When we were young at school in Beirut, we could not tell who was a Muslim and who was a Christian, save for the students named Muhammad or Hanna. Nowadays, it is no longer enough to know who is Muslim and who is Christian, but we must also know who is a Sunni and who is a Shiite. What Lebanon has suffered from after the fighting broke out in 1975 and in the next two decades that followed is now afflicting Iraq, and in a manner proportional to the country's size in comparison to Lebanon. This happened as the murderous terrorism that accompanied the resistance to the American occupation in Iraq, began to stoke sectarian strife. True that it has receded recently, but it has now returned in full and frightening force, and all I can say in this regard is God save us. When I was little, I used to hear people say “sedition is dormant so may God damn whoever dares awaken it”. This expression then came back to my recollection when I received a letter from Mustafa Al-Sehil in Jeddah, through the e-mail address of colleague Jamil Theyabi. Mustafa said in his message that the clash of civilizations may go beyond being between the West and the Muslims, to what is more sinister, “and to what threatens to cause a major rift within the Arabs, and between Christianity and Islam. This is because the Christian Life satellite channel started broadcasting a program in which the Prophet of Mercy Mohammed (Peace Be Upon Him) is attacked, all throughout the day”. He [Mustafa] fears that there might be a seditious intent behind this, and that there must be someone funding this sedition within a dark and yet unknown scheme. I admit that I did not know anything about this station, not even its name. I tried to find it within my network of ground and space channels but did not succeed; there must be around 999 stations, and looking for one of them is like looking for a needle in a haystack. In any case, the attack on another religion is absolutely unacceptable, and will eventually backfire on its perpetrators and condemn them. What is required in this regard however, is that the members of the perpetrators' own religious community absolve themselves of these actions before anyone else and condemn such talk, because the party targeted by the attack will not remain silent. As such, the entire religious community would pay the price of an extremist demented minority. Then there is the responsibility of the country from which the channel is broadcasting. In fact, I received the letter from Mr. Mustafa someday last week. The following day, I received an email from Mona al-Nashashibi. Her family is one of the most famous aristocratic Sunni Palestinian families in Jerusalem, and in the letter, she wrote about a program that was broadcasted on BBC Radio 4 on the ninth of this month called Sunday Worship. The program was available on the BBC website until last Sunday. It focused on the co-existence between Muslims and Christians in Syria, and was followed and promoted by the Arab Media Observer. The program's host, Martin Palmer, a British cleric, travelled between Aleppo and Damascus, and was stunned by the richness of history on the one hand, and the brotherly and cordial relationship between Muslims and Christians in Syria on the other hand, where one can see veiled women attending the weddings of their Christian friends inside churches. Palmer also talked about the Orthodox Cathedral and the Roman Catholic cathedral in Aleppo, in addition to the Chaldean and Armenian churches. He noted that there, a mosque stands near a Church, and that church ceremonies are held in Syriac or Aramaic, the language of Jesus Christ, who did not speak Hebrew. In the castle of Aleppo, the host spoke about the shrine of Saint Gregory, the dragon slayer in a famous story/myth. Palmer said that this saint is the same figure known as al-Khodr that Muslims revere (My first colleague in Reuters in Beirut was Khodr Nassar, and for years I thought he was Muslim because of his name, then I found out that he is a Palestinian Christian.) Then in Damascus, the program followed the steps of St. Paul and his escape over the city wall. Palmer also visited the Umayyad Mosque, which was a Roman temple dedicated to Jupiter before becoming a Church, then is now one of the most famous mosques in the Islamic world. It was pleasant for a Christian religious program to have included a chat with Sheikh Ahmad Hassoun, the Grand Mufti of Syria. I heard his talk translated to English, and he was very effective in his introduction in which he said that God selected the prophets from our region because those who believe in God follow the same religion, albeit in different interpretations and explanations. The Mufti also said that should the believers all return to the fundamentals of religion, they would discover that we are all equal before God. Sheikh Hassoun said that he had visited several European countries, such as Germany and France, and advised the Muslims there to integrate themselves into their communities, and not bring along with them the problems which they had fled in their original countries. It is worth mentioning here that the first prime minister in Syria following the country's independence was Faris Al-Khouri, who is originally from the town of al-Kfer in present day Lebanon. Finally, I will conclude with a poem written by Elia Abu Madi a hundred or so years ago, when the two countries (Lebanon and Syria) were the same country. In the poem, Abu Madi said that love should be the religion of Syrians, meaning the love between Muslims and Christians, the former being ensorcelled by the sound of church bells, and the latter by the sound of the Azan (call for payer) in mosques. Now, however, some of us seem to be ensorcelled by the love of murder, may God battle them.
