Umm as-Sa’ad: Quranic Scholar

The elderly lady in the picture is Umm as-Sa’ad. She was born 1925 and memorised the Quran at the age of 15. By the age of 25 she had the shortest chains of recitation (Ijzazh) to the Prophet sala Allahu Alihi wasSalam in the 10 modes of recitation.

She is a PIVOTAL point in Quranic instruction in Egypt and Alexandria in particular. From AbdulBasit abdulSamad to Mishary al-Afaasi…all have recited the Quran upon her seeking approval to teach and recite.

Allah have mercy on her, she recently passed away at close to 90 years old. May Allah reward her for her service to the Quran.
Since 1950 she has taught and licensed in memorization of the quran over 100,000 students.

She married one of her students. She was not blessed with any children through her nearly 50 years of marriage. She would say, “Allah barred me from children and their responsibility, so that I can teach his Word to the children of others."

She also said:
"I feel that my memorization of the Quran is as complete has my knowledge of my own name. I cannot imagine that I can forget a single letter from it or even make a single mistake in its reading from memory. I do not know anything else in life like I do the Quran and its modes of recitation. I did not master any other Science or attend lectures or commit anything to memory except the Noble Quran, the texts related to its modes of recitation."

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Alhamdulilah!!What an amazing woman! She is the mother of all whom she taught and the best mother they could have had! 

In Cairo, desperate Egyptian men search in vain for Syrian brides

 On the outskirts of the vast Egyptian capital, Egypt ends and the latest Syria enclave begins. Women tie their headscarves in a distinctly Syrian way. They buy Syrian spices and trinkets from vendors whose shops are now tables lined along the streets. There is a constant murmur of stories about the desperate circumstances that forced the residents to flee places such as Homs and Damascus in the past year.

The only sign that one is still in Egypt is the sound of Egyptian men and their mothers, who flock every day in the hopes they can exploit the dashed hopes of the Syrian revolution. Too poor to take an Egyptian bride, the men have heard that Syrian refugees are cheaper, prettier, better cooks and easier to marry.

“I am looking for a Syrian bride,” a 39-year-old painter, his calloused hands showing his struggle to survive, tells a Syrian man selling pita bread and spices outside the local mosque. “They are less complicated.”

The Syrian has heard this a dozen times already that day and doesn’t even respond, but rather points to a professionally made sign in front of the mosque behind him. It says that the mosque “announces that it has nothing to do with the marriage of Egyptian men to Syrian sisters. That’s why there shouldn’t be any questions regarding this issue in any of the offices of the organization. May Allah punish those responsible for spreading these rumors.”

The painter is undeterred. “Maybe there are Syrian women around the corner?” he asks.

The Syrian, who asks that he be identified only as Khalid, just shakes his head.

Before the sign, Khalid said, he fielded the question 100 times a day; now it is only 50. It’s difficult to know if he’s exaggerating.

“They ask us where the office is to buy a Syrian woman, as if they are buying a chicken. They don’t believe us when we tell them it doesn’t exist,” said Khalid, who said he was 26. “Our women are not for sale. We are here because we did not want to be killed.”

Men across the region are now seeking Syrian brides. In Turkey and Jordan, where refugee camps pepper the landscape, the desperation of the Syrians is far easier to spot as rich Persian Gulf men scour the camps to buy brides living in tents. Rape, child brides and temporary marriages are prevalent.

“People are marrying off their daughters for as little as 100 Jordanian dinars ($70) because of the bad circumstances inside the camp in return for money,” said Marwa al Saloumy, who works on women’s issues for a regional advocacy group called Al Zahra.

But in Cairo, where there are no camps, the dashed dreams of both Egyptians and Syrians in the post-Arab Spring world meet on more equal terms. Egyptian men, now poorer as the economy founders, find hope in the desperate Syrians, who can’t live in their own nation because a war that once promised revolutionary change has brought devastation and forced flight instead.

