In the article in Time magazine entitled “Sunnis vs. Shi’ites: Why they hate each other; what’s really driving the civil war that’s tearing the Middle East apart”, Bobby Ghosh talks about the coming civil war in Iraq and its way to spread into the whole Middle East. It’s honestly an article that suffers from the lack of information where you can see the horrible reading of an eastern society by a westerner.
When I see a title like this that presents a pretty huge issue in Iraq and the Middle East, which gives me the sense of how cheap this magazine is where any writer picks up a big topic to talk about without any well done research and information.
Then, you notice the picture on the cover that suggests two covered faces, one of them the Sunni and the other is the Shi’ite. Being an Iraqi, this picture really makes me laugh because both of the faces suggest Sunni faces; both of them used head covers which are stylishly Sunni. Because the Shi’ites are more than the Sunnis in Iraq, they didn’t choose to try to get control over Iraq by suicide bombings but by organized armies. Therefore, Shi’ites are too powerful to hide behind a cover! Even the Shi’ite Iranians who’s against the recent Iranian system “Halq (or the creation)” don’t cover their faces; covering faces is a very Sunni thing that is used even in the other Sunni countries like Palestine.
In the first page of the article, the writer chooses several good pictures that present both Sunni and Shi’ite families even though I bet that none of the American readers will be able to tell who’s the Sunni and who’s the Shi’ite, even the writer himself. But I like the pictures because I feel they are saying that all of them are humans, they are just Iraqis. But at the same time, putting the pictures of normal people suggests all Iraqi people are involved in this religious war. While in fact, this war is all about politics; each rich Iraqi who lived in Iran or anywhere else came to Iraq after the fall down and decided to have an army or to fight against the Americans because he thinks he’s the most suffered Iraqi ever and that his ideology or religion is the right one.
Going back to the article itself, this article isn’t special in any way; just another article that views an American who relates Iraq to the American ambitions and shamelessly puts the blame on the Shi’ites and Sunnis for the American failure in Iraq, as if America was the beloved Santa Claus! And then he goes on giving the evidences of how do Shi’ites and Sunnis hate each other which are totally false examples like quoting a sentence by a Sunni leader: “If I see a Shi’ite child about to drown in the Tigris now, I will not reach my hand out to save him”. It’s true that the leaders of the Shi’ites and Sunnis hate each other and would like to burn each other but it’s not true that when the Shi’ites were drowning, the Sunnis were happy. Iraq is a country of multiculturalism that lasted for thousands of years where Jews, Christens, Muslims, Sabians, Yazidians and other seventeen religions and nations lived together in one neighborhood. So a four-year-old war and a thirty five-year-old dictatorship can’t change a whole country because they used to live in this way under the dictatorship marrying each other and working with each other.
Moreover, the part where the writer was giving six examples on the war between Iraqi Muslims like names, prayer, mosques, homes, accents, and cars, he was telling differences not examples of hate. Shi’ites have their own sacred historical characters. Therefore, they have their own names that were named after the names of their religious characters. The same thing goes with the Sunnis. And that goes with all other aspects, those differences existed a long time ago and it has never been a problem in the Iraqi society. Also, the Shi’ite beliefs are totally different than the Sunni ones except the main ones like believing in prophet Mohammed and Quran and those differences made the Shi’ites in another position from a religious aspect. Otherwise, things like homes, cars and accents have nothing to do with Iraqis. Homes and cars are related to the class this or that Iraqi belongs to and the accents go according to the cities and regions not to the sects.
On the other hand, I found that the writer had a lot of mistakes that can not be forgiven like saying that Shi’ites are minority in Lebanon and that Syria started to be led by a small Shi’ite suspect called Alawites! Shi’ites are the majority of Muslims in Lebanon and this small group is influenced by the Shi’ite system of beliefs, however, they are totally different; they don’t believe in Mohammed but Imam Ali as the soul of God! Does that look like Islam or Shi’ism?.
