Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: The anguish of intolerance

COMMENT

I was born a Shia Muslim. We make up only 10 per cent of the Ummah (the world-wide Muslim population), although Shias are the ruling majority in Iran and 60 per cent of the population in Iraq.

The assassination last Friday of the much-respected Iraqi Ayatollah Mohammad Bakr al-Hakim in Najaf - one of the holiest of sites for Shia Muslims - is an act of political vandalism in an unstable country and further evidence of mounting persecution of Shia Muslims.

In Pakistan, thousands of Shias have been killed as they pray, walk or take their children to school. The brutes are slaughtering many of the most educated people in the country - doctors, teachers, writers, architects, entrepreneurs.

A brief description of Shia-ism. The Prophet Mohammed died without naming a successor. His best friend, Abu Bakr, was elected the first Caliph. Three further caliphs were elected by Muslim leaders in Medina, and the fourth of these was Ali, son-in law of the Prophet.

He settled in southern Iraq, and it was there that he was assassinated in AD661. His son was also murdered.

The schism began at this point. Sunnis chose to follow exactly the Prophet's words and deeds, and Shias to believe in various interpretations expounded by successive leaders who came down from Ali.

Change, accommodation and a historical view of compulsions and obligations are woven into Shia preaching and practice, but leaders can have extraordinary influence, which is always dangerous.

There is also an elitism that Shia Islam fosters and Sunni Islam rejects.

Ayatollah Khomeini developed his autocratic ideas while in exile in Najaf, where he declared that religious and political power had to be vested solely in the hands of militant clerics.

He came at a time when the plottings of the powerful nations were creating much global resentment. Khomeini exploited this to make Shia Islam brutally conformist too.

He had antecedents in previous centuries. In Iran, Sunnis and other minorities have long been suppressed and their rights violated mercilessly. But on the whole, Shia Islam has greater diversity and a tendency to evolve with the times.

At its best, it teaches us never, ever to condemn the prayers of others. This is deeply resented in these times when Islamists want to regain the past and impose intolerable monolithic rules and regulations.

Their hypocrisy is nauseating. Some British Muslims (including a woman who frequently broadcasts on the infinite tolerance of Islam) refused to talk to me for a television programme because I am a Shia Muslim. They told Channel Four to choose a non-Muslim presenter instead.

Such insufferable British Muslims demand better rights at home but never mention the way minorities are treated in Muslim countries - from Saudi Arabia to Turkey - or the many ways women and children are denied basic choices to which all human beings are entitled.

Why do you stay with the faith, letters ask? Because of the humility it teaches me, the care it insists I must give to the old and young, the instruction it gives me not to put my own desires always before all others, the light it brings when I pray with the intensity I daily seek and sometimes attain.

And then pride that I come from many great traditions which contain brilliant histories, and intellectual and political thought.

A Shia Iranian, Dr Ali Shariati, was developing this positive, modernist Shia-ism while in exile in Paris with his old colleague Khomeini.

Shariati read Sartre, Fanon, and opened his mind. He wrote: "We want the Islam not of the Royal Palace but of justice, not of caliphs and class stratifications and aristocratic privileges but of freedom, progress and awareness, not of captivity, stagnation and silence."

When he returned to Iraq, he became so popular that Khomeini had to destroy him.

The forces of darkness have since pushed on. Today the poor Iraqi Shias who annually mourn the bloodshed they have had to endure for centuries grieve again. It breaks my heart a little more.

- INDEPENDENT

Herald Feature: Iraq