Pomeps Conversations

Fanar Haddad talks about his latest book, Understanding ‘Sectarianism’: Sunni-Shi’a Relations in the Modern Arab World, with Marc Lynch on this week’s podcast. The book explores the sectarian identity not as a monochrome frame of identification, but as a multi-layered concept. Haddad said, “One of the problems with how sectarianism, the phrase, is approached is that it’s almost always is presented as meaning just one thing thereby condensing what is inescapably a multifaceted subject into some mono-dimensional or mono-colored aspect. And so if we are going to take sectarian identity we need to avoid making the same mistake.” “What I propose in the book is that sectarian identity operates on four dimensions simultaneously, on four interlinked dimensions. And these are the doctrinal dimension, the subnational, so that’s the dynamics within a single nation-state. Thirdly, at the level of the nation-state, so in terms of how sectarian identity interacts with nationalism and national identity, and finally on a t