Shia Houthis Attack Sunni Saudis: The Myth Of Muslim Unity

Missiles fell on Riyadh this weekend, fired not by infidel armies but by fellow Muslims targeting the land that houses Islam’s two holiest cities. On Saturday, the Iran-backed Houthis have struck again, and this time the target was the heart of the Saudi capital, precisely King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh. Many were killed, and more than 309 were injured. President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have condemned the Houthi aggression against Saudi Arabia.

While Washington has named the culprit, the deeper question is one Western commentators rarely ask: where is the “best ummah” when Muslims bomb civilian Muslims at an airport?

Beyond the immediate geopolitical crisis lies a theological contradiction. Sunni and Shiite Muslims continue to clash despite their fanciful claim to a unified ummah, a transnational community of believers united by faith rather than ethnicity, tribe, or nationality. Their Quran calls Muslims the “best ummah” (Quran 3:110), and Muslims declare it repeatedly in sermons, dawah booths, and interfaith panels as proof that Islam accomplishes what no other faith can: one brotherhood, one community, one body.

Riyadh suggests otherwise.

To appreciate the weight of this moment, one must understand Islam’s deepest fracture. The Sunni-Shiite split dates to roughly the seventh century and is rooted in a foundational dispute over who held the rightful authority to lead the Muslim community after Muhammad’s death. Sunnis, who make up roughly 85 to 90% of the world’s Muslims, held that leadership should pass to qualified companions of Muhammad. Shiites held that authority belonged exclusively to his bloodline, beginning with his cousin and son-in-law Ali.

That isn’t a quarrel over a minor spiritual point of etiquette, but precisely over who speaks for Allah after Muhammad. This dispute has never healed, and within a generation, Muslims were fighting Muslims in civil wars that ended with Ali murdered and Muhammad’s own grandson slaughtered at Karbala.

The ummah didn’t fracture after centuries of corruption. It fractured at its birth.

Today that ancient schism shapes Middle Eastern geopolitics. Iran, the world’s dominant Shiite power, has spent decades bankrolling proxy forces across the Arab world, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and militias in Iraq and Syria, in a relentless bid to project power into predominantly Sunni territory. The Gulf states, led by Saudi Arabia, view Tehran not merely as a regional rival but as an ideological and sectarian threat to their own stability and legitimacy. Neither side behaves as though they belong to the same brotherhood. They behave like rival empires, because that is what they are.

Here the propaganda is most exposed.

Muslims may point to gestures of reconciliation in conferences filled with occasional handshakes, but look at what happens on the ground, in mosque sermons and sectarian discourses. For centuries, influential Sunnis have long labeled Shiites heretics or outright apostates, whereas Shiite religious leaders, for their part, condemn the very Caliphs and Companions that Sunnis revere as the best generation of Muslims.

But it isn’t only about politics, because each side regards the other’s core religious beliefs as a deviation serious enough to merit hellfire as eternal destiny.

Sunni-Shiite unity was never the operating theology, but exclusivity was. If Sunnis and Shiites consider each other misguided at best and infidels at worst, then the so-called “best ummah” isn’t one community. Instead, it is rival powers driven by political interests and sectarian particularities.

But this also complicates a favorite “Muslim” boast: that Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the world.

The claim is repeated as evidence of divine favor and cohesive momentum, although the headline number counts, as one “faith,” two sects that deny each other’s legitimacy. It folds together communities that anathematize one another, and it rests largely on birth rates and nominal affiliation, not on a unifying, convincing religious message. A religion cannot simultaneously claim to be the single fastest-growing community on earth and a place where its largest branches question one another’s standing as true believers.

Numbers measure headcount, but they don’t measure unity, and unity is precisely what the “best ummah” claim promises.

Strip away the propaganda, and the pattern is plain. Muslim nations fight, embargo, and undermine one another as readily as any other nations do. Gulf monarchies tangle with each other. Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Emirates compete for regional dominance. Militias kill in the name of the same Allah they accuse their enemies of betraying. Power, sect, and national interest decide the facts on the ground, while the so-called ummah is invoked only when it is useful, to rally the faithful, to silence critics, or to impress fanciful non-Muslims.

When missiles fall on Riyadh’s airport, the question isn’t only how America should respond to Houthi aggression. It is also whether the West should keep repeating a claim that Muslims themselves refute every time one Muslim army, militia, or cleric declares another not a true believer.

The best ummah, according to its own scripture, was supposed to be a model for humanity. Today it is a rhetorical product. The reality is a fractured world, and Riyadh is its latest headline.

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A. S. Ibrahim holds two PhDs in Islamic Studies. He is the author of “Sharia Versus the U.S. Constitution: Why Americans Must Choose Freedom” and “Islam and the West.” He has also authored “Muhammad’s Military Expeditions” (Oxford, 2024), “A Concise Guide to the Life of Muhammad” (Baker Academic, 2022), “Conversion to Islam” (Oxford, 2021), “Basics of Arabic” (Zondervan, 2021), “A Concise Guide to the Quran” (Baker Academic, 2020), and “The Stated Motivations for the Early Islamic Expansion” (Peter Lang, 2018), among others. Follow him on X: @al2ostaz