[ad_1]
By Ramin Mazaheri
(Ramin Mazaheri is Press TV’s chief correspondent in Paris and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of “Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism “and” I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China “, which is also available in Simplified and Traditional Chinese.)
As a numerical minority – of course, the Shiites are the Muslim group most interested in Muslim unity: it means survival. This has meant this since the death of the Prophet Mohammad, and both “Muslim unity†and “Shiite survival†have been inextricably linked ever since.
The logic of this concept – that “Muslim unity” is the best protector of the largest minority in the Muslim world – should be obvious. Minorities need peace to thrive – they are outnumbered in conflict / voting.
It is only divisive imperialists and their puppets in some Muslim countries who reject this logical idea and propagate the opposite – that instead the Shiites are trying to divide the Muslim community; that the Shiite minority is intent on going to war with Sunnis. Of course, this is a war that is already forbidden by Islam – the belief cannot be imposed on anyone – so such individuals (and I am referring to isolated extremists who have no democratic political power anywhere in the Muslim world) will always be considered non-Muslim .
No thinking Muslim needs a conference to revive this millennia-old conversation and the law in force. The annual conference of the International Islamic Unity of Iran, which has just ended its 35th meeting, goes light years beyond these false non-issues.
The conference offers a forum to create an Islamic-geopolitical way to resolve the insecurity in the Muslim world. Such uncertainty is allowed to occur in our modern imperialist area because there is disagreement among Muslims on fundamental issues of political modernity.
The Islamic Unity Week was launched in 1987 and takes place in the week of the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday. The conference is not held to proselytize for the Shiites (again proselytizing is forbidden in Islam, which is why there are no Muslim missionaries), but to strengthen unity among Muslims in a practical sense.
Yes, the event is under the auspices of the World Forum for Proximity of Islamic Schools of Thought, which paves the way for Islamic scholars to get to know and understand one another. Indeed, building theological empathy and respectful intellectual understanding among the many sects of Islam is an integral part of the conference. But the presence of the leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, the chiefs of the Iranian Foreign and Culture Minister, eminent Iranian politicians, political scientists, communications specialists and others testify to the very practical, very real results that the conference is expected to produce.
A fundamental tenet of the conference is that Muslims cannot be united as long as foreign powers take away Muslims’ sovereignty in their own countries. Thus the practical basis of the conference is anti-imperialism, a struggle so bloody and necessary that every kind of correct unity must be used.
We should always remember that unity among the broad masses has always been called “divisive†by the forces of imperialism – be they feudal kings who opposed even meager parliaments, or the shareholders of the East India Tea Company or the “200 families “. â€From France, with whom Leon Blum had to negotiate for an eight-hour day in 1936 because“ who else could I negotiate with? Masses against the elite will create a modern revolution in any society.
Political unity should be easier than religious unity, but the Muslim world has more of the latter than the former
When there is a Muslim unity on a purely national level, the result takes the form of an “Islamic Republic”. It has to be a republic, because monarchy – the preservation of privileges based on blood, elite and favoritism, and with it the necessary rejection of economic and political justice – is always a cruel and unusual punishment for the masses and their resources.
This idea did not appear in the history of the Eastern Hemisphere until the 19th arrogant colonialism and began the horror known as World War I just because monarchs (in alliance with their aristocracy, old and new rich) wanted to preserve their privileges. It really is that simple, and to say something else is a lie.
Monarchy – i.e. autocracy, authoritarianism, inequality before the law, undeserved privileges and arrogance – still has tremendous support and support in most of Western Europe, and these countries have sustained their royal brethren in the Muslim world.
It is wrong to expect global unity on a religious level, but are we expected to still wait for unity in the face of the truly dire demands of the kings and queens?
“Republican imperialism” – of which France and the United States are shining examples – is not a real republic, but a republic that only speaks the words of equality before the law, but whose policies preserve the nouveau riche and uphold imperialism. In such places patriotism is the most exalted virtue, and because it places the nation above God, it degrades positive patriotism into fanatical jingoism.
After World War I, the notion that a nation has superior human qualities, deserves special privileges, and is destined to rule over others was transformed into “fascism”. The differences between monarchy and fascism are small, as there were no fundamental upheavals in property relations such as in the Iranian Islamic Revolution – the banking system, medium and heavy industry and foreign trade remained in the hands of a tiny cabal instead of the hands of the people Good of the people.
Because Western nations are either former or current colonizers and / or strongholds of monarchism (either open or latent), they themselves suffer from vicious sectarianism. Their callous, entrenched, selfish elite are trying to impose the same sectarianism on the Muslim world. The policy of “divide and rule†is of course not neglected at home either.
This is rightly called “sectarianism” outside the West, but inside the West it is given a harmless sounding name – “Identity Politics”. Both are the politics of the struggle for elitist privileges, of “us against them”, of anti-unity, of an individualism that knows no legal limits.
“Identity politics†is anti-republican because it is sectarian. You hear that all the time in France – they have a history of mass revolution to draw from, after all. In the US, identity politics is cynically viewed as a necessary evil in a world with only heartless societies.
The benefiting elite are seeking division in both California and Nebraska, just as they want division in Lebanon and Iraq, just as they now want division within Afghanistan with burning urgency.
Afghanistan was the focus of this year’s conference as it is currently ground zero in the struggle for unity in the Muslim world with regard to the global war against a sense of arrogant privilege that some call “reactionary” what others call “fascism” . and who call other people “evil”.
In the first part, the geopolitical foundations of the Islamic Unity Week have now been described, which shows us the correctness of the title of Part 2 “Iran’s Islamic Unity Week: A place free from fascist / reactionary / anti-Muslim influences”. In 2021, the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan makes such a haven for Islamic unity and global harmony incredibly necessary.
(The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Press TV.)
[ad_2]
