The Damascene Blog

The Real Danger Lies Within

I am no fan of the pro-Israel Thomas Freidman. However, his recent article in the New York Times, entitled “Martin Luther Al-King?” caught my attention:

"It's hard to know what's more disturbing: The barbaric sectarian murders by Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq or the deafening silence with which these mass murders are received in the Muslim world. How could it be that Danish cartoons of Muhammad led to mass violent protests, while unspeakable violence by Muslims against Muslims in Iraq every day evokes about as much reaction in the Arab-Muslim world as the weather report? Where is the Muslim Martin Luther King? Where is the "Million Muslim March" under the banner: "No Shiites, No Sunnis: We are all children of the Prophet Muhammad."

I can logically understand the lack of protest when Muslims kill Americans in Iraq. We're seen as occupiers by many. But I can't understand how the mass slaughter of 70 Baghdad college students last week by Sunni suicide bombers or the blowing up of a Shiite mosque on the first day of Ramadan in 2005 evoke so little response. Every day it's 100 more. I raise this question because the only hope left for Iraq — if there is any — is not in a U.S. counterinsurgency strategy. That may be necessary, but without a Muslim counternihilism strategy that delegitimizes the mass murder of Muslims by Muslims, there is no hope for decent politics there. It takes a village, and right now the Muslim village is mute. It has no moral voice when it comes to its own."

The sectarian civil war in Iraq poses a serious threat not only to the unity of every Arab and Islamic nation, but to the future of the Islamic faith itself. This sectarian strife, with its appalling human cost, is much more serious of a threat than the Arab-Israeli conflict, the occupation of Iraqand the American attempts to dominate the Middle East

Some may say that it was the Americans who ignited the flames of sectarianism in Iraq. “Let the Americans sow what they have reaped!” they will argue. But it’s us who are sowing death and hatred! It’s Muslims that are now more divided than ever before and more confused than ever before about what is right and what is wrong. It’s true that the stupid policies that were implemented in Iraq upon its invasion and occupation played a major role in creating today’s ugly sectarian Iraq. However, this does not change the fact that it the responsibility of Iraqis, Arabs and Muslims to identify the seriousness of the situation and work towards a solution.

The solution, in the largest part, lies in the hands of Islamic World’s political and religious leaders. When one sees all this death in Iraq, he’d expect them to unite in condemning the sectarian violence and the wasting innocent lives. Let’s see what’s happening instead:

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia responds to alleged attempts by Shiite Muslims to convert Sunnis. He tells a Kuwaiti newspaper that Sunni Islam will not be penetrated by the Shiites and will remain Islam’s dominant sect:

“We are aware of the dimensions of spreading Shiism and where it has reached. However, we believe that this process will not achieve its goal because the majority of Sunni Muslims will never change their faith. The majority of Muslims seem immune to any attempts by other sects to penetrate Sunnism or diminish its historical power."

In a recent conference about “Dialogue Between Islamic Sects” held in Doha, Qatar, this “hot” issue was on the table, too. In the opening ceremony, the famous Youssef Al-Qardawi declares, in the presence of the Islamic World’s most prominent clerics:

“An Islamic sect is not allowed to spread its beliefs in countries that fully belong to the other sect […] What good would it do you to enter a Sunni country like Egypt, Sudan, Morocco, Algeria or other countries that fully belong to Shafiism and Malikism, and try to convert some individuals to the Shiite sect? You may get 10, 20, 100 or 200 followers but afterwards, you will only cause fitna in the country; the people will hate you and damn you for that”

Al-Qardawi went on to say that most casualties in Iraq are from the Sunni side, and accused the Shiite militias of “trying to empty Baghdad of its Sunni inhabitants.” He placed responsibility of what’s happening in Iraq on the Iran-backed Shiites who have “the government, the army, the powery and money.”

Qardawi’s comments brought on response from Iran's Ayatollah Muhammad Ali Al-Taskhiri, who claimed there are also attempts to convert Shiites to Sunnism in Iran itself.

So instead of our religious leaders taking this opportunity to show Islamic unity against secterianism and terror, this was what we got (according to the media, at least) from a conference on “dialogue between Islamic sects”!

Qardawi and Taskhiri were quoted in Asharq Al-Awsat and Aljazeerah. Go to both links and scroll down through readers’ comments to know how serious the situation is. Surf around the Arabic web space and look for praise and support for the Iraqi “resistance” against Shiites (or Safavids as some hate promoters prefer to call them, using Saddam Hussein's terminology). Even some Arabic blogs are full of similar tones of hatred and sectarianism.

It’s time for those who claim to be our religious leaders and protectors of our faith to take a move. Religious authorities from around the Islamic World should call for a meeting of all prominent Islamic clerics: The Imam of Al-Azhar, the Mufti of Saudi Arabia, the religious leaders of Iraq and Lebanon and popular preachers like Al-Qardawi and Amr Khaled. They should declare, in a loud and clear voice:

Spilling Muslim blood is an unforgivable sin. It’s God, not us, who decide who is a believer and who is an infidel. And He will not forgive a Muslim who kills a civilian (be it a Sunni, Shiite, Christian, Jew, believer or non-believer, American or Israeli) in the name of Islam. All suicide bombers or “resistance fighters” who target civilians will not go to heaven but will rot in hell for eternity. It is our duty as Muslims to unite and rise above sectarian differences. Takfir is a sin and hatred is a sin.

This should be preached in mosques all over the Islamic World. It should be the subject of every Friday sermon, of every religious lesson, on every religious TV channel. Until this happens and takes effect, innocent Muslims will still be fed to the fire which will continue to grow and threaten the future of Islam.

