ASSOCIATED PRESS: BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP) — Two of the Arab world's most prominent Muslim theologians have waded into a bitter exchange of barbs, engaging in a debate that is a small-scale rendition of the worsening animosity between the Sunni and Shiite branches of Islam.
The fight began early this month when Youssef al-Qaradawi, a Sunni who is one of the best known Islamic television clerics, called Shiites "heretics" and accused them of seeking to infiltrate Sunni societies.
Lebanon's top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, shot back that Qaradawi was trying to incite "fitna" — the word for internal civil strife among Muslims that is anathema to followers of Islam.
Centuries-old tensions between Islam's two main branches in the Middle East have flared into the open in recent years, following the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and the eruption of sectarian killings there.
Though sectarian violence has eased in Iraq this year, it has boiled over in other places, particularly Lebanon, which saw dozens killed in fighting in May between Sunni groups and the Shiite militants of Hezbollah.
Periodic reconciliation efforts, such as a Sunni-Shiite dialogue conference in June in the holy city of Mecca, have done little to ease the deep suspicions of the Mideast's Sunni majority toward Shiites, seen by some Sunnis as a tool for spreading the influence of Persian Iran.
Although many Sunnis in the Arab world had shown admiration for Hezbollah's confrontations with Israel, much of that good will evaporated after the Shiite group turned its guns on Lebanon's Sunnis. Clerics’ Debate Underlines Sunni-Shiite Divide >>> By Bassem Mroue | September 24, 2008
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