Bahrain’s Uprising is about Power not Religion http://babulilmlibrary.com/news/bahrains-uprising-is-about-power-not-religion

Sunni. Shia. Every time the protests in Bahrain are mentioned, they are made into a battle between these two branches of Islam, as if this was a war of religions.It’s not about religion, it’s about power and the desire for political change. Of course, in terms of power, it matters that 65 per cent of the population of Bahrain is Shia but 95 per cent of authority and most of the wealth belongs to the Sunni royal family and its close circle.But to put it in terms of a religious division is not only misleading, it also plays into the hands of those in Washington, as in Riyadh, who want to see everything through the prism of the confrontation with Iran and the fear of a so-called “Shia arc” emerging through the Gulf.

It’s grossly exaggerated. The Iranians, ethnically Indo-European, have always had problems of influence among the Arab Shia of the region. So far Iran seems to have played virtually no part in this uprising.To put the Bahraini demonstrations in Muslim terms is simply a diversion from the real problem, which is that a major part of the population has had it up to the neck with a corrupt and self-serving regime which has garnered the wealth of the island to a small group of royal rich and left the majority excluded. As Ibrahim Shareef, leader of the largest non-religious party in the country, the opposition Waad, put it succinctly this week: “This is not about the Shia versus Sunni; it is about conserving the status quo.”