Shiite Muslims find refuge in U.S. to escape persecution in Muslim countries – by Omar Sacirbey (Washington Post)
Turkish Shiites take part in a religious procession held for Ashura in Istanbul on Dec. 5, 2011.
Source: Adapted and edited from Washington Post
QUINCY, Mass. — Sayed Mohammad Jawad Al-Qazwini was 12 years old when his family fled Iran and settled in Los Angeles. Now 28, he sat with some 70 Shiite Muslims at the Iman Islamic Center on a recent Friday night, preaching about the Mosque of the Trash Picker in Iran, and a Turkish mosque peculiarly named “As if I have eaten.”
Al-Qazwini, a descendant of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad, soon veered into a theme he had raised before on his two-week visit to the center: the discrimination and violence that Shiite Muslims have suffered at the hands of Sunni (mostly Salafist) Muslims.
“Some Muslims don’t like other Muslims praying on the rock,” Al-Qazwini said, referring to a biscuit-sized stone or piece of dried mud (from Karbala or Medinah – known as Khak-e-Shifa or Turbatul Husayniyyah) that Shiites place their foreheads on when prostrating during prayer. Sunnis do not use this stone, and some (hard-liner) Sunnis believe it goes against Islamic tradition, and is even heresy.
“It’s happened to me at least 50 times in Saudi Arabia. They see the rock, they take it away and say that it’s shirk, polytheism,” Al-Qazwini declared, eliciting gasps from his audience.
The variation in the proper way to pray is one among several differences that exist between Shiites, who make up about 15 percent of Muslims globally and in America, and the majority of Sunnis. Until recently, those differences mattered little in the United States, where the two groups bonded as Muslim minorities and prayed in the same mosques.
“There weren’t enough of either to justify the cost of building sectarian mosques, and because in general, early generation immigrants were less focused on establishing formal houses of worship,” said Andrea Stanton, a religious studies professor at the University of Denver.
That is changing, however, as American Shiites are increasingly establishing their own mosques. According to “The American Mosque 2011,” a survey sponsored by several Muslim American organizations, 7 percent of roughly 2,100 mosques in America are Shiite, and most have been built in the last 20 years.
One reason: Shiites have become numerous and financially strong enough to manage the expensive process of buying or building their own mosques. Another factor: the growth in Shiite populations as immigrants flee persecution in Iraq, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, where Taliban (Takfiri Salafists and Deobandis of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi/Sipah-e-Sahaba) gunmen recently executed at least 22 Shiite bus passengers. (In Pakistan alone, at least 19,000 Shia Muslims have been killed by Takfiri Salafists-Deobandis as a part of gradual genocide.)
Many Shiite Muslims say that while American mosques profess to be open to any and all Muslims, they tend to be Sunni in practice and can be hostile to Shiite beliefs and practices.
In some ways, the Sunni/Shiite divide is similar to divisions between Protestants and Catholics — both are Christians, but with different ways of understanding and worshipping the same God.
The differences between Sunnis and Shiites are historic and theological. After Muhammad died in 632 A.D., some Muslims believed he should be succeeded by his male relatives, beginning with his cousin and son-in-law, Ali. They became the Shiites. Others supported the prophet’s closest companions; they became the Sunnis.
The disagreement led to a series of civil wars beginning in 656 and that climaxed in 680 at the Battle of Karbala, in Iraq, where Sunnis (correction: Umayyad Caliph Yazid ibn Muawiya is rejected by majority of Sunnis) routed Shiites and killed Muhammad’s grandson, Hussein. The city is sacred to Shiites, and the mosque where Hussein is buried is led by Al-Qazwini’s grandfather.
For Shiites, paying reverence to Muhammad’s descendants by visiting their graves or observing their birthdays is a deeply ingrained act of devotion. Sunnis, on the other hand, have a more casual historic interest. The Wahhabis (Salafists), the puritanical Sunni sect that controls Saudi Arabia and Islam’s holiest sites, see such reverence as heretical, and have razed many important Islamic sites, including the home where Muhammad grew up, and the Medina grave of his grandson Hasan.
The two sects use different sets of hadith, or stories related to Muhammad, and also pray slightly differently.
