Sunni/Shia Relations: “Everyday is Ashura, every land is Karbala”

Remember the golden dome

Growing up as an American Shiite Muslim in the United States, the annual recounting of the killing of Imam Husayn, the third of 12 Shiite Imams to succeed the Prophet Muhammad, had a profound effect on my socialization. What struck me then – and even more now after the Al-Askari Mosque bomb blast – was in learning that Imam Husayn was killed by a purported Muslim, the Umayyad caliph Yazid.

The popular repeated notion in recent years that Islam has been “hijacked” is a foreign construct. As a child, the hijacking of Islam was recounted each year with Imam Husayn’s saga. The story engrained in me the notion that the enemy within myself and within my community is far more erosive, far more threatening than any external, non-Muslim threat.

The bombing of the Al-Askari Mosque was not an attack on Shiites, but on the ethos of Shiism itself. While the majority of Sunnis abhor last week’s attack, there is a small minority within the Sunni community that is becoming increasingly more violent and more determined to eliminate Shiites (and Shiism) from any and all lands. The attack in Samarra has resulted in gruesome and indiscriminate Shiite relataliation on Sunni innocents and Sunni places of worship. This must be equally condemned and deplored.

This tide of abuse against Shiites is not limited to Muslim countries. Whereas violence against Shiites manifests itself in the form of targeted killings in Pakistan and in Iraq, violence against Shiites in the U.S. manifests itself in the form of hate speech.

On February 5, 2006, Shiites of New York City marked the martyrdom of Imam Husayn with a procession through the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It is a tradition that has occurred for many years without nary of a conflict.

This year a group calling itself the Islamic Thinkers Society staged a protest outside the procession to “expose Shiism and the filth they stand for” and to “show that these Shiite heretics do not represent Islam.” Many of those present complained of being verbally threatened and the NYPD had to intervene to provide safety to the Shiite mourners.

Five years ago, acts like the protest in New York City were unheard of. Although a rift has always existed between Sunnis and Shiites in the United States, it never resulted in a confrontation against Shiites as we saw in New York.

Sadly, much of this hate speech has trickled down to college campuses where Muslim students are influenced by online learning academies like SunniPath that consider Shiites heretical people to be avoided. With such ideas being peddled, what options do Shiites have to dialogue with Sunnis?

In a survey The Qunoot Foundation conducted in 2004, about the socio-political perceptions of American Shiite Muslims, we found that most respondents did not report Shiite-Sunni relations as improving or becoming more friendly. Equally as troubling, Shiites were far less likely to report hate crimes to national, often Sunni-majority Muslim organizations.

Of course, these Muslim organizations will boast that they condemned the attacks. But it is all too easy to create a paper dragon and then slay it valiantly for the media’s sake.

Indeed the majority of Sunnis denounce religious extremism or sectarian hate speech. But mainstream Muslim groups – the Muslim Public Affairs Council excluded – have failed to provide a space within their organizations to discuss intra-Muslim discrimination in the U.S. They have instead provided forums for vacuous dialogue in which the Sunni-Shiite problem is presented as a global sectarian problem where all parties deserve equal blame.

It is not. It is a problem of an unchecked (and thankfully still minority) Sunni bigotry that is festering in Muslim societies and in some parts of the West. Muslims owe it to themselves to admit that basic and crucial fact.

Mohamed H. Sabur is co-director of the Qunoot Foundation, a Washington-based organization focusing on sociopolitical education within the Shiite Muslim community.