Today's Edition
By: Imam Mohammad Tawhidi*
For decades, Western commentary on the Middle East has leaned on a comfortable shorthand: the region's conflicts are the product of ancient hatreds between Sunni and Shia Muslims, flaring up whenever old wounds are reopened.
The truth is less mystical and more cynical.
Sectarian identity in the modern Middle East functions less like an inherited feud and more like a tool kept in a drawer; pulled out, sharpened, and put to work whenever a political movement needs it, then quietly set aside when it stops being useful.
No actor illustrates this better than the regime in Iran. Since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 and the convulsions of the “Arab Spring” after 2010, Tehran has built its regional power around a network of predominantly Shia militias in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen; the so-called Shia Crescent.
Iran casts itself as the protector of the region's Shia communities and the last line of resistance against Western domination and Sunni conservatism. It is a useful story. It justifies arming Hezbollah, propping up dictators such as Bashar al-Assad, and funding Iraqi and Yemeni militias, all under the banner of religious solidarity rather than naked power projection.
But scratch the surface and the sectarian branding looks more opportunistic than sincere. In Syria, research on the civil war shows that sectarian alignment became attractive only once it proved more reliable on the battlefield than religiously mixed alternatives. Sect, in other words, was Plan B.
The clearest tell, though, is what Iran does at home. A regime that markets itself abroad as the guardian of Shia Islam runs a domestic system that discriminates harshly against its own Sunni citizens; Kurds, Baloch and parts of the Arab population of Khuzestan, barring them from top state institutions and leaving Tehran, remarkably, without a single official Sunni mosque despite a Sunni population over a million and a half. Yet the state's cruelty isn't confined to Sunnis.
The Ahwazi Arabs of Khuzestan are overwhelmingly Shia, and they have nonetheless endured some of the harshest repression in the country: mass arrests, executions and systematic exclusion from the oil wealth extracted from their own province. That single fact undercuts any claim that Iran's sectarian politics reflect genuine religious kinship.
What actually seems to matter to Tehran is ethnic and political loyalty to the clerical state, not confessional identity as such. Sect is exported as solidarity and imported as suspicion.
The Muslim Brotherhood, the terrorist movement founded in Egypt in 1928, runs a parallel playbook aimed at society rather than the state. Its enduring strength has come from building parallel institutions: mosque networks, student associations, social services and tightly organised cadre-training bodies that fuse religious identity with political loyalty and draw a sharp line between an authentic, mobilised Islamic community and everyone outside it: secular elites, non-Islamist Muslims and religious minorities.
Analyses of internal Brotherhood strategy documents describe a deliberate, staged doctrine; "tamkeen," or empowerment, aimed at gradually capturing institutions from within. Both things can be true at once: a movement can have sincere social origins and also learn, over time, to treat identity as a lever.
What makes the comparison worth drawing is not just that Iran and the Brotherhood each instrumentalise identity, but that they have repeatedly done so together, despite sitting on opposite sides of Islam's great schism. Hassan al-Banna courted Iranian clerics in the 1930s in the name of Sunni-Shia unity against colonialism. Khomeini is said to have admired Brotherhood thought, and a young Ali Khamenei reportedly translated the writings of Brotherhood theorist Sayyid Qutb into Persian.
After 1979, Syrian and Egyptian Brotherhood figures traveled to Iran to study Khomeini's revolutionary model. And since the 1990s, Tehran has bankrolled and armed Hamas and, to a lesser extent, Palestinian Islamic Jihad; both extremist movements with zero sectarian kinship to Iran, specifically to present itself as a pan-Islamic power rather than a narrowly Shia one.
One French scholar studying the relationship points to a structural echo beneath the theological divide: the Brotherhood's model of the "Murshid," or Supreme Guide, and Iran's own "Rahbar," or Supreme Leader, both function as near-absolute sources of religious-political authority.
The alliance frayed when Hamas broke with Damascus over Syria's civil war, then mended again by the October 2023 Gaza war, when Iran's president phoned Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders the day after the October 7 attack.
In 2025, the Brotherhood's own leadership wrote to Iran's Supreme Leader declaring the two movements "one nation; religiously, spiritually and geopolitically," setting the sectarian divide aside entirely in the face of a shared adversary.
The lesson isn't that Sunni and Shia extremists secretly agree on theology. It's that both Tehran and the Brotherhood treat religious identity as infrastructure; something to be built up, wired into institutions, switched on for mobilisation, and switched off for convenience, whether that means allying across the sectarian line or crushing coreligionists at home who threaten the centre's grip on power.
Sectarianism, in this reading, is not merely the region's problem. It is one of the most effective instruments of control that Islamist extremists have mastered; and one the West must become far wiser in recognising and confronting.
*Parliamentary Adviser and Research Partner with TRENDS Research & Advisory
