Membership in any organization considered "Salafist," a designation generally denoting conservative Sunni fundamentalism, is illegal.

With the rise there of the Sunni fundamentalism known as Wahhabism, severe restrictions have been placed on Shia practice and its leaders jailed.

Shiite Iran was long suspicious of the overt Sunni fundamentalism preached by the Taliban, and almost went to war with Afghanistan in 1998.

"The most extreme forms of Sunni fundamentalism surfaced in Nasser's concentration camps, and the shah's crackdowns helped to inspire the Islamic Revolution."

It would also be better if it did not cast far-fetched aspersions over non-existent relations between Damascus and Al Qaeda and Sunni fundamentalism.

We shall see that it was in the camps that some of the Brothers abandoned Banna's reformist vision and created a new and potentially violent Sunni fundamentalism.

Unfortunately, the so-called Arab Spring (which has encouraged Sunni fundamentalism) and the as yet unfathomable consequences of the Syrian civil war have pushed both sides on to the defensive.

When Sunni fundamentalism appeared in the 1970s, many Alevis reacted by reinterpreting Alevism in socialist and Marxist idiom that seemed to have an affinity to Alevi ideals.

The Houthi rebels say they have been marginalized through a rise in Sunni fundamentalism on the back of Saleh's alliance with Saudi Arabia, whose puritanical Wahhabi Islam regards Shi'ites as heretics.