Iran: Surrounded By Friendly Enemies

      

By Djelloul (Del) Marbrook

The Muslim Arab conquest of Persia in the first half of the Seventh Century A.D. should be priority reading in Washington, not the usual breathless news used to gift-wrap commercials.

Idol-smashing anticlerical Arabs burst out of the Arabian peninsula and began scooping up the eastern Roman empire and the Sassanid empire of the Persians in the name of their new religion, Islam, setting the stage for conflict between the Indo-European Persians and the Semitic Arabs that reverberates to this day and is critical to the Middle East matrix.

Lost in today's reportage is that element of anticlericalism that characterizes Sunni Islam. The clerical autocracy in Shiite Iran, with its scowling ayatollahs, puts Sunni teeth on edge. The Sunnis, who by far comprise the worldwide Muslim majority, regard such an inner sanctum as an impediment to man's intimate relationship with God.

Sunni Islam, to be sure, has its prayer leaders, its mullahs, marabouts and other religious figures, but a highly structured clerical ruling class remains anathema. Indeed the Shia sect itself is repugnant to most Sunni Muslims, a heresy.

America misses this and other nuances because it persists in viewing the Middle East in terms of Israel's dicey position in its part of the world, a view sustained by insisting that Israeli belligerence and land-grabbing is some kind of religious tenet and that Israel's existence is at stake.in each and every difference with the Arabs.

Because the United States has made its support of Israel a kind of holy war it remains unable to see that the Middle East is a much more complicated region than Israel's existence in it would seem to suggest. For example, Turkey, whose importance is greatly magnified by its being the ethnic mother country of millions of Central Asians, has its own historic problems with Iran, and the Gulf Arabs, who refuse to even refer to a Persian Gulf, have a famously toxic relationship with Iran.

Nor is that the end of it. Shiite Iran and Sunni Afghanistan get along like oil and water, and millions of other ethnic and religious minority members have serious quarrels with Iran and vice versa. Iran, for example, has suppressed the Baha'is and Zoroastrians and has difficulty treating its large Sunni Arab population equitably.

That the Arabs and other Muslims understand that Americans know little about any of this helps explain their conviction that America cares only about Israel and in fact covertly supports the idea of Israeli expansion to its Biblical borders, which would encompass much more Arab land than it has already seized.

It can be put in another way. On the best of days, in their most equitable mood, many Arabs regard America as Israel-obsessed. They believe that America conceives only of two great Western religions, Judaism and Christianity, not three great Western religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The more irrational among them believe that Israel is a kind of Crusader puppet state and that America has resumed the medieval Crusades.

They see American policy as crazily apocalyptic and Israel as a handmaiden of fundamentalist Christian apocalyptos. Given such an end-time scenario, it's hardly a wonder they might think negotiating with people who hold such a view is futile.

It's often said that nothing can be settled between Israel and the Arabs without the United States. But what is more to the point is that the United States must put its collective head on straight to preside over any negotiation. The United States must take into account that the Middle East is not merely about Israel and Arabs, Muslims and Jews, it's also about Turks, Copts, Baha'is, Uzbeks, Kurds, Christians-a rich and varied ethnic and religious quilt.

Our incursion into Iraq has made it more difficult for us to acquire credibility in Arab eyes.

Beyond that, the Middle East is about old conflicts that have little or nothing to do with Israel. And it's about memories.

If the Jews may be said to have a collective memory of Biblical Israel, of King David's realm, why should it be so surprising that the Persians should have a collective memory of any number of grand dynasties and empires, or that the Arabs should remember their fabled caliphates, or that the Turks should remember their Seljuk and Ottoman heydays, or Egypt its ancient grandeur and its more recent grandeur as a Muslim center of civilization?

Where is any of this reflected in news about the Middle East? If our national past is important enough for flag-waving and fireworks, why aren't the national pasts of the Middle Eastern peoples? Why is the Middle East about Israel's survival and prosperity and not the equally important survival and prosperity of every other racial and religious group in the Middle East? I know the answer to my rhetorical question. I know it because the press has drilled it into our consciousness-there can be no peace or prosperity for anyone in the Middle East if Israel is endangered.

