The past week has been one of the deadliest in Afghanistan’s eventful history. It was particularly bloody even by the tragic standards set in the country over the years. More than 200 people were killed in a series of attacks attributed to the Taliban and the Daesh or Isil terrorists.
What made these attacks even more shameful is the fact that they once again targeted innocent bystanders and people who were in communion with their God.
At least 56 people died in a suicide attack claimed by Isil on the Imam Zaman mosque in Kabul while another attack on a Sunni mosque in the central province of Ghor last Friday killed 33 worshippers.
According to reports, the coward fired at worshippers at the Kabul mosque when they were in ‘sajda’ – the final act of prostrating – before blowing himself up. It still beats me how anyone, let alone a believer, can bring himself to target people inside a House of God. But mosques and other places of worship have long been fair game in this cynical, zero-sum war of attrition in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
While the Afghan Taliban’s reputation of intolerance of religious minorities is perhaps well deserved and justified, Pakistan has been home to many such groups whose very raison d’être has been hatred and open hostility for religious minorities, including Shia Muslims, Ahmadis, Hindus and Christians.
This despite the fact that Pakistan’s founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, dreamed of a modern and moderate country where citizens – Muslims, Hindus and Christians – were free to worship whoever they liked, as he emphasised in his address to the Constituent Assembly days ahead of Pakistan’s creation.
However, this dream of Quaid-e-Azam has arguably turned into a recurring nightmare for its minorities. The scourge of sectarian violence has been eating into the vitals of Pakistani society, once known for its progressive and prosperous Muslims. This notwithstanding the leading role the Shia community has historically played in the creation of Pakistan and in its subsequent progress.
Growing up in Hyderabad, the last bastion of Muslim culture in India, one never quite knew and understood that Sunnis and Shias were somehow two different sects and communities – despite the fact that the state, ruled by the Qutub Shahi rulers and the Nizams not long ago, has been home to a large and affluent Shia community.
Over the years, Sunnis and Shias have so heavily mingled with each other in this part of the world that they seldom view one another as ‘us versus them’. So some of our closest friends and teachers happened to be Shia. Some of the biggest names in Urdu literature, poetry and Indian cinema come from the same sect, not that the fact ever mattered or was worth mentioning.
Although until the 1990s we used to have frequent bouts of Hindu-Muslim violence and tensions, there had never been any unpleasantness in Sunni-Shia relations. Unlike Lucknow, Hyderabad thankfully never witnessed any sectarian conflict
In fact, one had never been made conscious of one’s sectarian identity until one arrived in the Middle East. Or, to be more precise, until Iraq happened to us!
Which is perhaps why I still find it rather difficult to comprehend the fact that Sunnis and Shias can detest each other so much that they can slaughter each other, as has been the case in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere.
I have been a trenchant critic of the Iraq war and all that has taken place over the past decade in the name of democracy and freedom. But the Shia and Sunni leaders of Iraq also have played a role in perpetuating the misery of the Iraqi people by unleashing this genie of the most destructive sectarianism on the country. They legitimised the occupation and justified crimes against humanity by joining the free-for-all sectarian bloodletting.
More alarmingly, the deadly conflict between Islam’s two sects has not just spilt over beyond Iraq’s borders into neighbouring countries like Syria and Lebanon, it now threatens the entire Islamic world. Sunnis and Shias live side by side all over the world, from Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon and Bahrain on the one hand to Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan on the other.
It has already destroyed Iraq and Syria, the oldest centres of civilisations, including their fabled cities like Baghdad and Aleppo, beyond recognition. Those who somehow survived the most pointless and destructive US invasion of Iraq have been brought down by the sectarian monster.
The Syrian conflict has claimed half a million lives and driven out more than half of the country’s population. Look at the endless tragedy of the Yemen, again one of the oldest civilisations of the world and again a victim of sectarian fratricide.
Do we even realise that if this conflict is globalised, which it already nearly is, the possible consequences for the Muslim world – already saddled with myriad problems and contradictions – are too frightening to even imagine.
Do we want that to happen? How long will we continue to be used and exploited as pawns in the hands of the global forces of darkness? When will we wake up to the reality that over and above our identity as Sunnis or Shias, we are Muslims and human beings first?
How can we slaughter each other with impunity over an academic debate that is as old as Islam and that too in the name of a faith that stands for peace, mercy and forgiveness? Where are the protesting faithful and their leaders? And pray, what are we fighting over? Both Shias and Sunnis love and revere the Prophet (pbuh) and his noble descendants. So what is the justification and point of this conflict?
Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, did not bring Sunni or Shia Islam to us. He brought Islam to us – pure and simple. And Islam does not preach, accept or condone the killing of innocents, whatever their sect or faith. The blood that the assorted terrorists and militias have been shedding in Syria, Iraq and Pakistan and Afghanistan daily is not Sunni blood or Shia blood. It is Muslim blood. It is the blood of innocents.
Remember what the Messenger of Islam (pbuh) said about killing of innocents. Standing before the Kaaba in Makkah, he said: “O you sacred Kaaba, the blood of a human being is more sacred than you.”
It is high time governments, scholars and opinion leaders across the Islamic world recognised that religious bigotry and sectarianism have emerged as a serious challenge to Muslim societies everywhere.
For far too long have irresponsible and self-serving clerics, politicians and the media on both sides fanned the flames of sectarian hatred and intolerance, with catastrophic consequences. For far too long has hate been peddled from the pulpit and no one paid any attention to the havoc it played with young and impressionable minds. It is time to act. It is time to drain the swamp of sectarian hatred.
The writer is an award-winning journalist.
Email: aijaz.syedhotmail.com