Syrian women say the men instantly spot them by their dress and approach them constantly. Alaa, a woman who fled Damascus three months ago to the Helwan neighborhood that has now become a Syrian enclave, said the harassment has been one of her biggest challenges.

In light of what is happening in Syria, “this is not the time to marry and celebrate and enjoy life,” Alaa said. And because of it, “Egyptian women now are starting to hate Syrian woman.”

That Egyptian men believe they could marry someone for less is changing marriage across Egypt. Men are demanding more of women and are willing to offer less, women report, and the standards for taking a bride are falling. Where an Egyptian man was once expected to provide a home and prove he can work before he could marry, now many believe they can have a Syrian bride for as little as $45.

The men come to the areas where Syrians have congregated all day, hoping to escape forced marriages or no prospects at all. They go to the mosque, to the makeshift Syrian vendors, to apartment complexes where Syrians are known to live. They approach one stranger after another, asking for a woman in the same tone they would ask directions – security guards at apartment complexes, Muslim clerics, anyone whose accent identifies them as Syrian.

For the Syrians, defending the women in their community has become a means to maintain their dignity even as they are living in dire circumstances.

“The thugs of Bashar Assad have spread these false rumors,” explained Khalid. “He has destroyed our nation and now he is destroying the reputation of our women.”

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, there are nearly 70,000 Syrian refugees living in Egypt, most in and around Cairo, all arriving in the last year.

But it is unclear how many Egyptians have taken a Syrian bride. Instead, it is a crisis built on rumor.

One regional women’s organization reported recently that 12,000 Syrian women have married Egyptian men in the last year. But according to the Ministry of Justice in Egypt, the official number of marriages between Egyptian men and Syrian women between January 2012 and March 2013 is 170, with 57 of those nuptials between January and March 2013, according to an Al Ahram online newspaper report.

Moreover, neither side wants to admit they are partaking. Syrians here find such claims insulting, and Egyptian women don’t want to admit that their men could find Syrians more attractive.

Some Muslim clerics have urged Egyptian men to marry Syrian women as an act of charity, and there are even rumors that top members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the secretive religious society through which Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi rose to prominence, have taken Syrian women as second wives.

Earlier this month, the National Council of Women condemned the push to marry Syrian women, urging Egyptian officials to intervene. It even set up a hotline for Syrians to call and complain.

The number doesn’t work.

Egyptian matchmakers say they keep getting requests for Syrian women but refuse to oblige. They say they do not want to create yet another problem for Egyptian women – another obstacle to marriage.

Nashwa Soltan has worked as a matchmaker for a decade. For the first time, in the last year, two of every 10 men she meets ask for a Syrian bride.

“He has difficult demands,” Soltan said, referring to one such man she is working with. “He is a 54-year-old widower and he has three children, two of them are in college and the third is in sixth grade. And he wants a beautiful woman in her 40s who doesn’t have children and who doesn’t want to have any children.

“He wants someone to cook for his kids and wake up early for him and his children. He wants a servant,” Soltan said.

Soltan tried to hook him up with three Egyptian women, but the Egyptian women always turned him down.

“He tells the women from the first date that he won’t change anything in the house and that each one of his children likes certain types of food and he is expecting her to cook for each one of them,” Soltan said. When he asks to only see Syrian women, Soltan said she refused.

The painter, who refused to give his name, appeared to be just as unlucky. After the sellers lectured him on why he was on a fool’s errand, he walked quietly around the corner where no Syrian women awaited him.

Frustrated, he walked away. The Syrians vendors smirked as though they had won a fight.

“We still have our dignity” Khalid explained.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/05/14/191195/in-cairo-desperate-egyptian-men.html#.UZoe1LVwrp4#storylink=cpy

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Politically motivated sexual assault: the Egypt story none want to hear

What happened to the Egyptian women who were gang raped and sexually tortured in Tahrir Square on 25 January 2013? Not much, other than power holders incriminating the victims as being responsible for bringing the assault upon themselves. Consequently, four leading rights organisations – El Nadim Center for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Torture and Violence, the Center for New Woman Studies, Nazra for Feminist Studies and the Center for Egyptian Women's Legal Aid – have filed an official complaint on behalf of seven female clients.

