Translation of "Dem schiitischen" in English

The coalition left one seat free for a Shiite candidate from Hezbollah.

Some wish the worst for Iran because it follows Shia Islam.

In some respects, they are similar to Shi'ite Muslims but there are striking differences.

But isn ?t there significant difference between the Shi ?ite South and the Sunni North?

The evidence cited for this includes the statement by the Yemeni Government that it stopped an Iranian delivery of arms to the rebel movement in October 2009 and the fact that in recent months, the Iranian state media has been covering the struggle of the Shia rebel movement more intensively and benevolently than previously.

Organized sectarian militants are also killing the ethnic Hazara, who are Shia Muslims, and probably the largest casualty in this war.

Haddad complicated Vatican when designed himself to work with the founder of the Amal Movement, the Shiite Imam Musa al-Sadr.

In this fluid regional environment, a great proxy struggle for regional dominance between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran is playing out violently in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, and Lebanon.

There are even rumors that some of them have resorted to witchcraft to summon spirits from beyond the grave, and that Ahmadinejad has had direct contact with the hidden Imam (the Shia messiah).

Prior to that, the last great Sunni-Shia battle in the Middle East involved near-constant war between the Sunni Ottoman Empire and Iran’s Shia Safavid Empire during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Perhaps the most immediate source of uncertainty is the prospect of a long-term cold war – punctuated by proxy conflicts – between the Middle East’s regional powers, particularly Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran.

An alliance with Shia Iran – the Kingdom’s supreme ideological enemy, and one with regional hegemonic ambitions – is out of the question.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki will have to manage relations with firebrand Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and his followers, who can provoke unrest in southern Iraq if they feel under-served.

Also playing a role here is the competition between a Shiite Iran – in which, since Ayatollah Khomeini, the religious leaders have also held secular power – and secularised Turkey, in which Sunni-oriented politicians have now become the strongest force since developing into a socio-religious populist party.

There and elsewhere, the US, motivated by the larger geopolitical goal of containing Shia Iran and its regional allies, has embraced Sunni rulers steeped in religious and political bigotry, even though they pose a transnational threat to the values of freedom and secularism.

Indeed, the uprising by Bahrain’s Shia majority has now become a struggle for regional mastery between Iran and the US-backed Sunni monarchies in the Gulf.

The road toward peace rather than ceasefire in Lebanon precludes the EU’s participation in America’s emerging “containment” strategy vis-à-vis Iran, at least in its current form, which is based on organizing the resistance of Sunni states to Shia influence.

The Saudi monarchy’s immunity from US pressure for democratic reform owes much to fear of the “Shia crescent” looming over the Gulf, with Iran at its center.

The alliance of the predominately Sunni Muslim Palestinian resistance movements and the Free Patriotic Movement, Lebanon’s largest Christian political party, with predominately Shiite Muslim Iran and Hezbollah should defuse such a perception that the US and its allies are trying to cultivate.

So we turn to the Shi'a ritual of Muharram not necessarily to better understand Islam or the Middle East per se, but rather to better grasp our own understandings of modernity, history, and time.

The sectarian countries have that phobia of the "Shi'a crescent," that the whole Syrian government, the Syrian regime is Alawite, it is a friend of Iran, and should be toppled.

Although Saudi Arabia apparently had warm diplomatic relations with Iran, the largest Shi'a country; but in cases in which we could have agreed very easily, like the Lebanon civil war, or the Iraq civil war, they, due to this phobia—I call it a phobia, a phobia of the "Shi'a crescent"—they refrained from any kind of reconciliation.

In Islam - Sunni with its four schools or rites and Shiite in its various forms - the ritual prayer (salat) is after the creed the first duty of religious observance.