Islam, You Say?

Like Africa and its tribal and religious animosities, the Middle East seems continually roiled in upheaval and violence, its people victim to the vagaries of tribal jealousies, territorial disputes, religious adversarial positions. Part of Africa shares an Islamic inheritance, which further appears to confound the ability of people to get along together without continual strife and blood-letting.

Mostly because Islam remains a religion of conquest and its faithful are enjoined by its scriptures to engage in jihad for the sake of advancing Islam to dominate the world. Islam, as most people now know, is not just a religion; it is an avowed and demanding way of life incorporating politics, social structure, economics and justice.

Famously, the place of women in Islam is a problematical one -- for women, that is -- their position that of yet another chattel, a personal holding, dependent entirely on the good graces of the males in a family. A woman must be modest in her dress and her demeanor, prepared to surrender to her husband's demands just as he is prepared to surrender to Islam's.

But Islam though a monolithic religion in some respects, has also been compartmentalized into a variety of sects, and offshoots of sects. Any departure, however, from the dominant Sunni sect is viewed as errant and unforgivable, the next largest group, the Shia, considered to be defaulters from true Islam, while the gradations of lesser offshoots are felt to be heretical, their worship of Islam an assault and an insult to the Prophet Mohammed and to Allah.

Ismaili and Ahmadiyya Muslims, like the Baha'i, are held to be beneath contempt, merely posing as creative offshoots of Islam, but criminal pretenders beyond the pale as far as mainstream Islam is concerned. They suffer indignities, slander and brutality at the hands of the Sunni and Shia sects. But it is the ferocity of the enmity between the two major sects of Islam and their historical jockeying for primacy that now fuels a major discordance in the world of Islam.

In North Africa and the Middle East that enmity has become viciously alive with bloody attacks. Shia mutilating and slaughtering Sunnis, and Sunnis visiting atrocities upon Shi'ites. Their religious leaders incite each side to continued animosity and mass bloodshed. While ordinary Muslims who look on in fear and trepidation keep declaring to the outside world that theirs is a religion of peace and brotherhood. And for their efforts they are targeted by Mujahadeen for extinction.

When the militant Islamists are not busy demonizing their own 'heretics' and traitors to tradition, they focus on their visceral hatred for Jews and Israel, and expand their venom to include the United States and then fan out to encompass all vestiges of Western democracy. The tumult currently taking place in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Turkey, Lebanon, Bahrain, Tunisia, Somalia,       Libya and elsewhere is effectively decimating Muslims themselves.

The lines have been drawn between Sunni and Shia, and between several types of viral extremism. The Islamism that the world has grown to recognize and to loathe as representing the most fearsome crucible of the world's terrorists wreaking havoc wherever they can, exists both within Shi'ite and Sunni Islam. Saudi Arabia is the fount of Salafist extremism, even while it is the custodian of the two most venerable and holy sites in Islam.

Iran, since the Islamic Revolution that took place with the downfall of the Shah of Iran, has nurtured its own brand of viciously fanatical fundamentalist Islamism, mentoring its armies of non-state and inter-state militias to defy the Sunni jihadists who have been waging their own war on Middle East autocracies, tyrannies, kingdoms and sheikdoms.

The atrocities taking place in Syria, with a regime bombing its own population which has risen as a majority Sunni population against the dictatorship of a Shia-offshoot minority is a fairly good reflection of the balance of the Middle East. The struggle in Syria that has brought the country to civil war resulting in millions of homeless Syrians, internally and externally displaced refugees and a hundred thousand perished is not new, but it is punishing.

Lebanon went through its own paroxysm of upheavals when religious, ethnic and political groups brought the country to a ruin so deep it has never recovered its original character when all those groups lived together amicably, before the advent of deeply divisive Islamism. It stands now on the brink of yet another divide with Shia Hezbollah now part of its government, and as an Iran proxy, answerable to the Republic alone.

Iraq and Iran battled a bloody eight-year war when Saddam Hussein in continual disputes with Iran over territory, and fearing that the proximity of a newly entitled fundamentalist Shia theocracy in Iran would excite Iraq's majority Shia population long held in thrall to the country's ruling Sunni minority, would be emboldened to defy Hussein's Baathist government. When the U.S. and its allies removed Saddam Hussein from power they effectively liberated the Shia majority into Iran's sphere of influence.

Egypt has been horribly riven by its experiment with the Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood which hovers in the background of opportunity that is anticipated to open elsewhere within the Middle East and North Africa, to attain primacy and control and enact a universal Sharia law-driven government to comprise the Caliphate they have longed for. Social-secular, moderate Islamic Egyptians have rejected Islamist rule, and the country is at violent loggerheads in a conflict of ideologies.

Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Bahrain, Jordan, Egypt and Qatar sing from the Sunni songbook. In competition with Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon clinging to Shia empowerment. Christianity which predated Islam and had a long proud heritage in the Middle East as its fount, now clings to its memories with little hope for their continued future in the geography, hounded and persecuted. And where a cold war pertains, there is a smouldering resentment.

But where the conflicts have arisen there is the stench of decomposition of the countless combatants and their hapless victims colouring the desert sands in intense vermilion.