They have provided evidence, in videos and testimonies, of women who were violently sexually assaulted, which they believe was undertaken in a systematic manner, and have demanded an investigation to reveal the identity of the perpetrators and call them to justice. The organisations believe that such violence is politically motivated, intended to intimidate women against engaging in activism against the government.

Farah Shash, a psychologist with El Nadeem Center argues that although politically motivated sexual assault was practised during the rule of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF), such incidents have increased in frequency and severity since the Muslim Brotherhood took over. The targets are both women and men who are either activists or bystanders in protest spaces. The political nature of many of these assaults is clear.

Yet many prefer to talk about the problem of sexual harassment more generally. To do so entails a public condemnation of society and government alike for failing women, but to talk of politically motivated sexual assault is to primarily hold the Muslim Brotherhood accountable for using it as a political strategy for eliminating opposition. Critics would argue that the opposition has also been engaged in violence against the government. However, this disregards the asymmetry of power between a ruling party that can resort to its national security apparatus and its militias, compared with the resources available to citizens.

Irrespective of whether the sexual assault is politically or socially motivated, a culture of fear threatens to obscure the iconic 2011 image of protesting women in Tahrir Square. In conversations with women living in Mo'assasset el Zakat, an impoverished shanty town in close proximity to El Marg, north of Cairo, the views are divided. Some argue that women should not go into Tahrir Square anymore, they should leave this kind of political activism to men and concentrate on their work and families. Others see it differently. They argue that this is a ploy to terrorise and intimidate women so that they do not go out to the streets, and the only thing to do is push back and not be deterred.

However, women do not always have the choice. Across many parts of Egypt, families have been withdrawing their daughters from schools and universities because of the lax security situation. Culture is not to blame: it is not that men do not want to see their daughters educated, on the contrary, but they fear that the women and girls will be vulnerable to harassment and assault. Yet no one is talking about the immense human cost of a generation of women missing out on education because of government failure to ensure a safe and assault-free environment. Why?

There is a reason why the everyday realities of women and girls and their families are not featuring as prominently in the international policy arenas and the media: there seems to be an implicit policy of silence – almost to the point of censorship – of not criticising the Muslim Brotherhood too much for fear of appearing Islamophobic and orientalist.

No one, for example, is listening to the stories of Egyptian women in Qena, Fayoum, Cairo and elsewhere about their anger and despair at some of the religious leaders at the local mosques who are actively encouraging married men to take on Syrian women as wives. Sharing their husbands is not the kind of solidarity with the Syrian people women had in mind. Polygamy in Egypt has rarely been practised and when it has, it has been done in secret. Yet there has been very little talk about how religious leaders affiliated to particular Islamist movements are wreaking havoc in the homes of Egyptian families. All the while, many Egyptian women are suffering in silence, anguishing over the idea or the experience of having to share their husbands.

The irony is that while the international community is keen to show its political correctness by ignoring the voices of Egyptian women critical of the regime, many of the country's citizens are fighting against the Muslim Brotherhood's and Salafis' claim to be the sole guardians and representatives of Islam, and are resisting attempts to vilify them as traitors to religion.

The failure of the government to send strong signals to perpetrators of politically motivated assault and to those promoting practices and behaviour that undermine women's wellbeing can only be interpreted as complicity in these very acts. And saying those who critique the government are critiquing Islam is a way of using religion for political ends that many Egyptian Muslim women and men are not going to buy into anymore.

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Meet a famous Arab sex therapist

 Shereen El Feki – a writer, broadcaster and PhD in molecular immunology – spent five years investigating the radical upheaval of Arab society: not in the political sphere, but in the bedrooms of the region. Sex, she believes, is deeply enmeshed with religion, politics and the economy. And learning about married life, dating, homosexual circles and sex education, to name only a few of the taboo topics she explored, can give us rich insight into everyday lives and dreams. Here, in an adapted excerpt from her book Sex and The Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World (out March 16), Ms. El Feki introduces us to a famous Arab sex therapist.

