In the modern history of the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA) sectarian discourses have played an important role at a number of pivotal moments. With increasing European domination of the region in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries European states fought wars of position against one another by sponsoring particular local religious groups as a means of embodying their political claims. As a consequence, European rivalries became sutured onto local identity in new ways. Then, as hegemony turned to direct rule, colonial powers deeply imbued the political entities they created with sectarian norms. Legal personhood was mediated by religious identity. Ironically, the liberal norms guiding the accompanying colonial civilizing projects foregrounded the idea of freedom of religion and the protection of minorities. In so doing, religious identity, imagined now in sectarian terms, became a site for the intervention of the imperial hegemon as the guarantor of religious liberty and as a safeguard for religious minorities. But sectarianism also played an important role in various anti-colonial nationalist movements across the region. Likewise, it had a role in state-building and in the construction of citizenship regimes in post-colonial states across the region. Despite this complicated history, the present dispensation of sectarian discourse in the MENA is unprecedented in scope. It has become ubiquitous in ways unimaginable even twenty-five years ago. It headlines the political maneuvering of regional actors from Iraqi politicians to the Saudi royal family to the Israeli, Bahraini and Syrian governments to say nothing of the Islamic State which celebrated its sectarianism. My paper traces the current irruption of sectarian discourses across the region to the American-led Iraq invasion and its aftermath.