10/6/2023 0 Comments One god, many wars: religious dimensions of armed conflict in the middle east and north africaIt is visible in the rubble of Syria's Qusair, emptied now of much of its population, and taken by a joint force of Hezbollah and Assad government forces, as well as in Lebanon's seaside city of Tripoli, the country's second largest, where gun battles between Alawites and Sunni militias are continuing. If ever evidence was needed of the escalating sectarian dimension to the growing regional instability in the Middle East – in which the worsening conflict in Syria is playing a large part – it was visible last week. They were a direct response to a speech made by Hezbollah's general secretary, Hassan Nasrallah, in Beirut, not only admitting that his fighters were in Syria but pledging that his men would help Assad – a member of the Shia Alawite sect – to final "victory". Qaradawi's comments – endorsed last week by Saudi Arabia's grand mufti, Abdul Aziz al-Asheikh – did not come out of nowhere. "How could 100 million Shias defeat 1.7 billion ? Only because Muslims are weak." "The leader of the party of the Satan comes to fight the Sunnis … now we know what the Iranians want … they want continued massacres to kill Sunnis," Qaradawi said. In Doha, however, Qaradawi's remarks embraced a more dangerous sectarian notion. When I heard him preach on Syria at Cairo's crowded al-Azhar mosque last autumn, he was sharp in his condemnation of the Assad regime, but stopped short of endorsing a jihad. It was a sermon that not only marked a sharp shift in the sectarian tensions in the Middle East between Sunni and Shia but an escalation in Qaradawi's own rhetoric.
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