Lackluster lovemaking is positively un-Islamic.

“Let none of you come upon his wife like an animal, and let there be an emissary between them,” the Prophet Mohammed is reported to have said. “What is this emissary, O Messenger of God?” a clueless believer asked. “The kiss and [sweet] words,” he replied.

If those sentiments seem to be lost in contemporary Arab society, one woman is out to breathe that pioneering spirit back into marital relations: Heba Kotb, the Arab world’s best-known sex therapist.

“We don’t have a lot of time in this world. And we practise sex, so let’s practise it in a good way,” she enthused. “Let’s transform it into the dynamo of our life and our happiness.”

Kotb and I first met at her clinic in a trendy part of Cairo a couple of years before the recent uprisings. “For now, I’m booked three months in advance. Daily, I see between 10 and 20 [patients]. In the summer [when Egyptians living abroad, and Arabs from elsewhere in the region, visit Cairo], it’s usually a mess.”

Her Egyptian patients come from all classes, locations, and age groups; although women are traditionally expected to head into sexual hibernation at menopause (in Arabic, the “age of despair”), Kotb’s clientele also includes a sprinkling of those well past retirement.

Patients have not always been forthcoming. When Kotb first set up shop in 2001, the few people bold enough to seek help were wary about putting in an appearance. “The man would ask whether he would be seen in my office or not [and], if there’s another patient on the day, whether there would be a space so that they would not overlap,” she recalled.

Now, she says, “They are waiting outside. Things change.”

This change is in part due to Kotb herself. In 2006, she burst into Arab households with Kalam Kabir (Big Talk), a weekly TV series on sexual problems broadcast by one of Egypt’s private satellite channels. The show’s dozen or so episodes openly ventured into areas where other presenters had feared to tread – online porn, oral sex, and wedding night jitters, among them. For just under an hour, a soberly suited Kotb, her hair and neck fully covered by a hijab, dispensed advice on various topics, her lengthy monologues relieved by the occasional guest expert and an imam giving an Islamic take on the issue at hand, be it masturbation or voyeurism.

For all the hardships Egyptians now face, there is a new freedom of expression, one Kotb sees in her patients: Earlier it was mainly husbands dragging in their wives for consultation; after the 2011 uprising, she found the situation reversed. “Women are more courageous now to accuse their husbands of not being good [in bed]. It is the spirit of the revolution – I have to reject, I have to refuse, I have to say no [I am not the one to blame],” she told me.

Kotb’s advice to couples is shaped by her faith.

“I love Islam,” she told me. “I admire the religion. In radical Christianity, sex is not a good thing, even within marriage. But this is not logic; people find themselves desiring something, and they couldn’t get attached to that religion, so they start to get out of that religion. In Islam, it’s the contrary: sex is something that is advised. … This makes people more religious and more loving to this religion, which is giving them all this space, which is giving them all this pleasure – and also the reward in this life and the hereafter.”

Kotb is in her 40s; like many Egyptians of her generation, she became interested in Islam at university. “I was brought up in a very liberal house; I was wearing a swimsuit until after I got married.” Her husband, whom she met at medical school, came from an even less observant background, but together, she said, “we decided to make ourselves and our future families better than our older families, so we started to read about religion, to study Koran, to get it by heart.” It was around this time that Kotb decided to put on hijab, much to her parents’ dismay – at the time, head scarves were something for servants, not aspiring surgeons.

Her career in sexology came later. As a working mother, Kotb decided to forgo a career in surgery for something less time intensive: forensic medicine. She began working on the sexual abuse of children – both victims and perpetrators – and it was through this that she developed her interest in sexuality. A doctorate from the United States on sexuality in Islam topped off her training, and in Cairo she began to build her patient roster, which now extends to several Gulf states, and a following among Muslims in Canada as well.

