As ever post-2003, the Iraq Shia, so long oppressed by former leader Saddam Hussein, remain politically dominant.

The Sunni Taqaddum (Progress) came second with 37, while Iraq’s third major ethnic bloc, the Kurds, saw its major party the Kurdistan Patriotic Union (KDP) take 16 seats. A variety of smaller parties and independents made up the remainder.

It is this patchwork of ethnic, sectarian, and religious groupings that seeks to rule Iraq — and it is this which is, of course, the problem. If Iraqi society is divided, its politics are sundered. The 2021 elections were born of crisis after swathes of Iraqi youth took to the streets in 2019, sick of the corruption that dominates their lives, of those who rule them, and of the sectarianism that courses through the veins of the body politic. It was the largest civil unrest in Iraq since 2003 and it was bloody. The Government, backed by many of the Pro-Iranian Shia militias that support it, struck back, often firing live ammo; more than 1,000 people were killed. In the end, though, it was too much. The Government faced a simple choice: massacre everyone or back down. It backed down. Then Prime Minister, Adil Abdul-Mahdi, resigned to be replaced by the incumbent, Mustafa Al-Kadhimi. New elections were promised: they have just been delivered.

Campaigning was merciless. Every party and group and sect seemed to toss accusations at the other: Sunni versus Shia; Shia versus Shia and Sunni; Shia versus Kurds. But certain narratives and tropes reoccur. These are clearly identifiable as false or misleading, designed to achieve behavioural change, and as such are what we might usefully describe as disinformation. They are also instructive, because not only do they spread across legacy and social media, allowing us a glimpse of what experts call the Iraqi Information environment (IE), but they are geared toward exploiting psychological vulnerabilities in Iraqis (as with all nationalities), which are formed by a specific set of cultural, historical, and geographical experiences.

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The Iraqi IE, especially its online spaces, is toxic at the best of times, but things began to get worse about a month before the election. And while all sides engage in disinformation, it’s clear that pro-Iranian Shia groups and their associates — perhaps reflecting their dominant position and foreign backing — do it more often and better than anyone else.

Given Iraq has had foreign troops on its soil for almost twenty years, not to mention a history of colonialism still very much alive in the national consciousness, then narratives that speak to foreign interference are popular there — as they are across the Middle East. About three weeks before the vote, Kata’ib Hezbollah-owned Aleitjah TV posted a report on Telegram claiming that international election observers form the UN and EU were seeking to manipulate the elections for the benefit of Western interests. The story even included a fabricated quote from the UN special representative to Iraq, who was quoted as remarking that “if things don’t go the way they’re supposed to, we will have another say in this”.

These kinds of narratives never fail to appeal and spread rapidly across social media — and none more so than those that mention the “Zionists”. Three weeks before the election, pro-Iran outlet Sabereen News got in early and attacked UN representative Hilary Stauffer on Telegram, claiming that she had worked in Israel before Iraq and was, inevitably, a Mossad operative, a lie that was, naturally, repeated on mainstream channels.

Much of the online content here has unsurprisingly been sectarian in nature. A Kata’ib Hezbollah-linked group claimed it had hacked a database containing a list of Sunni politicians frequenting the Saudi Embassy in Baghdad, which was supposedly buying votes for them. It was all nonsense, but clever nonsense nonetheless. It was clearly designed to exploit Shia fears of Sunni meddling in the elections, as well as to rhetorically bolster Iran’s broader geopolitical battle with Saudi Arabia for influence in the region.

Then came the day itself. Sabereen News began reporting — totally falsely — that “forces” had entered a polling station to mess with the count. Another group of pro-Iran outlets, again led by the now relentless Sabereen News, reported that voting at polling stations across several provinces, including Anbar and Baghdad, had been disrupted because voting servers, located in the UAE (a close Saudi ally) were, with the help of an Iraqi National Intelligence officer, being used to tamper with votes.

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Now that the results are in, it’s clear that one theme unites all these narratives: what we might call “the big lie”; that the voted was rigged, altered, or otherwise tampered with, and is therefore invalid. Once this is understood it’s obvious why most of the disinformation came from Pro-Iran outlets and parties. Al-Fatah lost over 30 seats. Iraqis have once more shown that they don’t want Iran in their country, but Iran cannot let this stand.

Indeed, as soon as the results started to become clear, Iran’s footsoldiers started getting their people out. On 12 October, two days after the vote, an Al-Fatah linked group announced that they had filed complaints with the electoral commission, threatening “alternative measures” if these weren’t addressed. A week later, another pro-Iran group released a statement also rejecting the elections and urging Iraqis to “demand their rights” and take to the streets.

Al-Fatah knows they will not force a recount, but they don’t really want one. After all, they’d only lose again, and they know it. But get their people out on the street and they can exercise influence on the incoming administration. The new Iraqi government can ignore 15 seats in the parliament. It can’t ignore 50,000 people on the streets.

