The good news is that rival Lebanese factions, after six days of Arab-mediated talks in Doha, settled their political conflict earlier this week, a conflict that at one time we thought would push their country to the brink of a new civil war. The bad news is that a sectarian fuse, mirroring to some degree the unutterable monotony of Sunni-Shiite animosity in Iraq, may have been lit.
When citizens take up arms and resort to inflicting violence on each other in order to resolve political disputes, the price they pay cuts deep not only into what constitutes civilised social life, but into the reserves of individual feeling and imaginative response in a human community.
The last 18 months of political discord in Lebanon, culminating in recent weeks with the hollow brutalities of urban battles over turf supremacy, have shown us how intolerant we can be of the precarious uniqueness of each other's political views.
The brief takeover of Beirut in a display of power by Hezbollah prompted counter-attacks by Sunni militants in northern Lebanon against the Shiite group, resulting in many deaths. That is bad enough. What is worse was the unbelievably silly, but nevertheless ominous, calls by extremist Sunni websites across the Arab world for a "jihad" against "unrepentant" Shiites.
Oh, puleeeeze! That's the last thing we need - revisiting an old dispute (old, as in 1,400 years old) that has the potential to tear our societies apart, societies that are already broken in back and spirit and hardly need to add to their long list of social woes. Those clamouring to reintroduce a Sunni-Shiite divide in our world posit the notion that Shiites, all Shiites, be they our Arab brothers or Iranian neighbours, are the enemy.
Since the war started in Iraq five years ago, and the political deadlock in Lebanon 18 months ago, terms like "the Persian menace" and "the Eastern tide", have begun to appear not only in those websites but in the Op-Ed pages of prominent Arab journals as well. The thrust of the debate, if debate it is, is that Iran is building an "evil empire" to dominate the heartland of the Arab world and that Shiites there are a fifth column, sleepers ready to rise when called upon to do so in pursuit of that goal.
For now, the overwhelming majority of Arabs are not buying any of it, but the events in Lebanon in recent weeks may represent a tipping point. My true quarrel with these commentators, peddling this diatribe, is not so much that a great deal of their writing is boring and irresponsibly argued, but that they leave their readers' compass of political awareness less exact and their view of the world less humane.
Divide is not over theology
Whatever dispute Sunnis and Shiites have, say, in Iraq and Lebanon (and I hasten to add that the two are not the same by any means) is a function of their political differences, not their confessional values. In Iraq, for example, Shiite leaders have earned the resentment of Sunnis not because they are Shiites, but because these leaders have exacerbated Iraq's social contradictions through their brand of identity politics, treating their country like a fiefdom and its resources as their piggy-bank.
And the dangerous divide between Sunni and Shiite in Lebanon, at a seminal level of relating to it, is not over matters of theological principle but of compelling claims over political power, over the role each plays in running the government, and over distribution of national wealth. That the Shiites in that country have been demonstrably vocal has more to do with the fact that they had traditionally been under-represented, marginalised and impoverished than with a putative Shiite tendency to "plot" against non-Shiite Muslims.
In that context, consider how Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot were clearly not driven to commit their brutalities by their faith, but their own individual monstrous bent. Conversely, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Mother Teresa did not enlighten us about the fragile plurality of human nature and conduct because they were, respectively, Hindu, Protestant and Catholic, but because they possessed a vision of human accord.
Fighting together
Theological differences between Sunnis and Shiites are small, decidedly smaller than those that divide, say, Catholics and Protestants. For centuries we lived together, shared common struggles, formed friendships and intermarried. In the 1920s in Iraq, Sunnis and Shiites fought in the same battle, for the same cause, against the same enemy - British colonial overlords. And more recently, in Lebanon in the 1980s, Lebanese Shiites and Sunnis, in like manner, fought together against the same enemy - Israeli occupiers.
This old geezer of a columnist, already in his sixties, recalls the days he was growing up in the 1950s in the mean streets of Beirut when your identity politics was defined by, well, your political identity. You were a Nasserist, a Baathist, a Greater Syria Nationalist, a Marxist, a Socialist, and the rest of it. Anyone in our midst, in our fiercely political milieu, who even hinted at creating a plus-minus dichotomy between Muslims and Christians, let alone between Sunnis and Shiites, was ostracised as a ta'ifi (parochialist), the worst appellation you could level against a person in those days.
After the harrowing conflict in Lebanon was amicably, and we hope permanently, resolved in Doha on Tuesday, let us not, whether we are Sunnis or Shiites, give echo to the bellowing of those who effectively want to build between the Arab mind and the facts a wall of myth, and potentially drag us into the abyss of sectarian conflict. Let us instead turn away from their nebulous jargon in nauseated disbelief.
Fawaz Turki is a veteran journalist, lecturer and author of several books, including The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile. He lives in Washington D.C.