Kotb is obviously an inspiration to some; I’ve seen strangers come up to her in public to thank her for her show. How many of these fans are actually following her advice is another matter. “I like Heba Kotb,” one married woman in her early 20s in a working-class neighbourhood of Cairo told me, “because she explains everything in a modest and useful way. I watch it always, but my mother does not like her. I heard from her [Kotb] that I need to ask for my sexual rights. But I cannot apply that because my husband will not agree or will feel that I am rude.”

To be sure, Kotb’s advice seems daring to many by today’s standards.

Given recent fatwas forbidding oral sex or nudity between the conjugal sheets, her suggestions on how to spice up spousal relations have earned her conservative opponents. But on closer inspection, Kotb is hardly a radical – something that puts her in the crosshairs of other, more liberal sexologists across the region.

She is, for example, an implacable opponent of premarital sex, on psychosexual as well as religious grounds. And for all her talk of women exerting their God-given sexual rights, it’s still men first in Kotb’s book. “He is exposed to many temptations outside the home. Be available to please him and do not give him a reason to make a choice between you and hellfire.”

The advice of Kotb and other Islamically inflected sex therapists pales in comparison with the full-blooded approach of the past.

Take, for example, the Encyclopedia of Pleasure. We know little about its author, Ali ibn Nasr al-Katib, other than where and when he wrote: Baghdad in the late 10th or early 11th century. But short of cybersex and porn videos, its 43 chapters cover every conceivable sexual practice. “On the Advantages of a Non-virgin over a Virgin,” “On Increasing the Sexual Pleasure of Man and Woman,” and “Description of the Nasty Way of Doing It and Lewd Sex” give you some idea of its vast scope.

The Encyclopedia is also full of women with full-throttle sex drives. The sexual insatiability of women was a well-established theme long before Ali ibn Nasr came on the scene. The Koran tells the story of the wife of a Pharaonic court official, better known as Zuleika, who attempted to seduce the Prophet Joseph, then a young and handsome slave. When he refused her advances, she claimed that he was the seducer, but her lie was exposed when people noticed that his shirt was torn from the back, proving that he had been fleeing her, not the other way around.

It is tempting to contrast today’s close-mindedness and sexual hang-ups, to the freewheeling, fun-loving women of the Encyclopedia.

It is, however, important to remember that this is not some medieval Masters and Johnson; Ali ibn Nasr is telling tales, not taking a compass to female sexual response. His stories may be exaggerated, or even fabricated, but that’s not the point. What’s remarkable about his work, seen through 21-first-century eyes, is not whether women actually behaved in this way in the eleventh century, but the fact that it was considered desirable that they should express their sexuality – at least in private– and that it was socially acceptable to write about it in such a free, frank, and detailed fashion.

Adapted from Sex and the Citadel. Source

Egyptians protest against sexual violence

It happens at night: Genital mutilation in Egypt

Despite being legally banned, female genital mutilation in Egypt is on the rise, causing lifelong pains, health problems and even death for the women who undergo it. Islamists are pushing to legalize the procedure again.

Umm Mohamed lives in a part of Cairo where others dump their garbage. The 47-year-old Muslim woman has experienced many hardships in her life. Putting on a brave face, she says she is used to being daily surrounded by dirt and misery. But what really hurts, she admits, is the pain she personally had to endure 35 years ago.

When Mohamed was 12, nearly all parents from the quarter where she lived brought their daughters of the same age to a hair dresser. "We didn't know why," she says, "but we were all very excited, as each girl had just been given a new, white dress."

In celebration of the day, the girls' hands had been painted with henna. They were ever so proud. But then came the moment of shock: "Suddenly this man, who was really a stranger to us, started to undress us," she recalls. "Then he got out his razor blade." All the girls underwent the procedure which mutilated them for life - without narcotics and without even minimal hygene standards.

'How can my family do this to me?'

Mohamed bled for three days. When it didn't stop, her father went to the local baker for some ashes to cover up the wound. But the dirt only made everything worse. "I still remember asking myself how my family could do this to me," Mohamed says, tears clouding her eyes. Another girl from her neighbourhood, she adds, even died after the procedure.

