“To speak of the Shi’a of the Arab world is to raise a sensitive
issue that most Muslims would rather not discuss,” is the
opening gambit of the authors of “The Arab Shi’a: The Forgotten
Muslims”. Graham Fuller, resident senior political consultant at
the RAND Corporation, and Rend Rahim Francke, executive director
of the Iraq Foundation and later the Iraqi Governing Council’s
US representative, go on to say, “Sunnis by and large prefer to
avoid the subject, and even many Shi’a are uncomfortable with
it.” If western commentators are to be believed however, the
story of the Shi’a and Sunni is not simply one of an awkward
relationship. They represent ‘Islam’s great schism’, one that
renders the idea of a homogenous Muslim collective – the Ummah –
a myth: “The Shi’a…present a sensitive problem that assails to
the core of Muslim unity and undermines the traditional
histiography of the Muslim state…” or so Fuller and Francke
believe. The concept of a universal Islamic political system,
one capable of ruling over b