Reaching for power
...Sunni’s adverse ambience more vivid. These depiction and interviews are used not only for giving readers reality, but also for a skillful setting arousing curiosity in readers’ mind, “what had made the Shiites life so miserable“. He unties the intricate reason by explaining the origin of schism in Islam. Islam had been established under the Prophet Muhammad around A.D 7th. The split arouse from a dispute over who succeed the Prophet Muhammad after his death. There were two factions, one insisted that successor should be chosen by tribal consensus, the other assert that the successor should come directly from the Prophet’s family, namely his cousin and son-in-law Ali. The former were so predominant that they chose an eminent person as caliph, the leader of Arabic Islam, and finally coalesced into a powerful faction, Sunni. The latter, however, while they sought to gain power, receded to the edge of power; the Prophet’s son was assassinated and his grandchild was hunted down by the 7th caliph in the end. The place where the two buried became shrine, and their adherents gathered together around the shrine cities and coalesced into the other faction, Shiite. The Shiites might never have become the majority in Iraq if not for the building of a canal. Until the beginning of the 19th century, Schism was practiced mostly in the shrine cities, but when the Hindiyah canal bought in water from the Euphrates River to the arid south in the 19th century, Arab tribes gravitated to the area and settled down to grow grain, rice, and dates. Living so close to Shism’s holy cities, these Arabs converted from Sunni to Shiite Islam rapidly. As a result of rapid increment of converters, now they constitute 60% percent of Iraq’s population. Admittedly, the author’s introduction of schism and the canal which provoked conversion effectively explained the ‘origin’ of current adverse condition between the two. He, however, make a point of the invasion of Great Power, principally British in early 20th century and Baath party as cause of present acrimonious persecution and discrimination to the Shiites. The writer said that the British colonial power in Iraq fueled the uprising to British regime by Shiites, in alliance with the Sunnis, but after they failed in their rebellion against them, British installed a foreign Sunni monarch to lead the modern state of Iraq, paving the way for decades of Sunni dominance. On top of that, secular Baath Party, the Communist party overthrowing the monarchy by a military coup, utterly precluded Shiite’s participation in politics mainly for the sake of Shiites’ Islamic fundamentalism. In addition to internal political changes which degraded Shiites’ social and political status in Iraq, the author suggests that Iranian Revolution, which overturned Pahlavi dynasty, is another reason for Shiites’ hardship. Iranian Revolution leaded by Shiite Muslim clerics, mainly fundamentalists, changed political system from monarchy to theocracy. Emboldened by the creation of an adjoining Islamic state and under sever repression by Baath administration, they formed a new political party, called Al-Dawa, to oppose the secular state. The rise of new party made milieu around Shiite even worse, and genocide and public execution were committed to suppress bloody demonstration and terrorism o...