July 5, 2016
Revenge of the Sunnis
By Martin KramerSunni Arabs have been losing their grip on the Arab heartland since the fall of the Ottoman empire; the moment of their revival is now.
The crucial passage in Ofir Haivry’s essay, “The Great Arab Implosion and Its Consequences,” is this one:
If there is a single prime mover of the dizzying kaleidoscope of events we have been witnessing in the last years, it is the crumbling of a century-old Sunni Arab regional order and, no less piercingly, the entire worldview that upheld it. In a world where Sunnis vastly outnumber Shiites, this is a crisis of epic proportions.
The crisis is indisputable. But it isn’t just a matter of the last years. In fact, Sunni ascendancy in the core of the Arab world has been in retreat for a full century, since the fall of the Ottoman empire. And aside from the Sunni and Shiite Arabs themselves, lots of people have had a hand in it. They include France, Britain, Turkey, Israel, and Iran.
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