AYOON WA AZAN (MAY GOD BATTLE THEM)
Dar El Hayat
ihad el-Khazen
Thu, 20 August 2009J
When we were young at school in Beirut, we could not tell who was a
Muslim and who was a Christian, save for the students named Muhammad or
Hanna. Nowadays, it is no longer enough to know who is Muslim and who
is Christian, but we must also know who is a Sunni and who is a Shiite.
What Lebanon has suffered from after the fighting broke out in 1975
and in the next two decades that followed is now afflicting Iraq,
and in a manner proportional to the country’s size in comparison to
Lebanon. This happened as the murderous terrorism that accompanied
the resistance to the American occupation in Iraq, began to stoke
sectarian strife. True that it has receded recently, but it has now
returned in full and frightening force, and all I can say in this
regard is God save us.
When I was little, I used to hear people say "sedition is dormant so
may God damn whoever dares awaken it". This expression then came back
to my recollection when I received a letter from Mustafa Al-Sehil in
Jeddah, through the e-mail address of colleague Jamil Theyabi.
Mustafa said in his message that the clash of civilizations may
go beyond being between the West and the Muslims, to what is more
sinister, "and to what threatens to cause a major rift within the
Arabs, and between Christianity and Islam. This is because the
Christian Life satellite channel started broadcasting a program in
which the Prophet of Mercy Mohammed (Peace Be Upon Him) is attacked,
all throughout the day". He [Mustafa] fears that there might be a
seditious intent behind this, and that there must be someone funding
this sedition within a dark and yet unknown scheme.
I admit that I did not know anything about this station, not even
its name. I tried to find it within my network of ground and space
channels but did not succeed; there must be around 999 stations,
and looking for one of them is like looking for a needle in a haystack.
In any case, the attack on another religion is absolutely unacceptable,
and will eventually backfire on its perpetrators and condemn
them. What is required in this regard however, is that the members
of the perpetrators’ own religious community absolve themselves
of these actions before anyone else and condemn such talk, because
the party targeted by the attack will not remain silent. As such,
the entire religious community would pay the price of an extremist
demented minority. Then there is the responsibility of the country
from which the channel is broadcasting.
In fact, I received the letter from Mr. Mustafa someday last week. The
following day, I received an email from Mona al-Nashashibi. Her family
is one of the most famous aristocratic Sunni Palestinian families
in Jerusalem, and in the letter, she wrote about a program that was
broadcasted on BBC Radio 4 on the ninth of this month called Sunday
Worship. The program was available on the BBC website until last
Sunday. It focused on the co-existence between Muslims and Christians
in Syria, and was followed and promoted by the Arab Media Observer.
The program’s host, Martin Palmer, a British cleric, travelled between
Aleppo and Damascus, and was stunned by the richness of history on
the one hand, and the brotherly and cordial relationship between
Muslims and Christians in Syria on the other hand, where one can
see veiled women attending the weddings of their Christian friends
inside churches.
Palmer also talked about the Orthodox Cathedral and the Roman Catholic
cathedral in Aleppo, in addition to the Chaldean and Armenian
churches. He noted that there, a mosque stands near a Church, and
that church ceremonies are held in Syriac or Aramaic, the language
of Jesus Christ, who did not speak Hebrew.
In the castle of Aleppo, the host spoke about the shrine of Saint
Gregory, the dragon slayer in a famous story/myth. Palmer said
that this saint is the same figure known as al-Khodr that Muslims
revere (My first colleague in Reuters in Beirut was Khodr Nassar,
and for years I thought he was Muslim because of his name, then I
found out that he is a Palestinian Christian.) Then in Damascus,
the program followed the steps of St. Paul and his escape over the
city wall. Palmer also visited the Umayyad Mosque, which was a Roman
temple dedicated to Jupiter before becoming a Church, then is now
one of the most famous mosques in the Islamic world.
It was pleasant for a Christian religious program to have included
a chat with Sheikh Ahmad Hassoun, the Grand Mufti of Syria. I heard
his talk translated to English, and he was very effective in his
introduction in which he said that God selected the prophets from
our region because those who believe in God follow the same religion,
albeit in different interpretations and explanations. The Mufti also
said that should the believers all return to the fundamentals of
religion, they would discover that we are all equal before God. Sheikh
Hassoun said that he had visited several European countries, such
as Germany and France, and advised the Muslims there to integrate
themselves into their communities, and not bring along with them the
problems which they had fled in their original countries.
It is worth mentioning here that the first prime minister in Syria
following the country’s independence was Faris Al-Khouri, who is
originally from the town of al-Kfer in present day Lebanon.
Finally, I will conclude with a poem written by Elia Abu Madi a
hundred or so years ago, when the two countries (Lebanon and Syria)
were the same country. In the poem, Abu Madi said that love should
be the religion of Syrians, meaning the love between Muslims and
Christians, the former being ensorcelled by the sound of church bells,
and the latter by the sound of the Azan (call for payer) in mosques.
Now, however, some of us seem to be ensorcelled by the love of murder,
may God battle them.