For the Greater Good: Common Goals and Institutional Sunni–Shiʿa Cooperation in Norway

Abstract

Under what circumstances do Sunni and Shiʿa organisations enter into institutional cooperation with each other? This article explores this question through a study of Muslim institutional cooperation in Norway from the late 1980s to the late 2010s, based on both archival sources and qualitative interviews. This period witnessed at first a very tight cooperation between Sunni and Shiʿa organisations, before the cooperation collapsed in the 1990s. In the 2010s Sunnis and Shiʿa again started to cooperate closely. The article seeks to interpret this development through the theory of superordinate or common goals or uniting against a third party. Sunnis seemed to invite the Shiʿa in when they had a clear common goal in the form of an external threat. Even though conditions vary, I argue that this mechanism may have played a role in the development of cooperation between Sunni and Shiʾa organisations in other countries as well.