Shiite immigrants started coming to the U.S. in the 1870s, along with Sunni and Christian immigrants, from modern-day Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. Following Iraq’s war with Shiite Iran, Saddam Hussein started persecuting Shiites, triggering another wave of Shiite immigrants.
“They came here as refugees because they could not practice their religion,” said Muthanna Waili, whose family was expelled from Kuwait in 1985 and who helped establish the Iman Islamic Center in 2006.
According to “The American Mosque 2011,” nearly half — 44 percent — of Shiite mosques in the U.S. opened in the 1990s.
Some worry that anti-Shiite sentiment has intensified in parts of the Muslim world. According to an August report from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, more than half of Muslims in Egypt and Morocco say Shiites are not Muslims; in Jordan, Tunisia, and the Palestinian territories, that figure is more than 40 percent.
Human rights reports allege persecution of Shiites in several Muslim countries. The State Department’s 2011 human rights report alleges that Bahrain’s government fired thousands of Shiite workers from their jobs, barred them from the police force and military, destroyed many Shiite religious sites, and tortured thousands of political prisoners, most of them Shiites.
In Saudi Arabia, the State Department report said, “The Shia minority continued to suffer social, legal, economic, and political discrimination,” and accused the government there of arresting Shiite religious leaders. Other Shiites report that many mosques in Saudi Arabia and other countries lace their sermons with anti-Shiite rhetoric.
While American mosques once offered a reliable refuge from this persecution, Shiite immigrants who have come more recently have found some mosques unwelcoming to their creed.
“They couldn’t find mosques that would let them pray the way they wanted to pray,” said Waili, 39. “I’ve personally had people label me as a kafir, an infidel. People look at you like you’re trying to change the traditional way.”
Waili said that while he had good personal relations with leaders of two nearby Sunni mosques, his efforts to foster closer relationships have been ignored or rejected. Before the Quincy mosque was finished, Waili said he asked a mosque in nearby Sharon, Mass., if his community could hold an observance there. It was rejected, he said, because he was told that some members of the community would object.
Rashid Noor, president of the Islamic Center of New England, which runs the Sharon mosque, said he was unaware of hostility toward Shiites. “I don’t think we have anyone here like that. We haven’t talked about these things,” said Noor.
Despite the divisions, Shiite leaders say they still hope to improve relations with Sunnis. “We’re good at interfaith work but not intra-faith work,” said Al-Qazwini. “The most important thing is to educate the entire Muslim community about the different sects of Islam.”
Other challenges may have to come first, however. As their numbers grow, Shiites are increasingly divided themselves, often according to the different religious scholars they follow overseas. Not long after the Shiite center in Quincy was founded, some of the more conservative members objected that males and females were not segregated, and founded yet another center in Boston.
“We’re also struggling with internal separation,” said Waili. “The center started very strong, but it has slowed down because of the friction within the community.”
(This story was made possible by a fellowship from the French-American Foundation-United States as part of the Immigration Journalism Fellowship.)
Video: Pakistani Shia Muslims Muharram procession (Ashura Jaloos) in New York – December 4th, 2011
The plight of Egypt’s forgotten Shia minority
Even after the historic election, this marginalised minority risk daily persecution and victimisation because of their beliefs.
BY EMANUELLE DEGLI ESPOSTI
PUBLISHED 03 JULY 2012 11:32
Egyptian presidential guards stand outside Cairo’s Al-Azhar mosque. Photograph: Getty Images
Sitting cross-legged on the threadbare sofa in his living room, Abu Hasan gestures to the bare walls behind him, apologising for the sparseness of his home. He breathlessly explains that himself, his wife, and their three children had to flee their previous apartment here in Alexandria only a few days ago after a neighbour posted a note under their door threatening to kills them.
“This is third time we have had to move in four years,” he says, offering me a plate of steaming bamiye (okra).
Abu Hasan and his family are Shia – a small and marginalised minority in predominantly Sunni Egypt. He says that they face daily persecution and victimisation because of their beliefs.
Since Mohammed Morsi was declared President of Egypt, there has been growing speculation about what the future of Egypt’s Coptic minority will be under an Islamist government, but little has been said about the even smaller (and arguably equally threatened) Shia community. In the run up to the elections, I spent time in both Cairo and Alexandria speaking to the Egyptian Shia community and gauging their response to the likelihood of a takeover by the Muslim Brotherhood.