Then, the writer talked about the Shi’ites under Saddam’s regime. It’s true that they really suffered but they suffered as much as other Iraqis did. Their leaders who tried to revolt were hardly punished and tortured as much as the other religious and Ideological Iraqi leaders had. Communists, some Ba’athists who don’t agree with Saddam, Jews, Kurds, Shi’ites, Sunnis all suffered from Saddam. However, the writer started his point about the history of Shi’ites under Saddam regime by saying that they liked him at the beginning because he treated them as equal as others.
Moreover, the writer quoted a lot of sentences taken from some reports where the people were supporting his point about this coming war in Iraq and how people are involved in it. But by the end of the article, he said that people said that they will talk if their names will be changed even though we have a big similarity of names in Iraq which will not let any one know them and therefore hurt them; there are millions of small kids called Hussein or Ali! Saying so, I really suspect the fact that there’s someone who really talked to the reporters!
In some particular paragraphs, the writer tried to show his sympathy towards Iraqis saying: “Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have lost loved ones, jobs, homes, occasionally entire neighborhoods- and then into the wider society”. It’s true that this religious war did cost us a lot but it didn’t cost us as much as being occupied by Americans cost us at least 620,000 Iraqis according to the last statistics done by the U.N. without counting those people who were tortured till death in the secrets prisons like Abu Ghrib. Once, an Iraqi Shi’ite Parliament member said: “If America with all its millions of supplied troops wanted to stop the war in Iraq, the war would end quickly. But for the politicians, oil is more important than lives”. That’s why my younger brother (five-years-old) suggested once that we give Americans money so they will leave our country!
It’s true that we have some people who are involved in this war because the leaders killed one of their family members and made them assume that someone from the other sect did so. It’s true that we have some fanatic religious places like Al- Thwara which is an area that was built up by our previous beloved president Abdulkareem Qassim who was killed by Ba’athists, for the homeless people in Baghdad and the area was named after him but changed to Al- Thwara (The revolution) and then to the Al- Sader area because all of the people in this area are Shi’ites and support Moqtada. They are just simple people who love Moqtada because they love his uncle who was a revolutionary killed by Saddam after a long torture. It’s true that we have areas like Falwja that doesn’t like Shi’ites because they were working for the intelligent agency in Saddam’s time and the downfall of Saddam left them with nothing except being hated by the whole Iraqi Society. But those examples are just a part of a larger picture that has a lot of other positive examples.
Another true point that was mentioned is the Iranian interfere in Iraq. Believe it or not, some Iraqis from both sects wait the day to see America invading Iran where they can see America too busy with Iran and Iran paying for its interfering in Iraq. Iran supports the Shi’ites in Iraq just to make America too busy with the horrific situation in Iraq so to keep it away from Iran till they have their nuclear weapons ready to go. But describing Iran as the enemy of Arabs is such a stupid wording because Iran is just the enemy of Sunnis but not Arabs, not after the end of the Iraqi-Iranian war (1980-1988).
About the examples the writer mentioned to explain this Shi’ite domination in Iraq, I think we have to talk more about the right definition of democracy. People have to know that democracy isn’t a good thing sometimes when it comes to a country that’s filled with many ethnicities, nations, sects, and religions. That’s why Shi’ites took control over Iraq because Muslims are the majority in Iraq and Shi’ites are the majority of Muslims in Iraq (67% of the Muslim population). Otherwise, we can make democracy work out by putting people who just came out of the darkness of a thirty five-year-old dictatorship, under the hands that can educate them and politically make them aware of what’s going on. So next time, they will not elect some deceiving leaders according to their sects. I wish that Iraqis will not reach the stage where they kill millions of each others and build up another Berlin wall between them, if so, that’s not hopeless because it suggests that someone will definitely break this wall down.
To conclude, I categorize this article as one of the most pathetic articles I’ve ever read; it’s an article that doesn’t belong to the credible type of writing. It’s another American failure to show the true reality in another occupied country by Santa Claus.
