Muhammad Surur and his work Wa jaʾa dawr al-Majus

Abstract

Muhammad Surur was one of the early polemicists who criticized the Iranian Revolution and warned against the threat of Shiʿa domination of the Middle East. Years before the Iranian Revolution, Surur developed firm anti-Shiʿa convictions that provided the basis for his 1981 book Wa jaʾa dawr al-Majus [Then Came the Turn of Majus (Zoroastrians)]. While anti-Shiʿa rhetoric was certainly not unique to Surur, his specific emphasis on the political dimension of the sectarian divide played a significant role in popularizing such sentiments. The political context of his homeland of Syria, and especially the repression experienced by the Muslim Brotherhood under the allegedly ‘Nusayri (Alawi)’ Syrian regime, clearly informed this anti-Shiʿa treatise and contributed to special criticism of Syria’s Alawis. Geopolitics and great power competition constantly appear in his work, as Surur believed that the Iranians, like their Persian ancestors, had national ambitions in the neighboring Arab countries and sought to control the region with the help of the Arab Shiʿa, whom Surur saw as a ‘fifth column’.