https://arab.news/yxm2n
It is not a coincidence that Iran is firing missiles at the Arab Gulf states. The fundamental difference between them is what this current war is really about. They represent two opposing worldviews, one based on a militant and radical version of Islam and the other on a liberal practice.
Their battle is one of ideas. Radicalism was inherited from the revolutionary decades of the 1970s and 1980s and the anti-imperialist movements opposed to the US. The other side is liberal, allied to the West and the US and in tune with its world order. For the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its proxy militias, the Gulf Cooperation Council states represent the real danger: a viable and prosperous alternative model for the region.
This is also not about theology. There are similar theological schools, like Salafis or Sufis, on both sides. It is also not strictly about religion either. There are radical and liberal secularists allied to both sides. It is a clash of radical versus liberal ideas that sometimes uses religion as a vehicle. In Catholicism, it is the difference between Latin American liberation theology and conservative movements like Opus Dei. When radical Islam started to expand in the late 1970s, many of its militants were former leftist revolutionaries and some were not even Muslim. It is not Islam that was radicalized, rather it was radicalism that was Islamized, according to French academic Olivier Roy.
