The media has a tendency to inflate conflict to the point where they grossly misinform. I just made this exact same argument in GD. This Sunni/Shi’a hostility thing certainly exists among extremists( of which there are far too many), but it is overblown as a generality. It does not preclude alliance or co-operation.
Qatar and Iran share a gigantic natural gas field, so yes it is in both of their best interests to cooperate.
Even with Catholic v Protestant, realpolitik often took precedence. Take the Thirty Year War, the greatest religious conflict in European history. Want to guess which side Catholic France was on? Hint: it wasn’t the same side as the Catholic Habsburgs.
+1
That and lets look at a map of the Gulf Region. Qatar is a small entity surrounded by large powers. By putting its eggs in with Iran, it ensures that it retains a degree of independance, rather than be another Saudi client state.
Qatar has also reached out to Pakistan (non Arab) and India (Hindu and these days nearly fascistly so). Its realpolitick.
Being ignorant of religious practices generally, I’ve always had similar questions about the Sunni/Shia schism. Articles from Google searches always make it sound like this huge, irreconcilable split (maybe it was in times past, but life goes on…?).
With 1.X billion adherents, making sweeping generalizations about Muslims might be a lost cause, but are there any generalizations that can be made about the nature of the Sunni-Shia relationship in modern times at all? As a thought experiment, suppose we randomly polled 10,000 Sunni Muslims and 10,000 Shia Muslims from the Middle East region and asked them how they felt about one another. Would there be any kind of majority/consensus perspective, i.e.
“Death to the infidels!”
“I’d prefer to deal with them as little as possible. But as long as they don’t bother us, I guess we won’t bother them.”
“Decent folks I suppose, just very misguided in a number of ways”
“At least they’re Muslim”
“Eh, people are people. Would share a meal with them as long as they were polite and didn’t bring up controversial topics like politics and religion.”
etc…
Would the calculus change if the samples were pulled from the worldwide population of Muslims? Since Sunnis are the majority population-wise, are the prevailing attitudes about the current state of the Sunni-Shia divide vastly different between the two major groupings?