And that girl was hardly alone. As the number of deaths rose, Egypt banned female genital mutilation (FGM) by law in 2008. Medical practitioners and midwives, who traditionally perform the procedure in the countryside, now do so at the risk of imprisonment. Issuing an Islamic legal opinion, a so-called fatwa, Egypt's Grand Mufti has also clarified that female genital mutilation is against the Islamic value system.

Female genital mutilation now for twice the money

But since the revolution, Umm Mohamed says she has seen a new increase in female genital mutilations.

During the Mubarak regime people used to fear punishment, but these days the medical practitioners in her quarter don't even bother to hide their actions any more: "During the day, they circumcise little boys, and the girls they do at night for twice the money," Mohamed says angrily. "Everybody knows this."

Mustering her courage as a simple woman, Mohamed went to the police station to make a report. "But the officers told me that they had other things to worry about," says the mother of three, who was able to save her own daughter the painful mutilation.

Umm Mohamed openly addresses what for most Egyptian woman is a taboo: Most victims live in chronic pain and have problems with their sexuality, and they also face serious health problems both during pregnancy and giving birth.

Omayma Idris, a Cairo-based gynaecologist, says that more than 90 percent of all married Egyptians today are thought to have undergone mutilation. After the prohibition, she says, one could see a decline, "but since the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists are in power in Egypt, the numbers are on the rise again; they encourage families to do it again."

Not even the deeply religious Muslims in Saudi Arabia mutilate girls and women, she adds.

Islamists push for legalization

Salafists and representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood - the political home of Egypt's President Mohamed Mursi - want to see female genital mutilation legalized again. Their push for legalization alerted the German advocacy group for women's rights, Terre des Femmes, which collected 12,000 signatures against the practice in Egypt.

The group presented the signatures together with a petition to the Egyptian ambassador in Berlin at the beginning of November.

In several places around the country, Islamists have already created precedents, according to Mervat Tallawy, president of the National Women's Council for Egypt. A few weeks ago, she learned about the Muslim Brotherhood using buses as mobile clinics in the rural Minia province.

"The mutilation of girls had been offered as a sort of health service, free of charge," Tallawy says. And the buses, she adds, had stickers with the logo of the "Party for Freedom and Justice" - the political branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Following the incident, the National Women's Council contacted the local governor and the Ministry of Health in Cairo. But a spokesperson of the Muslim Brotherhood flatly denied all charges and, in turn, accused the villagers of misusing the logo.

Tallawy laughs bitterly laugh about that. Villagers, she says, lead very simple lives and many can barely read. She doesn't think they're capable of such forgery. But what she does believe to be more likely is that the Muslim Brotherhood is funding illegal mutilation procedures in the countryside.

"That's child abuse and a barbaric act," Tallawy says with disgust. "But as long as the Egyptian president doesn't explicitly condemn such actions, the fundamentalists are going to carry on and lead us back into the Middle Ages. I have no idea where their hatred for women comes from."

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The Prophet's Curse: Islam's Ancient Divide Fuels Middle East Conflicts

In the countries that follow the Muslim faith, the lines between past and present often blur, making it seem as though the past is not over, and certainly not forgiven. Indeed, the past can come terribly alive here, and it can turn terribly deadly, again and again, every day.

When representatives from around the world convened in the Iranian capital of Tehran last Thursday for the start of a Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement, an annual meeting of 120 nations that view themselves as not aligned for or against any major powers, the focus was suddenly on 1,300-year-old battles, murders and power struggles. The host was Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a Shiite. Next to him on the dais was Egypt's new president, Mohammed Morsi, a Sunni.

Morsi began his opening address with a mention of the Prophet Muhammad, but then continued: "May Allah's blessing be upon our masters Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali."

Iranian media immediately took the statement as a provocation. Abu Bakr, Umar and Uthman were Muhammad's successors after the Prophet's death in 632. Sunni Muslims venerate them as the first caliphs -- but Shiite Muslims consider them usurpers and traitors to the faith, hated figures whose very names should not be spoken. Muhammad's true successor, Shiites say, was Ali, their first imam, who later fought against the other three before being murdered.

