Palestinians gloomy over U.S. victory

Christian Century, May 3, 2003 by Elaine Ruth Fletcher

People in Baghdad may have danced in the streets over the fall of Saddam Hussein. But in Jerusalem, Muslim and Christian Palestinians are gloomy and depressed over the rapid U.S. victory over Iraq.

Many Muslims see the invasion as an illicit move by the Christian world against Islam, while Christians fear that the war's outcome will, over the long term, threaten the security and stability of Christian communities throughout the Middle East.

"The results are very surprising. People here are confused," said Adnan Husseini, a senior official in the Islamic Trust (Wakf) administration that oversees Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem. He noted the first happy reactions on television of people in Baghdad. "But when they look at this more deeply, I think their thoughts will change," he said. "It will take them tens of years for them to restore their country and their future.

"People feel that under the title of a fight against terrorism, this is a war against Islam. Rather than trying to understand us, the West is trying to exert its power over us."

President Bush's use of religious terminology to describe the conflict in Iraq has contributed to that sense that the war is a confrontation between the Islamic East and the Judeo-Christian West, said Mustapha Abu Sway, a professor of Islamic thought at Al Kuds University in Jerusalem.

"At an appearance at a military camp in Florida, he used the term `day of judgment' in reference to Saddam Hussein," remarked Abu Sway. "In the same speech, he talked about peace through power, which is another biblical reference. Language like that, along with his reference once earlier to crusades, really has a bad effect on people.

"Certainly no one thinks that the war is being waged to liberate the Iraqi people from dictators. They think it is being done for the sake of oil, and also for the sake of Israel," said the scholar.

The fact that Iraq's population is about 60 percent Shi'ite Muslim will pose a dilemma for the U.S. if it tries to promote a truly representative form of government, he observed. Iraqi Shi'ite religious strongholds like Najaf and Karbala constitute the centers of Shi'ite history and tradition--places at which leading Shi'ite families and scholars trace their origins as far back as the family of the Prophet Muhammad.

"So if you are talking about real democracy, Iraq will become a Shi'ite government, and I am not sure that the U.S. will go for that," Sway said.

Following September 11, many religious leaders in the Muslim world began to support religious dialogue for the first time ever, Sway said. Mainstream religious leaders began to understand the need to explain Islam to the West. But the recent war in Iraq may set back some of those efforts.

"Even in Saudi Arabia, there had been a clear effort in this direction. Many scholars became involved, there were many conferences," Sway said. "The war will not bring an end to dialogue. But definitely it is a setback."

That is precisely what concerns many local churches of the region, where the continued survival of tiny Christian communities in a sea of Islam depends on Muslim-Christian goodwill and dialogue.

Munib Younan, bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Holy Land, describes the Iraqi war as a symbolic "stone" standing before Jesus' tomb.

"It [the stone] is huge and heavy," Younan said in the published text of his Easter sermon. "It is creating a big divide between cultures. Some say, `This is a religious mission to liberate Iraq.' Others say, `It is a religious task to fight the invaders.' It seems that some like to read the war as a fight among religions. What will happen with Christian-Muslim relations that we have built for a long time?"

The invasion of Iraq will send shock waves throughout Christian communities of the entire Middle East, said Anglican Bishop Riah Abu El-Assal, whose diocese encompasses the rival states of Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza.

"As much as some Iraqis welcomed the Americans on the television screen, it will be very easy for someone to tell them later, `Those Americans are Christians,' and that will cause greater harm to Christian communities here than anything in the last decade," El-Assal said.

El-Assal noted that after the 1991 gulf war, some 1 million Iraqi Christians left the country. Remaining in Iraq are another 1.5 million Christians of a population of about 26 million people. Most are Chaldeans, part of an ancient eastern branch of Christianity affiliated with the Catholic Church.

At the height of the war, the Greek Orthodox official in charge of Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity, Archimandrite Panaritos, declared that Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, along with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Foreign Minister Jack Straw, would be denied entrance to the Church of the Nativity "from now until eternity."

Following the Christian statement, Jerusalem's chief Muslim figure, Sheikh Ekrima Sabri, issued an Islamic fatwa or religious ruling denying Bush and Blair entry to the "sacred" land of Palestine.