Memories of Auschwitz

A recent TV footage of an Israeli settler harassing her Palestinian neighbor in the West Bank city of Hebron sparked heated controversy in Israel after Yosef Lapid, a Holocaust of survivor and Chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Authority, harshly criticized "the Jewish barbarians in Hebron" and compared the treatment of the city's Palestinian population to that of Jews in pre-Holocaust Europe:

That woman, the one who it turns out is named Yifat Alkobi, the Jewish woman that confronted, cursed, spat on and threatened her Arab neighbor in Hebron, she who is imprisoned in her own home, seemed somehow familiar to me.

Gradually, from the cobwebs of my childhood memories, I dredged up the image of a Hungarian neighbor in Novi Sad, who used to stand at the entrance to her home and curse us every time we went into the street - just like Yifat Alkobi.

When we decide, and rightly so, to never under any circumstances compare the behavior of Jews to that of Nazis, we are forgetting that anti-Semitism only reached its height at Auschwitz. It had existed, was active, frightening, harmful and disgusting - exactly like Alkobi's image - in the years that preceded Auschwitz too. And behind shuttered windows hid terrified Jewish women, exactly like the Arab woman of the Abu-Isha family in Hebron.

It is unthinkable that the memory of Auschwitz should serve as a pretext to ignore the fact that living here among us are Jews that behave toward Palestinians exactly the way that German, Hungarian, Polish and other anti-Semites behaved toward Jews."

Jewish settlement in Hebron started in 1979. About 500 settlers live in the city today among more than 130,000 Palestinians. The city remained under Israeli military occupation until 1997, when Israel handed a large part of it over to the Palestinian Authority, but continued to occupy the the old city center, where 500 settlers and 30,000 Palestinians lived. 1500 Israeli soldiers were stationed there to protect the settlers (a ratio of 3 soldiers for each settler). The continuous harassment of the Arab population by the settlers and the army alike have forced 20,000 people to leave the occupied part of the city. Only 10,000 remain there today. The settlers' notorious history of hate crimes against the Arabs of Hebron include the 1994 massacre of 29 people inside Al-Haram Al-Ibrahimi Mosque at the hands of a Jewish settler, whose grave has become a pilgrimage site for Israeli fanatics since then.

Lapid, of course, came under fierce criticism in Israel for committing the unforgivable sin of comparing Israelis to Nazis. But I wonder if anyone can challenge this comparison after seeing the TV footage or pictures like this, this, this and that?

The Flag at Souk El Hamidieh

Remember the Syrian flag on the giant billboard at the entrance of Souk El Hamidieh? It is a picture of an original that is now kept in… Memphis, Tennessee!

The story goes back to April 17, 2005, when I thought I should mark the National Day by posting a picture of the Syrian flag. A small hand-made flag with uneven stars had been hanging over my desk for more than three years. I took it off the wall, put it on desk, took a picture of it and posted it on the Damascene Blog. Six months later, the picture made it to the entrance of Souk El Hamidieh! During the Lebanon crisis, an advertising company placed a billboard at the Souk’s entrance, showing the President with the flag in the background.

While the flag remains at the Souk's entrance, the original has flown elsewhere. In June 2006, I moved to the US to start my medical training and I took my flag with me. The famous flag that catches the sight of thousands entering Souk El Hamidieh every day, now actually hangs on a wall in a tiny apartment in a place where nobody recognizes it. Above it on the same wall is an inscription in Arabic of my favorite poem by the great Ahmad Shawqi:

My homeland! Were I, in Paradise, to be distracted from you,
From Paradise, my soul would pull me back to you!

 

The Syrian Exodus in Numbers

... without having to refer to statistical reports with six- and seven-digit figures:

Out of my 21 cousins, 5 now live in the US, 2 in the UK, 1 in France, 2 in the UAE, 1 in Saudi Arabia. Only 10 are still in Syria. Out of 19 people who composed my inner circle of friends at Damascus University, 7 now work in the US, 2 in France, 1 in the UK, 1 in Germany and 1 in Japan. 7 remain in Syria. Most of them are planning to leave.

On the Execution of Saddam Hussein

No doubt it was a just end for a horrible dictator. However, for a government that is preaching democracy and justice, the trial and execution of Saddam Hussein should have been carried on in a more professional way.

The trial should have taken a longer time and Saddam should have been tried for other crimes he committed, not only for the killings in Dujail. He also massacred thousands of Iraqis, including Kurds and Sunnis. The fact that he was only tried for the Dujail massacre and the comments we heard on the execution video recording from Iraqi officials while Saddam was standing on the gallows made the whole thing look like Shiites taking revenge. It should have looked like Iraq taking revenge. Not the Iraqi government taking revenge. Not Shiites taking revenge. Not the US taking revenge. This is was a terrible mistake on the background of sectarian civil war in occupied Iraq.

I can find no reason why Saddam was executed on the morning of Eid. The Iraqi government could have waited till after the holidays. Why should the Arab and Islamic world wake up to images of death with sectarian overtones on the morning of its most important holiday? This lacked professionalism, showed no respect for death and no respect for the Islamic holiday and its meanings. That Saddam was a mass murderer does not change this fact. Imagine the Nuremberg executions taking place on Christmas Eve, being filmed and aired into people’s TV sets while they gather around their Christmas trees.

Finally, I wish Saddam was executed in a fully independent, sovereign and free Iraq. It is sad that until his execution, Saddam was held in custody of people who should also face trial for war crimes. If true justice is to come to Iraq, every person who has Iraqi blood on his hands should be tried. This, of course, includes George Bush Sr. and son.