Muslims killing Muslims
Letter To The Editor
Mahmood Elahi, Ottawa, Canada
I am writing with reference to the letter: "Islamic fundamentalism, extremism and the sharia," by Mahfuzur Rahman (July 20).
While referring to the war against non-believers, Mahfuzur Rahman tends to forget that despite 9/11, London and Madrid bombings, the greatest victims of the Muslim extremists are fellow Muslims, especially in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. In fact, there is a bigger war going on between the Sunnis and the Shiites.
-Sunni extremists in Iraq are systematically slaughtering fellow Shia Muslims.
-They have bombed Shiite mosques filled with worshippers during Friday prayers.
-They have attacked schools, hospitals and markets, killing mostly Shiite Muslims.
-Recently, the Sunni extremists destroyed the Golden Mosque at Samarra, one the holiest Shiite shrines.
-Only yesterday (July 19), they bombed the Shia suburb of Mahmoudia, killing 60 and injuring more than 100.
And the slaughter of the Shiite majority by the Sunni minority in Iraq had been going on long before the US-led military invasion. It may be recalled that when after the First Gulf War in 1991, the Shiite majority rose against Saddam's minority Sunni rule, his largely Sunni Republican Guards massacred thousands of Shiite rebels. Although the Sunni minority lost their grip on power after the American invasion of 2003, the Sunni insurgents are systematically killing the Shiites in the name of fighting the coalition forces.
Does the sharia allow killing of the Shiites?
Only a few days ago (July 14), a Sunni suicide bomber blew himself up outside the home of a prominent Pakistani Shiite cleric Allama Hassan Turabi, killing the cleric and bodyguard and triggering a riot in the port city of Karachi. After Turabi's killing, hundreds of Shiite youths attacked Sunni shops and a government bank. Pakistan has always been blighted by attacks blamed on extremist elements among the Sunni and Shia sects of Islam, targeting each other's mosques and religious leaders. In Iraq, the Shiites are now retaliating by bombing Sunni mosques and killing Sunni clerics.
How can the Sunni and Shiite religious fanatics justify killing of fellow Muslims in the name of Islam? Muslims are slaughtering fellow Muslims and then blaming it on America and Israel. It is interesting to note that after the killing of Allama Turabi by a Sunni extremist, hundreds of Shiite youths gathered in front of his house, weeping and chanting slogans against America and Israel, unusual targets of anger in the wake of such acts of violence by Sunni Muslims in Pakistan.
Now the Sunnis and the Shiites in Iraq are killing each other with a viciousness not seen even in the brutal history of Iraq. Can Mahfuzur Rahman explain under what sharia principle Sunnis in Iraq and Pakistan are butchering their fellow Shiite Muslims and vice versa?
http://www.thedailystar.net/2006/07/23/ ... 102101.htm
Muslims killing Muslims
The Muslim civil war
VIEW: The Muslim civil war
- Mai Yamani
Today, ordinary Saudi citizens are glued to Al Jazeera and other Arab satellite TV networks to follow events in Gaza and south Lebanon. They see Arab (not Shiite) blood being shed, with only Hezbollah fighting back. In their eyes, Hezbollah has become a heroic model of resistance. This is causing the Saudi state to deepen the Sunni-Shia schism.
Is the Sunni-Shia divide in the Middle East now deeper than the antagonism between Israel and the Arabs?
You might think so given the response of some Arab governments to Hezbollah’s decision to attack Israel. Even as Israeli bombs fell on Beirut and Tyre, Saudi Arabia, perhaps the most conservative Arab Muslim state of all, openly condemned the actions of the Shia Hezbollah in instigating conflict with Israel. Never before in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict has a state that considers itself a leader of the Arab Muslim peoples backed Israel so openly. Moreover, Saudi Arabia’s breach with Hezbollah is not a one-time occurrence. Egypt and Jordan have also roundly condemned Hezbollah and its leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, for their adventurism.
What is behind this stunning development?
-Are we seeing a fundamental shift in relations between Arab nationalism and Islamic sectarianism?
-Is Saudi Arabia’s Sunni government more concerned and frightened by Shia Islam than it is committed to Arab unity and the Palestinian cause?