But the Arabs have put forth a peace plan. What it asks, among other things, is that Israel give back land it seized during war, something Israel has not been willing to do. Why isn't Israel's unwillingness to trade confiscated land for peace as much an ongoing news story as Arab intransigence? Why is it only begrudgingly inserted into news stories because its absence would be so noticeable, a kind of tip of the hat?

Part of the answer is that it's so easy for a nation espousing a Judeo-Christian ethos to think in terms of a medieval conflict with Islam, to demonize the Muslims, pin tails and horns on them. But Jews, of all people, should know Christians are untrustworthy when it comes to them and readily revert to regarding Jews as Christ-killers. Indeed the history of Islam is far less bloody where Jews are concerned than the history of Christendom.

There is no compelling reason for the United States to be at odds with Muslim nations other than the Muslim perception that the secret purpose of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is to enable Israel to reconstitute King David's borders and in so doing to subvert an independent Palestinian state.

It was the Arabs who put an end to Persian dominance in the Middle East. Nothing has been forgotten. In the martyrdom of Hussein ibn Ali, the Prophet Muhammad's faithful and able grandson, Persians began to see a way to preserve their cultural identity. They rallied to the evolving Shia movement that arose from Ali's murder and eventually dominated it.

Over time the Umayyad caliphate, which under Mu'awiya defeated Ali and his reformist followers, weakened and gave way to an Abbasid rule more sympathetic to the Shias. But in the West a new Umayyad caliphate arose in Cordoba and presided over one of the splendors of human evolution.

Some understanding of all this is as necessary as understanding Zionism or the desire of Christian fundamentalists in the United States to usher in the end time, a desire that has no more true sympathy for Jews than it has for Muslims. If it's true that the flutter of a butterfly's wings in China affects the weather in California it's true that the ebb and flow of history shapes the mass of events to this day. We have no credibility in the world condemning Muslim fundamentalism and fanaticism without acknowledging our own. Nor has Israel or the Muslims. Israeli condemnations of Arab terrorism ring false because the Jewish state was founded in the midst of Jewish terrorism.

There has been enough terrorism historically to go around. Few religions or ethnic groups can claim innocence. Israel was born out of an incredible orgy of Nazi terrorism. Terrorists helped found the Zionist state. Arab terrorists reacted. Who is clean? Certainly not Christendom, certainly not the Jews, and certainly not the Muslims. Does anyone come out right? Is being right that important? Or is peace and cooperation the goal? I think those are the operative questions. Not the return of Golan Heights or the West Bank. Those are details. I don't agree that they're where the devil dwells. I think the devil dwells in human intent and struggle with introspection and honesty.

Djelloul (jeh-lool) Marbrook was born in 1934 in Algiers to a Bedouin father and an American painter. He grew up in Brooklyn, West Islip and Manhattan, New York, where he attended Dwight Preparatory School and Columbia. He then served in the U.S. Navy.

Djelloul Marbrook

The pioneering Online Originals (U.K.), the only online publisher to receive a Booker nomination, published his novella, Alice Miller's Room, in 1999. Recent fiction appeared in Prima Materia (Woodstock, NY), vols. I and IV, and Breakfast All Day (London, U.K.).In his younger days his poetry was published in literary journals including Solstice (England) and Beyond Baroque and Phantasm (California). Recent poems appear in Arabesques Literary and Cultural Review (www.arabesquespress.org), Perpetua Mobile (Baltimore), and Attic (Baltimore). He is the English language editor of Arabesques Literary and Cultural Journal (www.arabesquespress.org).

He worked as a reporter for The Providence Journal and as an editor for The Elmira (NY) Star-Gazette, The Baltimore Sun, The Winston-Salem Journal & Sentinel and The Washington Star. Later he worked as executive editor of four small dailies in northeast Ohio and two medium-size dailies in northern New Jersey.

Source: The Student Operated Press

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Tags: Afghanistan, Anticlericalism, Arab conquest of Persia, Gulf Arabs, Hussein ibn Ali, Iran, Iraq, Persia, Persian Gulf, Sassanids, Shi'ites, Sunnis, Turkey

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