Abstract
The Fertile Crescent’s cultural model of prioritizing religious identity over other social identities generated religious cleavages that caused conflict between the sectarian groups in the distant past. Some have persisted, in various forms, to the present time. While the religious conflicts have faded among the Christian sects, they persist between the Muslim sects and between Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Larger groups demanded the conformity of smaller ones to symbolic representations of their identities and associated beliefs and value systems. Those demands were reinforced by prejudicial attitudes and transmitted through intra- and intergroup interaction. Viewing nonconformists as heretics, apostates, or infidels inhibited assimilation, providing fertile ground for conflicts of a secular nature to be seen along sectarian fault lines and thus mutate into recurrent violent sectarian conflict.
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