Arab denunciations of Hezbollah suggest that the Muslim sectarian divide, already evident in the daily violence in Iraq, is deepening and intensifying across the Middle East. President George W Bush’s desire to shatter the Arab world’s frozen societies was meant to pit the forces of modernisation against the traditional elements in Arab and Islamic societies. Instead, he appears to have unleashed the region’s most atavistic forces. Opening this Pandora’s Box may have ushered in a new and even uglier era of generalised violence, perhaps what can only be called a “Muslim Civil War”.
The Shia-Sunni divide has existed from the dawn of Islam, but the geographical and ethnic isolation of non-Arab Shiite Iran, together with Sunni Arab countries’ dominance of their Shia minorities, mostly kept this rivalry in the background. These tensions further receded in the tide of the “Islamisation” created by the Iranian revolution, for in its wake Arabs’ sectarian identity as Sunni was pushed further into the background as a generalised “Islamic” assertiveness appeared.
That changed when Al Qaeda, a Sunni terrorist force that draws heavily on Saudi Wahabbi ideology and personnel, launched its attacks on America in September 2001. A specifically Sunni brand of militant Islam was now on the march. When the United States initiated wars on both the Sunni Taliban in Afghanistan and the Sunni Iraqi regime, this new radical Sunni strain became even more emboldened.
-The region’s newly assertive Sunni Arabs perceive Israel and the West as being only one threat, the other comprising the so-called “Shia crescent” - the arc of land extending from Lebanon to Iran through Syria and Iraq that is inhabited by the allegedly heretical Shia.
Saudi Arabia’s rulers, as custodians of the Muslim faith’s holiest places in Mecca and Medina, perhaps feel this threat most keenly. In Sunni eyes, the Shia not only dominate the oil-rich areas of Iran, Iraq, and the eastern region of Saudi Arabia, but are - through the actions of Hezbollah - attempting to usurp the role of “protector” of the central dream of all Arabs, the Palestinian cause.
It is because the Saudi royal family derives its legitimacy from a strict form of Sunni Islam and doubts the loyalty of its Shia population that the Kingdom has turned on Hezbollah. Ironically, it is America, Saudi Arabia’s long-time protector, which made Shia empowerment possible by overthrowing Saddam Hussein and bringing Shiite parties to power in Iraq. The Bush administration seems to recognise what it has done; as the Shia arc rises in the east of the Arab Muslim world, the US is attempting to strengthen its protection of the Sunni arc - Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia - in the region’s west. Israel, the once implacable enemy of the Arab cause, now seems to be slotted into this defensive structure. But such a defensive posture is bound to be unstable, due to pan-Arab feelings.
Following the Kingdom’s official denunciation of Hezbollah, the Saudi state called on its official Wahhabi clerics to issue fatwas condemning Hezbollah as Shiite deviants and heretics.
Such condemnations can only sharpen sectarian divisions within Saudi Arabia and the region. As these antagonisms deepen, will the Sunni regimes come to believe that they need their own Hezbollah to fight in their corner? If that is what they conclude, they need not look far, for many such fighters have already have been trained - by Al Qaeda.
-PS Mai Yamani’s most recent book is ‘Cradle of Islam’. She is a research fellow at Chatham House, London
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.as ... 2006_pg3_6
- Mai Yamani
Today, ordinary Saudi citizens are glued to Al Jazeera and other Arab satellite TV networks to follow events in Gaza and south Lebanon. They see Arab (not Shiite) blood being shed, with only Hezbollah fighting back. In their eyes, Hezbollah has become a heroic model of resistance. This is causing the Saudi state to deepen the Sunni-Shia schism.
Is the Sunni-Shia divide in the Middle East now deeper than the antagonism between Israel and the Arabs?
You might think so given the response of some Arab governments to Hezbollah’s decision to attack Israel. Even as Israeli bombs fell on Beirut and Tyre, Saudi Arabia, perhaps the most conservative Arab Muslim state of all, openly condemned the actions of the Shia Hezbollah in instigating conflict with Israel. Never before in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict has a state that considers itself a leader of the Arab Muslim peoples backed Israel so openly. Moreover, Saudi Arabia’s breach with Hezbollah is not a one-time occurrence. Egypt and Jordan have also roundly condemned Hezbollah and its leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, for their adventurism.