All of this is likely to go on for several more months. The infighting will get worse, and the disinformation will grow. And all the while Iran will benefit from the chaos, as it always does — and the Iraqi people will suffer, as they always do.

In his first address as PM to the Pakistani Senate, he said he intended to raise the blasphemy issue in the United Nations and would work to achieve a “common policy” within the 57-nation Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).[1. Imran Khan spoke after the Senate adopted a resolution condemning a plan by Geert Wilders, a militantly Islamophobic, far-right Dutch opposition leader, to hold a competition for cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad. Many Muslims see visual depictions of the prophet as blasphemy. Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte denounced Mr. Wilder’s plan as “not respectful” and “provocative” but provoked Pakistani ire by refusing to ban the competition on the grounds that he would not curtail freedom of speech.]

Likewise campaigning before his election, Khan said: “We are standing with Article 295c and will defend it,” referring to the blasphemy clause in the constitution that mandates the death penalty for any “imputation, insinuation or innuendo” against the Prophet Muhammad.

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This clause has been used to victimise minorities, including Shiites – who account for up to a quarter of the population – as well as the country’s small communities of Ahmadi Muslims, Christians and Hindus. It has acted as a means to whip crowds into a frenzy and at times turn them into lynch mobs; it has inspired vigilante killings. It is also used to intimidate journalists in the country, threatening freedom of the press and free speech.

The new prime minister’s backing for the clause came as no surprise to South Asia scholar Ahsan I. Butt, who noted shortly after the election that “Khan’s ideology and beliefs on a host of dimensions are indistinguishable from the religious hard-right”.

In fact, Khan’s move was a carefully calculated political gambit on two levels. It caters to the anti-blasphemy sentiment widely shared among Pakistanis, including the Islamist militants whose popularity in the election displaced Khan’s main rival, thereby playing a key role in his electoral victory.[2. Khan was once dubbed ‘Taliban Khan’ because of his support of the Afghan Taliban, and his advocacy for the opening in Pakistan of an official Taliban Pakistan office, for allowing government funds to go to militant madrassas, and for enabling Islamists to dictate the content of public school textbooks. His reluctance to confront the militancy problem has recently cost him $300 million of aid from America]

But it also sends a sign to Saudi Arabia, which has been quietly campaigning for more than decade for a global law that would punish blasphemy.

Pakistan doesn’t want to get caught in the cross-fire from the bitter rivalry between Saudi and Iran, with whom Pakistan, home to the world’s largest Shiite Muslim minority, shares a border. Nonetheless, Saudi is keen that Khan steps up support for the 41-nation, Saudi-led Islamic Military Counter-Terrorism Coalition, which is widely seen as an anti-Iranian alliance.

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This is key. Saudi financial support for Pakistan – currently caught in a financial crisis that will probably force it to turn for the 13^th  time in three decades to the IMF – could depend on the degree to which Khan bends to the kingdom’s will. The Saudi-backed Islamic Development Bank reportedly would be willing to lend Pakistan US$4billion to alleviate the crisis.

Saudi efforts to exploit Pakistan’s precarious financial position so early in Khan’s prime ministership stem not only from Pakistan’s urgent need for assistance indicate a certain uncertainty on their part as to how warm Saudi-Pakistani relations will be.

Indeed, Shameem Akhtar, a veteran foreign policy analyst, columnist and former dean of International Relations at Karachi University, argues: “Imran Khan doesn’t feel personally obliged towards the Saudis, who have long bought Pakistan and considered it their satellite state. If there’s anything that could push his hand it’s the economic support provided by Riyadh, given Pakistan’s fiscal needs.”

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But while Saudi Arabia will surely feel reassured by Khan’s ‘blasphemy’ move. There may yet be a problem neither country has considered. China.

For if he is successful in his campaign for a global blasphemy law, Khan will soon find that his credibility and that of the Islamic countries that join him will be undermined if they remain silent about China’s current crackdown on Uyghur Muslims. This is arguably one of the most concerted attacks on Islam in recent history and yet, curiously, the Muslim world has remained largely silent on the subject.

“Many Middle Eastern states have a poor human-rights record themselves — including when it comes to the treatment of religious minorities. Many exhibit a similar understanding of human rights to China’s — that is, that social stability trumps individual rights. This is how the Chinese Government has framed the presence of re-education camps and other repressive measures,” said Chinese politics scholar Simone van Nieuwenhuizen.

Many Muslim nations are also targets of significant Chinese investment, beneficiaries of trade, and in some case heavily indebted to the Republic. This puts Khan in an unenviable position: seeking to bolster domestic and international positions by burnishing his religious credentials, he could be jeopardising the Muslim world’s economic ties with the People’s Republic. Khan may yet come to regret his hasty blasphemy move.

A look at the Shi’a-Sunni conflict within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia’s Sunni-Shi’a relations are a cycle of repression, rebellion and activism that dates back decades. The execution of Shi’a cleric and activist Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, along with three other Shi’a clerics, in January 2016, was the latest chapter in the long-running and unequal struggle between the Sunni Saudi government and the Shi’a minority. In the 1980s there was armed confrontation, which was brutally put down, and after which many leading Shi’a clerics came to an accord with the Saudi government in 1993 – one Al-Nimr refused to join.

