Word: itely
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Imam Ali Hussein died 1327 years ago, but for the Shi'ite Muslim faithful in Kabul - and everywhere else - it might as well have been yesterday. There is a vivid intensity to their mourning of the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad with black banners, dirges, funereal marches and somber sermons in mosques - and also by ritual bloodletting and physical mortification. Every year, during the festival of Ashura, Shi'ites symbolically punish themselves for their failure to rally to their imam at the Battle of Karbala and save him from his enemies in a conflict that marked the beginning...
...This is no desultory passion play. Even a non-religious foreign observer cannot fail to be moved by the intensity of faith that courses through the tiny room, a collective surge of emotion connecting today's Shi'ites with the events that marked their division from Sunnis and centuries of persecution, warfare and sectarianism. It is a powerful ritual of Shi'ite unity - one that the Sunni Taliban leadership attempted to curtail during their reign in Kabul...
...Last week the Lebanese army failed to stop Hizballah from closing down Beirut and much of the rest of Lebanon. The Shi'ite organization made sure everyone knows it can take Beirut, historically a Sunni city, whenever it wants. The rioting that followed will be to Hizballah's benefit, since it thrives on chaos...
...Imam Musa Sadr, a charismatic Iranian cleric, led the political mobilization of the Shi'ite community in the 1960s and 1970s, giving it a voice for the first time through his Amal (Arabic for "hope") movement. Hizballah was born with Iranian assistance in the early 1980s, to resist Israel's occupation of Lebanon. And by the 1990s, the dynamism of Hizballah and the demographic advantage of the Shi'ites had begun to eat away at the historical Sunni dominance of Lebanon's Muslim communities...
...Lebanon's political fault lines today tend to follow sectarian boundaries, with the Shi'ites overwhelmingly following the Hizballah-led opposition, while the majority of Sunnis back the government and the Future Tide movement of Saad Hariri, Rafik's son and political heir. The tension between the two camps also mirrors the broader Shi'ite-Sunni political rift throughout the Arab world that has been rekindled by the Iraq conflict. The chief protagonists in this new "cold war," as some analysts describe it, are Shi'ite Iran and Saudi Arabia, the leader of the Sunni Arab world...