What is behind this stunning development?
-Are we seeing a fundamental shift in relations between Arab nationalism and Islamic sectarianism?
-Is Saudi Arabia’s Sunni government more concerned and frightened by Shia Islam than it is committed to Arab unity and the Palestinian cause?
Arab denunciations of Hezbollah suggest that the Muslim sectarian divide, already evident in the daily violence in Iraq, is deepening and intensifying across the Middle East. President George W Bush’s desire to shatter the Arab world’s frozen societies was meant to pit the forces of modernisation against the traditional elements in Arab and Islamic societies. Instead, he appears to have unleashed the region’s most atavistic forces. Opening this Pandora’s Box may have ushered in a new and even uglier era of generalised violence, perhaps what can only be called a “Muslim Civil War”.
The Shia-Sunni divide has existed from the dawn of Islam, but the geographical and ethnic isolation of non-Arab Shiite Iran, together with Sunni Arab countries’ dominance of their Shia minorities, mostly kept this rivalry in the background. These tensions further receded in the tide of the “Islamisation” created by the Iranian revolution, for in its wake Arabs’ sectarian identity as Sunni was pushed further into the background as a generalised “Islamic” assertiveness appeared.
That changed when Al Qaeda, a Sunni terrorist force that draws heavily on Saudi Wahabbi ideology and personnel, launched its attacks on America in September 2001. A specifically Sunni brand of militant Islam was now on the march. When the United States initiated wars on both the Sunni Taliban in Afghanistan and the Sunni Iraqi regime, this new radical Sunni strain became even more emboldened.
-The region’s newly assertive Sunni Arabs perceive Israel and the West as being only one threat, the other comprising the so-called “Shia crescent” - the arc of land extending from Lebanon to Iran through Syria and Iraq that is inhabited by the allegedly heretical Shia.
Saudi Arabia’s rulers, as custodians of the Muslim faith’s holiest places in Mecca and Medina, perhaps feel this threat most keenly. In Sunni eyes, the Shia not only dominate the oil-rich areas of Iran, Iraq, and the eastern region of Saudi Arabia, but are - through the actions of Hezbollah - attempting to usurp the role of “protector” of the central dream of all Arabs, the Palestinian cause.
It is because the Saudi royal family derives its legitimacy from a strict form of Sunni Islam and doubts the loyalty of its Shia population that the Kingdom has turned on Hezbollah. Ironically, it is America, Saudi Arabia’s long-time protector, which made Shia empowerment possible by overthrowing Saddam Hussein and bringing Shiite parties to power in Iraq. The Bush administration seems to recognise what it has done; as the Shia arc rises in the east of the Arab Muslim world, the US is attempting to strengthen its protection of the Sunni arc - Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia - in the region’s west. Israel, the once implacable enemy of the Arab cause, now seems to be slotted into this defensive structure. But such a defensive posture is bound to be unstable, due to pan-Arab feelings.
Following the Kingdom’s official denunciation of Hezbollah, the Saudi state called on its official Wahhabi clerics to issue fatwas condemning Hezbollah as Shiite deviants and heretics.
Such condemnations can only sharpen sectarian divisions within Saudi Arabia and the region. As these antagonisms deepen, will the Sunni regimes come to believe that they need their own Hezbollah to fight in their corner? If that is what they conclude, they need not look far, for many such fighters have already have been trained - by Al Qaeda.
-PS Mai Yamani’s most recent book is ‘Cradle of Islam’. She is a research fellow at Chatham House, London
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.as ... 2006_pg3_6
EDITORIAL:How we deny sectarianism and then pay for it
Monday, September 04, 2006
Eleven Pakistani pilgrims to Karbala have been brutally murdered by sectarian thugs in Iraq. The Pakistanis and three Indians, all male, were travelling to holy Shia sites in Iraq on Thursday when they were attacked in Anbar province, heartland of the Sunni insurgency. The attackers first separated the 14 men from women and children, then bound their hands and shot them in the head at point blank range. Pakistan has condemned the killings and has belatedly warned its citizens against travelling to Iraq. But those who deny that sectarianism exists everywhere in the Muslim world and pin the current death toll of nearly a thousand a month in Iraq on the Americans should take pause.