The schism between Sunni and Shia Islam dates back to the death of the Prophet Muhammed in AD 632, but the historical nature of the split does little to lessen the reality of Shias living and worshiping in Egypt. Although there are no official statistics about the number of Shia in Egypt, it has been estimated that they constitute roughly one per cent of the population: around one million people. Because of their relative obscurity, and the fact they tend to shy away from public or political activism, they are often overlooked in discussions about Egypt’s religious minorities.
“There are no Shia in Egypt, we are a Sunni country,” said one woman I spoke to outside Cairo’s Al Hussein mosque.
Shias say that they are ostracised and persecuted by Sunnis, and that they are afraid to publicly admit their confessional status since they believe it will only invite more prejudice. The Mubarak regime was especially intolerant towards Shias, and they were regularly arrested and interrogated during his 30-year reign. In 2009, more than 300 Shias were imprisoned by state security without official justification.
“Before the revolution, the situation of Shia was critical in Egypt, but since the revolution we have had a light margin of freedom,” Sayed Gamal Hashemi, a friend of Abu Hasan, tells me over a cup of heavily-sweetened tea.
But when asked whether Shias or Christians have more rights in post-revolutionary Egypt, Hashemi is quick to answer: “Christians,” he says, “of course.”
Misinterpretation and confusion abound among both Sunni and Shia communities, making reconciliation or acceptance between them an increasingly challenging task. One young Sunni student, who asked not to be named, claimed that Shia were “kufar” (infidels) because they didn’t follow the prophet Muhammed; while a Shia man (who also asked to remain anonymous) believed that it is “halal” (religiously ordained) for Sunni to kill Shia. Neither claims are true, but they reflect the extent of mistrust between the two communities.
Despite this, the number of Shia in Egypt seems to be growing, and there have been several cases of Sunnis converting to Shiism. Mahmoud Jabr, one such convert and the Secretary General of Egypt’s Hizb-ut-Tahreer (Liberation Party) – one of many grassroots political parties that have sprung up since the revolution – says he had his passport confiscated by the Mubarak regime because of his activism.
“The Egyptian constitution will never accept a Shia party,” he says, “the media misrepresent us.”
The “politicisation” of the Sunni-Shia divide through the proxies of Iran and Saudi Arabia is widespread in Egyptian society, Jabr claims, when in reality the vast majority of Egyptian Shia have no personal or political ties to the Islamic Republic. And indeed, when I approached the president of Cairo’s Al Hussein mosque – where more than 200 Shia were forcibly prevented from celebrating Ashura in December 2011 – his viewpoint is surprisingly succinct:
“If they want to practice their rituals, then they should go back to their own country,” he states, ignoring the fact that most Egyptian Shias are exactly that: Egyptian.
And yet Egypt remains a country with strong Shia ties. The Fatimid dynasty, who ruled Egypt from AD 969 – 1171 and founded the city of Cairo, were exclusively Shia. It wasn’t until after the fall of the Fatimids that Egyptians began to convert to the Sunna, and the cultural legacy of Ahl al-Beit (descendants of the Prophet Muhammed, literally ‘people of the house’) remains strong even today. No further testament needs to be made to the strength of Egyptians reverence for the Ahl al-Beit than the abundance of shrines and mosques dedicated to Hussein, Hasan, Zainab, Ali, and other Shia imams.
But there are concerns among the Shias I spoke to that the rise of Islamist movements in Egypt since the fall of Mubarak, especially the omnipresence of the Muslim Brotherhood, will result in even fewer rights for their community.
Shias might not face the same extent of persecution as the more visible Coptic minority, but it was evident from the people I spoke to that they are equally not tolerated by the more extreme factions in Egyptian society.
“We cannot have Shias in our mosque because of their extremist views,” said the head of Alexandria’s Al-Fattah mosque, a stronghold for fundamentalist Salafis.
When asked if he would support the construction of a Shia mosque to allow Shias to pray in their own space, he looks at me wide-eyed, as if surprised by the question.
“No.”
It is a little word, but it says so much about the current state of Egypt, and about the country’s forgotten minority.
Additional reporting by Farah Souames.
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/world-affairs/2012/07/plight-egypt%E2%80%99s-forgotten-shia-minority
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