By Hisham Melhem

June 27, 2013

(Original Arabic link: http://newspaper.annahar.com/article/44903-?????-?????)

 

A sectarian cancer is metastasizing throughout the ailing Arab body politic. In recent days, we have witnessed its latest terrifying symptoms: explosions, massacres, clashes, and lynchings between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt.

 

Sunni-Shiite tensions are nothing new to the region, and their intensity varies from country to country, where those sects and sub-sects reside in greater or lesser numbers and under different conditions. Typically, when sectarian feuds between Sunnis and Shiites subside, the antagonism merely shifts toward the Arab Christians of the Middle East.

 

In the past decade, half of the Christians of Iraq, who have roots in Mesopotamia dating back to the earliest days of Christianity, were forced to flee after Sunni terrorists burnt their churches and killed their bishops. In Syria, where the first Christian church was established and where Aramaic is still a living language in the towns of Saydnaya and Maalula, Christians feel their future is deeply threatened. They are trapped between the rock of a tyrannical regime that claims to represent the Alawite community, and the hard place of fanatical and intolerant Sunni fundamentalist movements.

 

In Egypt, where terrorizing the Copts began in earnest under Mubarak’s rule, we now see an unprecedented escalation in the level of violence against Christians and their churches. These abuses take place in the full view of the Egyptian military, under the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood, and at the instigation of fanatical Salafist movements.

 

Today’s fixation with sub-national sectarian identities, as opposed to national consciousness, is the result of the deliberate policies of the Arab “security states,” particularly the military republics and nationalist and chauvinist parties, and above all the Ba’ath Party. All of these political forces succeeded in suppressing a once-dynamic Arab political life and culture that had existed, and was sometimes exceptionally active, during the period between the first and second world wars.

 

During that more liberal era, in Egypt, Iraq and Syria between the two world wars, there was a pluralistic political parliamentary life, with myriad, competing political parties and a relatively free press. During that period, opposition parties (first formed in opposition to the British and French occupations) emerged, like Al-Wafd in Egypt, and Hizb al-Istiqlal and others in Iraq. Such opposition parties attempted to expand the political authority of, at least theoretically, popularly accountable parliaments and prime ministers, at the expense of the monarchs.

 

More important was the fact that the politicians, intellectuals and journalists opposing the various systems of government or ruling authorities knew that such political opposition would not cost them their lives, and that the worst punishment they could possibly face was exile or imprisonment. Political and intellectual life at that time was characterized by relatively advanced modernity, tolerance, pluralism and openness. During that period, Iraq and Syria never knew the massacres and mass graves that plagued the Ba’ath era. In the old Egypt, no one ever tried to murder freethinkers like Taha Hussein and Ali Abdelrazak. But it was in the "modern" times of Mubarak that Farag Fouda was assassinated by religious fanatics.

 

In the old days, the sectarian cancer was dormant, but it has been slowly recurring and metastasizing. Compare the sectarian hell in Syria today with the country’s openness in the ‘40s and ‘50s when Fares al-Khoury, a Protestant Christian, was elected prime minister, and four times, no less. Back then, it was said that his repeated electoral victories were a promising indicator of the “national maturity that Syria had attained.” Today, by sad contrast, the sectarian cancer threatens Syria and Iraq with total national disintegration.