In Pakistan violent sectarianism is alive and kicking even though the media, the government and the political parties are mostly in denial about its consequences. The same day, however, we heard the news that an anti-terrorism court (ATC) in Peshawar sent the owners of four video shops to jail after charging them with selling CDs and cassettes containing anti-Shia speeches by “leaders of the banned group Sipah-e-Sahaba”. Significantly, it was not only the Sipah-e-Sahaba men that were guilty but also a leader of the Tablighi Jamaat whose congregations in Lahore have been attended in the past by our presidents and chief ministers. Another offender mentioned in the FIR was the infamous Mufti Munir Shakir who created a civil war-like situation in Khyber Agency not long ago.
Nothing kills Muslims like sectarianism and what is happening in Iraq is being concealed behind much misplaced hand-wringing over civil war. The man who plunged the country into this hell, Abu Musaab Zarqawi, went there from Pakistan, primed with sectarian politics. And Pakistan has been steadily killing its religious leaders and other prominent citizens since 1986 when the three major Deobandi seminaries in Karachi, Lahore and Nowshehra issued fatwas apostatising the Shia community. Meanwhile, the Grand Ayatollah Sistani of Iraq has again taken to his diplomatic quietism in the face of blood-thirsty Shia gang-leaders like Muqtada al Sadr and Mahmoud Hassani heading the sectarian war against the equally murderous Sunni revivalists aided and abetted by Shia-hating Arab infiltrators from Iraq’s neighbouring states.
In Pakistan the anti-Soviet jihad was essentially anti-Shia in origin and ideology but no one paid any attention to this fact. Ruling Sunni establishments in Pakistan, it may be recalled, had prepared “nation building” textbooks after 1947 in which most of the “great men” were known to have been Shia-baiters. The politicians were ignorant. The clerics who knew kept quiet. Today Pakistan is ripe for the plucking because of its internal strife, but the trend is to deny rather than accept the disease and rectify it. Had sectarianism been admitted and its proponents punished, the 11 Pakistanis who died in Iraq wouldn’t have gone there. Let us give you an example of how everyone reacts to sectarian violence in Pakistan. This case study pertains to the ashura killings of the Hazaras in Quetta in 2004; and curiously the “politics” of Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Sistani is indirectly involved:
->A well-known columnist wrote in Jang (March 5, 2004) that he was greatly uplifted (taza dam kar diya) when he heard the Iraqi Shia saying that the death of 200 of them in Iraq on ashura was not the work of Muslims (read Sunnis) because no Muslim could do such a thing. The Shia in Iraq instead said that the evil deed was done by someone else (kissi aur ka hath). The columnist then said that the Shia of Pakistan should develop the same kind of thinking (issi soch ki zarurat hai) about the ashura massacre of Quetta, which killed nearly 50 Shias.
->Another influential columnist wrote that the ashura massacre in Quetta was just like the massacre in Baghdad and Karbala and the Muslims were convinced that it was not done by the Muslims themselves. In present times, when America had unleashed its aggression on the Muslims, no Muslim group could think of killing another Muslim, he argued, concluding that in the case of the Quetta massacre another country (read India) could have joined America in committing the evil deed and those who investigate the massacre should keep the idea of a foreign hand (beruni hath) in mind.
->Yet another columnist wrote that a Foreign Office spokesman in Islamabad had stated that Indian consulate in Afghanistan was involved in the ashura massacre in Quetta. In the Senate the opposition members thought that it was a conspiracy hatched by a big foreign power. (All these columns were published on the same day.)
