It is hard not to notice two contrasting stories that have run side by side
during the past week. One is the story about the violent protests in the
Muslim world triggered by a report in Newsweek (which the magazine has now
retracted) that U.S. interrogators at Guantánamo Bay desecrated a Koran by
throwing it into a toilet. In Afghanistan alone, at least 16 people were
killed and more than 100 wounded in anti-American rioting that has been linked
to that report. I certainly hope that Newsweek story is incorrect, because it
would be outrageous if U.S. interrogators behaved that way.
That said, though, in the same newspapers one can read
the latest reports from Iraq, where Baathist and jihadist suicide bombers have
killed 400 Iraqi Muslims in the past month - most of them Shiite and Kurdish
civilians shopping in markets, walking in funerals, going to mosques or
volunteering to join the police.
Yet these mass murders - this desecration and dismemberment of real Muslims
by other Muslims - have not prompted a single protest march anywhere in the
Muslim world. And I have not read of a single fatwa issued by any Muslim
cleric outside Iraq condemning these indiscriminate mass murders of Iraqi
Shiites and Kurds by these jihadist suicide bombers, many of whom, according
to a Washington Post report, are coming from Saudi Arabia.
The Muslim world's silence about the real desecration of Iraqis, coupled
with its outrage over the alleged desecration of a Koran, highlights what we
are up against in trying to stabilize Iraq - as well as the only workable
strategy going forward.
The challenge we face in Iraq is so steep precisely because the power shift
the U.S. and its allies are trying to engineer there is so profound - in both
religious and political terms.
Religiously, if you want to know how the Sunni Arab world views a Shiite's
being elected leader of Iraq, for the first time ever, think about how whites
in Alabama would have felt about a black governor's being installed there in
1920. Some Sunnis do not think Shiites are authentic Muslims, and are
indifferent to their brutalization.
At the same time, politically speaking, some Arab regimes prefer to see the
pot boiling in Iraq so the democratization process can never spread to their
countries. That's why their official newspapers rarely describe the murders of
civilians in Iraq as a massacre or acts of terror. Such crimes are usually
sanitized as "resistance" to occupation.
Salama Na'mat, the Washington bureau chief for the London-based Arabic
daily Al Hayat, wrote the other day: "What is the responsibility of the [Arab]
regimes and the official and semiofficial media in the countries bordering
Iraq in legitimizing the operations that murder Iraqis? ... Isn't their goal
to thwart [the emergence of] the newborn democracy in Iraq so that it won't
spread in the region?" (Translation by Memri.)
In identifying the problem, though, Mr. Na'mat also identifies the
solution. If you want to stop a wave of suicide bombings, the likes of which
we are seeing in Iraq, it takes a village. I am a big believer that the
greatest restraint on human behavior is not laws and police, but culture and
religious authority. It is what the community, what the village, deems
shameful. That is what restrains people. So how do we get the Sunni Arab
village to delegitimize suicide bombers?
Inside Iraq, obviously, credible Sunnis have to be brought into the
political process and constitution-drafting, as long as they do not have blood
on their hands from Saddam's days. And outside Iraq, the Bush team needs to be
forcefully demanding that Saudi Arabia and other key Arab allies use their
media, government and religious systems to denounce and delegitimize the
despicable murder of Muslims by Muslims in Iraq.
If the Arab world, its media and its spiritual leaders, came out and
forcefully and repeatedly condemned those who mount these suicide attacks, and
if credible Sunnis were given their fair share in the Iraqi government, I am
certain a lot of this suicide bombing would stop, as happened with the
Palestinians. Iraqi Sunnis would pass on the intelligence needed to prevent
these attacks, and they would deny the suicide bombers the safe houses they
need to succeed.
That is the only way it stops, because we don't know who is who. It takes
the village - and right now the Sunni Arab village needs to be pressured and
induced to restrain those among them who are engaging in these suicidal
murders of innocents.
The best way to honor the Koran is to live by the values of mercy and
compassion that it propagates.
