A prominent speaker on Islam, Vali Nasr, gave a public lecture on the history and current situation of Muslim society in the Middle East on Monday, February 19 at Baxter Hall’s Lovell Lecture Room.
Nasr is a noted Iranian-born American scholar. He teaches at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. He is considered an expert in Middle Eastern Affairs, Islam, and the area’s politics. He joined NPS in 1993 after teaching at the University of San Diego, University of California- San Diego, and Tufts University. He frequently appears as guest on many of the major television network news shows as a scholar of Islam and the Middle East.
His talk, “The Politics of the Muslim World,” was mainly focused on the long conflict between Shias, a majority sect of Muslim population, and Sunnis, the minority Muslim group. At its most simple level, Shias and Sunni Muslims had a disagreement 1,400 years ago determining the successor of the Prophet Muhammad. The sects have fought since 632 A.D. over ideological and territorial differences.
He said that the minority Sunni has been ruling the Middle East for a long time. The minority group ruling majority has led to the problem of sectarian conflicts.
“What the region saw was a change in the balance of power between the sects. If you look at all the countries in the Middle East most are ruled by minorities,” Nasr said.
Nasr devoted many of his evening remarks to a packed Baxter Hall on the Iraq war. He said the United States’s major failure was not to bring democracy to all of Iraq but its failure to understand shattering the Iraq state would lead to sectarian upheaval between the Shias and Sunnis.
Nasr is the author of the bestseller The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam will
Shape the Future. He has written numerous other books. He is a 2006 Carnegie Scholar and has given expert testimony to the U.S. Senate.