Morsi went on to discuss the present situation in Syria, where Bashar Assad is overseeing the massacre of rebels who are mostly Sunni. Assad and his clique belong to the country's Alawite minority, which is more closely aligned with the Shiites. "The bloodshed will not stop without intervention from outside," the Egyptian president declared, saying that Assad's regime had lost all legitimacy. Morsi, a Sunni, made these statements while sitting next to the Shiite Ahmadinejad, who has been providing the Syrian regime with weapons and now fighters, too.

Morsi must know that any country that intervenes in Syria risks ending up at war with Iran, as well. The frontlines of the conflict between Sunnis and Shiites run through many countries in the Middle East, and those who fan the flames in one part of the region may find themselves under fire in another part entirely.

An Ancient Conflict

From Tunisia to Bahrain, the Arab Spring began as a rebellion against despots and their rapacious clans. It began with a cry for freedom, justice and prosperity. But, increasingly, these rebellions are being sucked into the maelstrom that is the ancient conflict between these two different camps of Islam, the Sunnis and the Shiites.

It was power that was at stake after Muhammad's death, and it's still at stake today. Like tectonic plates that explode into motion after long periods of apparent calm, there is always friction under the surface between these two groups. In the past, that tension has often burst forth as carnage, for example, in the Iraqi civil war, which began in 2004 and still hasn't really ended. In late July of this year, 27 separate explosions killed 107 people within the space of a few hours. Most of the victims were Shiites, and it's assumed the bombers were Sunnis.

But rarely have so many countries and regimes experienced active tensions at once. There has been far more of this since the rebellions of the Arab Spring began in North Africa, in Yemen, Syria and Bahrain, toppling moribund despots or forcing them into crisis and even open warfare. There are also rumblings in Jordan, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. In Iraq, everyone is afraid of each other, while Iran fears an attack from Israel.

The rebellions all began in a similar way -- people wanted to topple their dictators and bring an end to despotic rule. But these political battles have also fanned new fears along old fronts.

Arab Spring Momentum

When Sunnis in Syria fight their country's Alawite regime, they receive help from Sunnis in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. At the same time, Iran supplies Damascus with money, weapons and, more recently, troops.

When Shiites in Bahrain fight their country's Sunni king, they're applauded by Iran and by Syria's regime. At the same time, Saudi Arabia supports Bahrain's despot.

For years, representatives of Bahrain's Shiite majority, who are treated as second-class citizens, have been demanding more rights from their king. The conflict had been brewing for a long time, but it was the momentum of the other Arab revolutions that brought thousands of Bahrainis out to the streets.

When the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), a consortium consisting primarily of the oil-rich states around the Persian Gulf, met in March 2011, it declared that Libya's Colonel Moammar Gadhafi should resign because he had lost all legitimacy by deploying tanks against his own people. Shortly after, GCC member Saudi Arabia sent tanks into Bahrain to crush the peaceful protests there.

The silence from al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya, the two major satellite news channels operated by the Sunni states of Qatar and Saudi Arabia respectively, is also telling. On some days, these broadcasters provide hourly reports on murders in Syria, yet they give little coverage to the violence in Bahrain.

Syria's state-run media, on the other hand, deplore the harsh treatment of the largely Shiite opposition in Bahrain -- even as Syria's own regime has turned to carpet-bombing entire neighborhoods in which primarily Sunnis live.

Power and Faith

The war that the regime in Damascus is waging against Syria's mostly Sunni rebels is increasingly taking on denominational characteristics, and not just within the country. The struggle is also drawing in external participants belonging to both camps. Soldiers from Lebanon's militant Islamist group Hezbollah, which is Shiite, have come to help the regime, as have elite forces from Iran, while Libyan volunteers have joined the rebels, who also receive significant amounts of money from Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

In Iraq, attacks by Sunni radicals are on the rise once again as the Shiite government forces Sunnis out of positions of power. Sunni terrorists groups in Pakistan murder Shiites, and even a Shiite mosque in Belgium was the target of an arson attack this March that killed the mosque's imam. The presumed attacker, a radical Sunni, declared after his arrest that he had acted out of revenge for Iran's military aid to Syria.