Allama Hassan Turabi, a highly respected Shia leader representing his community in the Muttahidda Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), was killed in July this year by a suicide bomber brainwashed by a Deobandi seminary in Karachi, which the police “will not name for reasons of security”. Turabi, who had been attacked many times earlier, had just returned from a rally held by the MMA to condemn America and Israel for invading Lebanon. The party that began its career by demanding the apostatisation of the Shia community — Sipah-e-Sahaba — is alive and kicking; it held a grand rally in Islamabad two months ago, as if to put the Shia community on notice. There are cities in Pakistan — Gilgit, Parachinar, Jhang, Karachi, Hangu, Kohat — where a sectarian war can flare up any moment.
The act of “excluding” is unfortunately the trend in all Muslim states basing themselves on sharia. Some communities are excluded as full Muslim citizens with “popular consensus”, as if it were part of the “bonding” the population needs to become a nation. After that, other communities are threatened as potentially “excludable” and the process goes on till the state is overwhelmed by a mercy-killing implosion. We should recall that the “caliphate” of Mullah Umar in Afghanistan was nourished on the blood of the Hazaras. Pakistan should not draw its nourishment from the same source. Instead it should take concrete steps to resist the hardline clerics who want to live in the past and settle scores outstanding from ancient times. *
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.as ... 2006_pg3_1
Monday, September 04, 2006
Eleven Pakistani pilgrims to Karbala have been brutally murdered by sectarian thugs in Iraq. The Pakistanis and three Indians, all male, were travelling to holy Shia sites in Iraq on Thursday when they were attacked in Anbar province, heartland of the Sunni insurgency. The attackers first separated the 14 men from women and children, then bound their hands and shot them in the head at point blank range. Pakistan has condemned the killings and has belatedly warned its citizens against travelling to Iraq. But those who deny that sectarianism exists everywhere in the Muslim world and pin the current death toll of nearly a thousand a month in Iraq on the Americans should take pause.
In Pakistan violent sectarianism is alive and kicking even though the media, the government and the political parties are mostly in denial about its consequences. The same day, however, we heard the news that an anti-terrorism court (ATC) in Peshawar sent the owners of four video shops to jail after charging them with selling CDs and cassettes containing anti-Shia speeches by “leaders of the banned group Sipah-e-Sahaba”. Significantly, it was not only the Sipah-e-Sahaba men that were guilty but also a leader of the Tablighi Jamaat whose congregations in Lahore have been attended in the past by our presidents and chief ministers. Another offender mentioned in the FIR was the infamous Mufti Munir Shakir who created a civil war-like situation in Khyber Agency not long ago.
Nothing kills Muslims like sectarianism and what is happening in Iraq is being concealed behind much misplaced hand-wringing over civil war. The man who plunged the country into this hell, Abu Musaab Zarqawi, went there from Pakistan, primed with sectarian politics. And Pakistan has been steadily killing its religious leaders and other prominent citizens since 1986 when the three major Deobandi seminaries in Karachi, Lahore and Nowshehra issued fatwas apostatising the Shia community. Meanwhile, the Grand Ayatollah Sistani of Iraq has again taken to his diplomatic quietism in the face of blood-thirsty Shia gang-leaders like Muqtada al Sadr and Mahmoud Hassani heading the sectarian war against the equally murderous Sunni revivalists aided and abetted by Shia-hating Arab infiltrators from Iraq’s neighbouring states.
In Pakistan the anti-Soviet jihad was essentially anti-Shia in origin and ideology but no one paid any attention to this fact. Ruling Sunni establishments in Pakistan, it may be recalled, had prepared “nation building” textbooks after 1947 in which most of the “great men” were known to have been Shia-baiters. The politicians were ignorant. The clerics who knew kept quiet. Today Pakistan is ripe for the plucking because of its internal strife, but the trend is to deny rather than accept the disease and rectify it. Had sectarianism been admitted and its proponents punished, the 11 Pakistanis who died in Iraq wouldn’t have gone there. Let us give you an example of how everyone reacts to sectarian violence in Pakistan. This case study pertains to the ashura killings of the Hazaras in Quetta in 2004; and curiously the “politics” of Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Sistani is indirectly involved:
->A well-known columnist wrote in Jang (March 5, 2004) that he was greatly uplifted (taza dam kar diya) when he heard the Iraqi Shia saying that the death of 200 of them in Iraq on ashura was not the work of Muslims (read Sunnis) because no Muslim could do such a thing. The Shia in Iraq instead said that the evil deed was done by someone else (kissi aur ka hath). The columnist then said that the Shia of Pakistan should develop the same kind of thinking (issi soch ki zarurat hai) about the ashura massacre of Quetta, which killed nearly 50 Shias.
