Viewpoinrt by Esad Duraković
Professor Esad Duraković is a well-known academic and a member of three Arab Academies of Art and Science.
SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina (IDN) – In late June 2017, four Arab countries (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain) adopted a decision to isolate the “brotherly” Qatar for several reasons, the main being “Qatar’s support for terrorism”.
In the subsequent ultimatum, they demanded of Qatar to close down Al-Jazeera, which, without doubt, embodies the greatest value of the Arab world in general today, and as such poses a threat to totalitarian regimes that want to rule in media darkness.
Just before the decision to isolate Qatar was taken, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, visited Saudi Arabia and signed a 110-billion-dollar arms deal, which is only a fraction of the planned sum that amounts to an incredible 500 billion dollars.
After the isolation of Qatar – which followed almost immediately after Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia – Trump initially sold 35 U.S. fighter jets to Qatar. Thus, the “brotherly” Arab countries are wholeheartedly supporting the U.S. military industry by executing preparations for a thorough, most probably total destruction of the Middle East. From that likely destruction, only the United States and the Zionist policy will profit.
One could analyse at great length this cataclysmic scenario in which Muslims in the region are working on their self-destruction with stunning stupidity. However, I will reflect upon a characteristic and indicative “detail” of this “war” in the Gulf, which is, for now, being fought in the diplomatic sphere. Yet the overwhelming arms build-up indicates preparations for war that has no sense or justification, except for pleasing the interests of the profiteers – the U.S. and the Zionist policy.
The media have on several occasions announced that the Saudi government banned the citizens of Qatar to visit the shrine of Kaaba. The current inter-Muslim wars are – primarily and above all – dramatic conflicts of the Muslims in the area with the very essence of Islam. Those wars are the consequence of a wrong understanding of Islam, and that is why they are so tragic, so horribly thorough.
In the birthplace of Islam, its sacred Text has been taken out of the Context; hence Islam is interpreted in a deviant manner exactly at the place where the Text was dived into the World by God’s Vertical and where, through the action of the Text, a powerful Arab-Islamic culture of the classical period was formed.
Failing the sense and mission of the Text by taking it out of the Context is – of course and sadly – accompanied by certain consequences that are utterly destructive, but also complementary to that arrogant and almost pagan intervention in God’s Order that is established through the relationship between the Text and the World.
Forbidding Muslims from a certain country, from any country in fact, with which there is a diplomatic dispute, to visit Kaaba is the most blatant attack against the very heart of Islam. That act is absolutely shocking, and is equal to the times when Meccans forbade Muslims with Prophet Muhammad SAAW to perform pilgrimage to Kaaba.
The institution of Ummah, as the essential institution of Islam is thus eliminated; the institution of brotherhood among Muslims is thus suspended, as well as many other institutions of Islam established by the Holy Qur’an.
One family, before the entire world, takes the right to decide which citizens can visit Kaaba and which cannot. The forces rummaging through the Arab world and destroying it can now celebrate in triumph, because the Saudi decision has introduced another extremely efficient factor of inter-Muslim divide.
Thus, the oil that God Himself bestowed to the Arabs is going to the industry of the West, while the dollars that the Arabs get for that oil are compensated to the Western corporations through payment for the weapons that are to be used by Muslims to destroy other Muslims, thus, Western companies will participate in a possible reconstruction of the devastated countries and again take money for it. (A part of the money used for arming is most certainly generated from the sum Saudi Arabia earns from hajj every year!)
It is obvious that Muslims in the Middle East, primarily Arabs, fail to understand that perfecting of evil to which they are exposed, and which they themselves create in most part. They fail to understand that – apart from all the aforementioned negative effects – the usurpation of Kaaba is the ultimate achievement of dissension among Muslims, a dissension that will for a long time bring devastating consequences for the Muslim world, for its unity and full awareness of a creative subject.
The royal family privatised Kaaba this way; they announced that they are entitled to Kaaba and have thus unimaginably desecrated it. Kaaba is not the property of any family, nation or power; it is exclusively a spiritual property of the entire Ummah, that is, the Muslim world. It should be made exterritorial. This ban is key evidence of the conflict between Muslims and Islam, especially the Muslims who proclaim themselves protectors and guardians of Islam.
However, that is not the end. I have not noticed that the Muslim world is disturbed over this flagrant desecration of Kaaba. A harsh reaction to this usurpation is to be expected from the Shia societies and communities – this time with good reason, hence the now already warlike antagonism between the Sunnis and the Shia will increase. And the entire world was obliged – especially its institutions and governments – to firmly react against this usurpation of Kaaba as a private family’s property.
As in many other negative, more or less dramatic situations in history, here too the responsibility does not rest solely with the immediate participants, but also with those who failed to act the way they were supposed to. Silence and passivity have always been a sign of approval – an act of Complicity. [IDN-InDepthNews – 12 July 2017]
Photo: Courtesy of Prof. Esad Duraković
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