Area's Sunnis and Shiites Keep A Delicate Balance Across Divides

Sunni and Shiite Muslims worship Allah and believe that the prophet Muhammad was his messenger. They have disagreed for 14 centuries, however, over how the prophet's first successor was chosen after his death and which heirs of his four successors, or caliphs, were legitimate leaders of the faith.

There are also differences in religious practice. Most Sunnis hold their hands up while praying; Shiites hold them at their sides. Most Sunnis say "amin" at the end of certain prayers; Shiites don't. Sunnis touch their foreheads to the ground when they pray; Shiites touch a small stone.

Such differences never caused friction among local Muslims until the 1979 Shiite revolution in Iran, which provoked a feud among Washington area mosque officials. After that, community leaders say, inter-sect friendships and marriages continued, but formal religious congregations tended to splinter along sectarian lines.

More recently, as sectarian violence has exploded in Iraq and begun to divide the Muslim world into radicalized Sunni and Shiite camps, tensions have risen in Muslim communities in the United States. There have been confrontations on college campuses in New Jersey and acts of vandalism in Michigan.

The 2003 toppling of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the establishment of a democratic government have given the country's Shiite majority a dominant political role for the first time in history, arousing Sunni resistance and fear of the expanding influence of neighboring Shiite Iran.

In December, the videotaped execution of Hussein intensified emotions on both sides, and the two sects in Iraq are bitterly divided. In Lebanon, once a diverse and cosmopolitan country, recent civil strife and the political rise of the Shiite Hezbollah militia have also heightened sectarian tensions.

In the Washington area, the international diversity and high education level of the Muslim immigrant community have helped keep heads cool. So has the work of people such as Sahib Hashim, 70, a retired Iraqi American pediatrician in Rockville who founded a Web site devoted to Sunni-Shiite understanding.

"Iraqis in this area are all pulling together against the madness," said Ali Attar, an Iraq-born doctor in Falls Church whose clinic partner is a Pakistani dentist. "Both Sunnis and Shias here denounce sectarian killings. They know the violence is the result of a regional political power struggle, and they don't fall into the trap of confrontation."

Yet that distant power struggle, in which Shiites are challenging longtime Sunni dominance, is very much on the minds of D.C. area Muslims. At the recent American University forum, the moderator asked the audience not to bring up events in the Middle East. But the very first questioner spoke of the widening Sunni-Shiite clash and asked, "Can it happen in America, too?"

Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad, a Palestinian American whose Bethesda-based organization, the Minaret of Freedom Institute, sponsored the event, said that sectarian feelings in the area were often laced with "silent contempt" but that the ongoing bloodshed overseas could also help bring Muslims together.

"Everyone here is horrified by what is going on, and it may even have a mild positive effect as an impetus for reconciliation," Ahmad said. He said that envoys from Iraq and several other Arab countries were invited to a reception recently at the Iranian Interests Section, an office that functions in lieu of an embassy, to celebrate the anniversary of the Shiite revolution.

On area university campuses with substantial numbers of Muslims -- including George Mason, Towson and George Washington -- there are active and well-organized Muslim student organizations, but no trouble has been reported.

Fatima Saeed, 28, an engineering student at GWU and a Sunni from Egypt, said she had felt somewhat ostracized as a Muslim in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and had even been called a terrorist once, but she had never encountered problems with Shiites, on campus or off.

"Everyone here is busy studying and working," she said. On Fridays, Muslim students at GWU rent space in a nearby church for their weekly prayer service, and Shiites and Sunnis fill the small room.

"We pray on different lines, but we are peaceful," Saeed said. "Whether you wear socks when you pray or not, what matters is that we are all praying."