->Another influential columnist wrote that the ashura massacre in Quetta was just like the massacre in Baghdad and Karbala and the Muslims were convinced that it was not done by the Muslims themselves. In present times, when America had unleashed its aggression on the Muslims, no Muslim group could think of killing another Muslim, he argued, concluding that in the case of the Quetta massacre another country (read India) could have joined America in committing the evil deed and those who investigate the massacre should keep the idea of a foreign hand (beruni hath) in mind.
->Yet another columnist wrote that a Foreign Office spokesman in Islamabad had stated that Indian consulate in Afghanistan was involved in the ashura massacre in Quetta. In the Senate the opposition members thought that it was a conspiracy hatched by a big foreign power. (All these columns were published on the same day.)
Allama Hassan Turabi, a highly respected Shia leader representing his community in the Muttahidda Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), was killed in July this year by a suicide bomber brainwashed by a Deobandi seminary in Karachi, which the police “will not name for reasons of security”. Turabi, who had been attacked many times earlier, had just returned from a rally held by the MMA to condemn America and Israel for invading Lebanon. The party that began its career by demanding the apostatisation of the Shia community — Sipah-e-Sahaba — is alive and kicking; it held a grand rally in Islamabad two months ago, as if to put the Shia community on notice. There are cities in Pakistan — Gilgit, Parachinar, Jhang, Karachi, Hangu, Kohat — where a sectarian war can flare up any moment.
The act of “excluding” is unfortunately the trend in all Muslim states basing themselves on sharia. Some communities are excluded as full Muslim citizens with “popular consensus”, as if it were part of the “bonding” the population needs to become a nation. After that, other communities are threatened as potentially “excludable” and the process goes on till the state is overwhelmed by a mercy-killing implosion. We should recall that the “caliphate” of Mullah Umar in Afghanistan was nourished on the blood of the Hazaras. Pakistan should not draw its nourishment from the same source. Instead it should take concrete steps to resist the hardline clerics who want to live in the past and settle scores outstanding from ancient times. *
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.as ... 2006_pg3_1
Ismailis along with other islamic minorities and non-islamic communities face the constant harassment aimed at excluding them from the others.
1)
The act of “excluding” is unfortunately the trend in all Muslim states basing themselves on sharia. Some communities are excluded as full Muslim citizens with “popular consensus”, as if it were part of the “bonding” the population needs to become a nation.
2) After that, other communities are threatened as potentially “excludable” and the process goes on till the state is overwhelmed by a mercy-killing implosion.
3) We should recall that the “caliphate” of Mullah Umar in Afghanistan was nourished on the blood of the Hazaras. Pakistan should not draw its nourishment from the same source. Instead it should take concrete steps to resist the hardline clerics who want to live in the past and settle scores outstanding from ancient times.
And, this:
4) Pakistan has been steadily killing its religious leaders and other prominent citizens since 1986 when the three major Deobandi seminaries in Karachi, Lahore and Nowshehra issued fatwas apostatising the Shia community.
It was not an isolated event when not too long ago and even today ismailis were/are flooded with vehemently anti ismaili and anti- Imam literature delivered to your e-mail and countless web-sites to steer us to an ideology where every thing taught is based on "compulsion" and every penalty per "their Immutable Sharia/interpretations" results in taking off a "life" - all in the name of Allah who is supposed to be all merciful. Is there any Sharia law that reflects & proves Allah as all merciful?
->If not, and that is the truth then, what & who do they worship?
When all religious acts are anti-human civility & dignity means that it (particular Madzhabs) has run its course and is no longer relevant. Only way falsehood can be kept alive and going is thru force & coercion, i.e.:
-> Kill those who leave/Reject Islam.
-> Kill those who blaspheme or criticize Islam, Quran, Hadiths, Companions, wives of the prophet, etc, etc.
Free expression, Pluralism, Human Rights are all considered conspiracies against Islam.