Reply #57: Another article about the Sunni-Shiite divide

[kwassa]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12383-2004Dec19?language=printer

In Iraq: One Religion, Two Realities
Sunni, Shiite Sermons Leave No Room for Dialogue on Election or Insurgents
By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, December 20, 2004; Page A01


BAGHDAD -- In a ritual practiced thousands of times, the men gather at two mosques -- Um al-Qura in a Sunni neighborhood, Baratha in a Shiite one -- at the appointed hour. The phrase "God is greatest" is uttered four times, and the men line up in successive rows. An hour or so later, crowds spilling into the halls, they bow their heads in graceful uniformity. Silence ensues, and they pray.

The words uttered in between, though, echo across a yawning divide.

Each week in Baghdad, sermons to the faithful offer a tale of two Fridays. Both sermons -- one Sunni, the other Shiite -- dwell on the issues that color Baghdad's weary life: the insurgency, elections planned for next month and the U.S. military presence. But the messages are so diametrically opposed as to speak to two realities and two futures for the country.

In Um al-Qura, built by former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein as the Mother of All Battles Mosque, the insurgency is celebrated as an act of resistance against a faithless and deceitful American occupier. In no less strident rhetoric, at the venerated Baratha mosque, that same insurgency is condemned as wicked and senseless violence waged by loyalists of Hussein and foreigners. Elections are subjugation at the Sunni sermon, liberation at the Shiite one. And at each, the community's patience, the preachers insist, is wearing dangerously thin after yet another provocation or slight.


(jump)

At mosques such as Um al-Qura, the Sunni community is fashioned as the bulwark against U.S. and Israeli designs on the country. Shiite Iranians posing as Iraqis are flooding the country, the preachers say, and the Kurds are serving as stooges of the U.S. presence. The Sunnis are the nation's defenders against an occupation, and they are being called upon to act.

(sounds like ethnic hatred to me!)