It’s an unhappy arrangement, with Shi’a resentment at their treatment never too far from the surface. And oil plays a key role in maintaining it.

Saudi Arabia’s oil sector accounts for around 87% of its budget revenues, and that oil is concentrated where much of the Shi’a population is concentrated, with many working in the industry.[1. Dilip Hiro, ‘A Matter of Crude Politics’, The Guardian, 12 December 2006] Which helps explain why an uneasy co-existence is maintained by the Saudi rulers: oil is the Kingdom’s life-blood, any action which might damage the industry would be catastrophic. Shi’a populations in other Gulf states (notably Kuwait in 1986) have shown that they are capable of striking at the oil industry and causing enormous damage.

Yet because of the Saudi monarchy’s role as the Custodians of the Two Holy Mosques (Mecca and Medina), the holiest sites in Islam, any further compromise with their Shi’a minority would be seen by many Sunnis as a fundamental dereliction of religious duty.[2. It’s worth noting that, although Iran has some important Shi’a sites such as the Imam Reza Mosque in Mashhad, the holiest sites: Najaf and Karbala, are in Iraq. The Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf is the resting place of the Fourth Caliph. Karbala is where Hussayn was murdered in 680CE. An event which is commemorated by the Shi’a every year in the Festival of Ashura.] The Wahhabi form of Sunni Islam espoused by the Saudi royal family rose to prominence on its claim to unsullied religious piety and purity. This impacts on how the Kingdom engages not only with their own Shi’a population, but also with Shi’a communities across the Middle East and especially the (Shi’a) Islamic Republic of Iran.

Iran and the Shi’a Awakening

The rising influence of Iran, another state with huge oil reserves, has emboldened Shi’a communities throughout the Middle East to be more pro-active in seeking concessions from their Sunni governments. This growing confidence has been labelled the ‘Shi’a Awakening’ or the ‘Shi’a Crescent’ (a reference to the broad shape of the geographical areas inhabited by Shi’a populations across the region). Shi’a Muslims are a sizeable minority in most countries across the Middle East, and a majority in Iran, Iraq and Bahrain (as well as forming the larger part of Lebanon’s Muslim population).

The Shi’a Awakening and the rise of Iran has given Saudi Arabia the opportunity to present itself as the defender of Sunni interests. For instance, it has funded Sunni militias in Syria (countered by Iranian funded Shi’a militias, most notably Hizbullah). More recently, Saudi Arabia, with the backing of Bahrain and the United States, intervened in Yemen after the Shi’a Houthi movement captured the capital and promptly offered a commercial flight route to Iran. Saudi Arabia, desperate not to allow Iran a toe-hold on the Arabian peninsula, took immediate military action. That war is ongoing.

Tensions are also rising in Lebanon, where, yet again, Iran and Saudi Arabia are backing rival factions.

To date, Iraq has been Iran’s biggest victory in this regional-sectarian struggle – with Iranian backed militias and political allies taking control in the wake of the US-led invasion. Which is where the religious ‘purity’ comes into play – the Sunni militias who would have been Saudi Arabia’s natural allies hated the Saudi government for not being the ‘pure Sunni Muslims’ they presented themselves to be. Particularly unforgivable in the eyes of ISIS and al-Qa’ida, was the fact that the Saudis had allowed non-Muslim soldiers on the Holy Arabian Peninsula during the Gulf War, although the ongoing presence of western businesses in Saudi Arabia was also a cause of upset. Therefore, Iran was able to extend its influence in Iraq because Saudi Arabia was unable to mount an effective counter-strategy.

If Saudi Arabia was not so dependent on the oil sourced from Shi’a-populated areas, they would have little reason to maintain that accord. A dramatic fall in the oil price could trigger an escalation in conflict.

What happens if the oil price falls

The price drop would, of course, be catastrophic for Iran as well as Saudi Arabia. Indeed, both countries have recognised the dangers posed by their over-reliance on oil and are seeking to diversify their economies. The recent purge of top officials orchestrated by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia is part of the same dynamic: putting the ‘house’ in order to curb expenditure and attract alternative investment. The Iran nuclear deal can be seen in much the same way.

For the Saudis, however, the objective of maintaining their religious legitimacy by not allowing the Arabian Peninsula to be further ‘polluted’ with non-Islamic influences would remain. In this context a $10 oil scenario could be seen by the Saudi government as an opportunity to move more aggressively against the Shi’a minority. A heavily diminished oil industry may in fact prompt the Shi’a minority to leave of their own accord to look for work elsewhere (they are barred from working in government or the military).

That displacement might be a best-case scenario. More catastrophically, a dramatic fall in the oil price could lead the Saudis to forcibly expel or violently oppress their Shi’a population, which might provoke Iran to intervene. At that point, $10 oil could shift Saudi Arabia and Iran from proxy wars into all out war.