Sunni Religious Groups Form Council Nyt

Sunni Religious Groups form Council

The NYT is reporting that Sunni Arab religious groupings met on Thursday and are seeking to establish a Sunni Arab leadership that could match that of the Kurds and the Shiites. The Sunni religious groups involved included Sufis, Salafis, and the Muslim Brotherhood.

I’m not sure such a grouping has much in the way of staying power. Salafis are fundamentalists (sometimes inaccurately refered to as “Wahhabis” by the Western press and by Iraqi Shiites) who despise mystical Sufism (which is about saints and shrines and visions). The Muslim Brotherhood has never been good about sharing power, and in Iraq is tiny. And, many Sunni Arabs are nationalists and not particularly religious. If they are religious, they are not necessarily Salafis, Sufis or Muslim Brotherhood. This group seems to me therefore to represent only a narrow sliver of the Sunni Arabs and to be unlikely to avoid squabbling among themselves very long.