America Strikes Back

[Paule]

Sympathy for U.S. in mosque pulpits
Published on: Saturday, 27 Jamadi´ul Thani 1422 (15 September 2001)

Tehran, Iran

By Ahmed Reza

The mosque preacher began by denouncing attacks against innocents, and every one of the listening worshippers knew he was speaking of the thousands who died in fiery terror strikes on the distant shores of America. To wantonly kill like this, he declared, was an abomination. A coward's cry.

But by the time the imam wound up his sermon to thousands of Muslim faithful at a West Bank mosque, familiar and long-held grievances -- most particularly, the plight of the Palestinians _ were at the forefront.

In mosques across the Middle East on Friday, the most important prayer day of the Muslim week, a wounded America received a measure of sympathy for the catastrophic suicide attacks that brought down the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon. Away from the crush of fellow worshippers, some expressed quiet sorrow over the carnage.

"What happened was terrible -- I look at it from a human perspective only," said Palestinian construction worker Jamal Abu Eid, who attended prayers at one of the region's most politically explosive venues, the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem's walled Old City.

In Iran, where reformists have been trying to forge ties with the West over the objections of conservative mullahs, denunciation of Israel went on as usual at Friday prayers -- but not of the United States.

At prayer services at a former sports stadium at Tehran University, the crowd refrained this week from its customary chants of "Death to America." The preacher, Ayatollah Mohammad Kashani, told about 10,000 worshippers the attacks in America were "tragic ... very worrying."

"Defenseless men, women and children have been killed," he said in his sermon, broadcast live on Tehran radio. Later, in an extraordinary gesture, a moment of silence in honor of victims of the terror attacks was observed at a Tehran stadium before a World Cup qualifying match between Bahrain and Iran.

But the day's sermons -- traditionally an important indicator of national sentiments -- also offered a passionate reminder of the hatreds and hardships that fuel the region's conflicts. In mosques from Baghdad to Beirut, from Tehran to Gaza City, the airborne attacks against America were portrayed as an inevitable consequence of U.S. support for Israel, and as retribution for an array of American policies seen as bullying and unfair toward Arabs and Muslims.

The combustible nature of religious leaders' role was underscored Friday when Israeli police briefly detained the top Islamic cleric, or mufti, of Jerusalem. Ikrema Sabri said afterward his interrogators had accused him, among other things, of incitement from the pulpit.

At Friday's prayers across the region, perhaps the most strident rhetoric came in Iraq, which has been locked in years of confrontation with successive American administrations. Iraq blames America for the deaths of thousands of civilians due to malnutrition and disease under United Nations sanctions imposed after Saddam Hussein's soldiers occupied Kuwait in 1990.

In a region where the car bomb and the suicide strike have long been weapons of choice, the sheer scale of the slaughter in the United States -- and its indiscriminate nature -- left some uneasy. At Egypt's oldest and most venerable Islamic institution, the attacks were criticized.

"He who kills a person without necessity ... will never go to heaven," Sheik Mohammed Sayed Tantawi told worshippers at Cairo's Al-Azhar mosque. "It's not courage in any way to kill an innocent person, or to kill thousands of people, including men and women and children."

The spiritual leader of Lebanon's Hezbollah movement, Sheikh Mohammd Hussein Fadlallah, a harsh critic of U.S. policy, called the attacks barbaric and un-Islamic.

The head of Saudi Arabia's Islamic judiciary, Sheikh Salih al-Luyahdan, said what happened in the United States was a criminal act which could not be excused in any way. He said the killing of innocents was a major sin and a horrendous crime.

Responsibility for the attacks has not yet been determined, though investigators are scrutinizing potential links to the terror network of Saudi exile Osama bin Laden. At prayers in the Nuseirat refugee camp outside Gaza City, worshippers were told that all Islam should not be tarred by association, even if bin Laden is eventually tied to the attack.

The imam pointed to the lessons of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which until this week was the worst terror attack on U.S. soil. "Christianity, America, or the Christian world were not accused because a Christian masterminded it," he said.





Paule "The Walnut" lives!