The execution of Shia scholar Shaikh Al Nimr in Saudi Arabia has started a new phase of Shia-Sunni doctrinal war in the modern age. It seems that Muslims as a whole are incapable of learning from history, either their own or that of other people. Saudi Arabia, an absolutist monarchy deriving its legitimacy from dogmatic Wahhabi Sunni Islam, and Iran, a theocracy and nominally a republic basing itself on Shia villayet-e-faqih, are the modern faces of an ancient rivalry. Both these anachronistic ‘Islamic states’ privilege their own sectarian brand of Islam and leave no stone unturned to prove to the world just how ancient they are in every sense of the word. Indeed, sectarianism seems to play a role in every other Muslim country as well. Even the best of Muslim countries, i.e. Turkey — a secular republic and perhaps the most modern Muslim country — discriminates in certain matters against Alevis, the Shia sub-sect that makes up eight percent of the Turkish population. Until recently their places of worship were not recognised by the state. Malaysia, a constitutional democracy, for all practical purposes has outlawed Shia Islam (and by extension all other sects of Islam other than that followed by the Sunni Malay majority). Pakistan, another constitutional democracy, declared a whole sect, i.e. Ahmedis, non-Muslim in 1974 and has subsequently imposed significant curbs on their religious freedom. The point is that we must recognise that there is something missing in Muslim society when it comes to accepting diversity of points of view within Islam. At the root of this is takfir, which seems to be an article of faith for many of the ulema (clergy) that have usurped the right to interpret faith. It is all the more remarkable that this happens in the name of a faith that merely puts the precondition of Kalima Shahadah or the declaration of faith in one God and the messenger Muhammad (PBUH) for entry into the fold. Islamic history suggests that the history of takfir itself is more than 1,200 years old. It may be stated, however, that the level of theological discourse at the time was considerably higher. The first religious inquisition in the Muslim world, called the Minha, began under the reign of Abbasid Caliph Mamun, who, being from the rationalist school of thought, i.e. Mutazillites, considered the Holy Quran to be God’s creation separate from God’s essence. Many of the traditional religious scholars and theologians at the time believed the holy Quran to be co-eternal with God’s essence. In the last year of his reign, Mamun declared that anyone who did not believe in his view of the Quran as a creation of God separate from his essence was not allowed to teach religion. His motive seems to have been to centralise religious authority in the office of the caliph. During Caliph Mutassim’s reign, Shaikh Ahmad Bin Hanbal, the traditional jurist who founded the Hanbali school of Islamic jurisprudence, was brutally tortured because he refused to answer the inquisition on the issue and kept repeating the Kalima Shahadah. Later, during Abbasid Caliph Mutawakkil’s reign, the traditionalists became dominant and declared the rationalists and Jahmites as being outside the pale of Islam. Jahmites or Jahmis derived their name from the Islamic theologian Jahm bin Safwan who believed that while action and creation can be attributed to God, speech was not an attribute and, on that logic, disputed the co-eternal nature of the holy Quran. This group, along with the wider Mutazillite movement, was persecuted and wiped out by the traditionalist orthodoxy in a short span of time. This had profound and long lasting impact on the question of religious dissent within the Islamic milieu. Persecution of ‘heretics’ became the norm rather than the exception. By the 12th century, Saladin, the chivalrous hero of the crusades who is universally praised for his tolerance for other non-Muslim creeds (which he was), had virtually wiped out Ismaili Shias in Egypt. His son, Al Malik Al Zahir, ordered the execution of Shahabuddin Suhrawardi, the Islamic theologian and mystic, because the ulema of the time adjudged him to an apostate preaching the Batini philosophy. The Ottoman Empire, known for its tolerance of Christians and Jews, nonetheless persecuted Shias, especially in the 15th and 16th centuries. The Shia empires in history were only slightly better than the Sunni ones in so much as that takfir was not the official policy. Nevertheless, Safavids under Shah Ismail, in reaction to the Ottoman Empire from which he had declared independence, made Shia Islam the official religion of Iran and suppressed Sunni Islam. Consequently, most of Iran today is Shia. Much of this was in consonance with what was going on elsewhere. At the time, Christian Europe too was sharply divided along Protestant and Catholic lines. Some 400 years later, the Shias and Sunnis are still fighting but Europe and the west have long left behind puerile religious and doctrinal disputes. Indeed, it seems that the coming of the Information Age has further sharpened sectarian knives in the east in general and the Muslim world in particular. The upshot is that Muslims carry the burden of 1,200 years of takfir and quelling of religious dissent. Unlike the predominantly Christian west, which embraced modernity and relegated faith to a personal domain, for Muslims, theology remains the central plank of society and politics. What is happening in the Middle East today, therefore, cannot be understood in terms of power politics alone. The conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran is not so much a modern conflict between nation states as it is an ancient schism reborn in the meta-system of a religious community gripped by doctrinal intolerance. This time around, however, it promises to drag in the rest of the world into its fire. The writer is a lawyer based in Lahore and the author of the book Mr Jinnah: Myth and Reality. He can be contacted via twitter @therealylh and through his email address yasser.hamdani@gmail.com