Shiites make up only 10 to 13 percent of the world's 1.4 billion Muslims, but their representation in the states around the Persian Gulf is significantly higher. Shiites account for 90 percent of the population in Iran, 70 percent in Bahrain, over 60 percent in Iraq, 35 percent in Kuwait and around 10 percent in Saudi Arabia.

In the Islamic world, where power and faith have always commingled, political conflicts often become religious ones, turning into a question of power that cuts along one of the region's most important frontlines.

Islam's Curse

It began with a question of power, as well. When the Prophet Muhammad died, he left behind a problem that would become his religion's curse: the question of succession. Unlike Jesus, for example, Muhammad was not only a prophet, but also a military commander. He was both a religious and a political leader, and he left behind a correspondingly large power vacuum. A dispute quickly arose as to whether his legitimate successor should be selected from within the prophet's circle of close associates, or whether it was more important that it be a relative of Muhammad's -- for example, Ali ibn Abu Talib, his cousin and son-in-law. Supporters of this second viewpoint were known as "Shiat Ali," or "followers of Ali," the source of the term "Shiite." Initially, though, the other faction gained the upper hand, and Ali wasn't chosen as caliph until three others -- Abu Bakr, Umar and Uthman -- had preceded him. Ali was then murdered in 661.

The initial struggle for power continued for more than two decades until something strange occurred: During the Battle of Kerbala in what is now Iraq, an enemy army killed Ali's son Hussein, and thus his last faithful successor. The struggle was over, and the Shiat Ali had lost.

Yet instead of vanishing into obscurity like so many other minor religious denominations, the Shiites grew stronger. Hussein's downfall became "the big bang that created and set into motion the rapidly expanding cosmos of Shia Islam," says Heinz Halm, an expert on Shia Islam at the University of Tübingen, in Germany. "For Shiites, Kerbala is the pivotal point around which their faith revolves." In other words, it is a faith that grew out of defeat and has defined itself through resistance.

Within Islam, two competing ideas established themselves. There are the Sunnis (named after the Sunnah, the canon of Muhammad's teachings), who see power and faith as one. The Shiites, meanwhile, held little power over the centuries and were left with only the mythos surrounding the hero of their religion, Ali.

An unbroken succession of imams, Ali's successors, continued for the next two centuries. According to legend, the 12th imam disappeared in 874, but did not die. It is believed that this 12th imam will return one day as the enforcer of God's will.

Everlasting Mistrust

But if any legitimate authority on Earth must wait until the return of the 12th imam, what does that mean for real world powers? Nothing good, it turns out, since Shiites' true loyalty is already committed elsewhere.

The result is an everlasting sense of mistrust on the part of Sunni rulers toward their Shiite subjects. The two groups' roles and tensions remained largely the same: Sunni caliphs ruled over Shiite subjects, who were often denied entry into the military or top positions at court.

Then, in the 16th century, the Safavid dynasty came to power in Iran and forced its subjects to adopt Shia Islam. This was the beginning of the rivalry that still smolders today between Shiite Iran and the Arab countries, with their majority Sunni populations. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Arab world's religious center shifted toward the Arabian Peninsula, where Mecca and other holy sites are located, and where, in 1902, young Ibn Saud took advantage of a religious alliance established by his forefathers to conquer large parts of the peninsula -- an area that became Saudi Arabia, with Ibn Saud as its king.

Here, the particularly narrow-minded Wahhabi branch of Sunni Islam became the state religion, and Shiites from the conquered eastern provinces were condemned as heretics. Then came oil. With each new source discovered, the Saudi kingdom grew to become one of the world's largest energy suppliers, and was then able to put enormous sums of money toward financing Wahhabi preachers around the world.

But Saudi Arabia's enormous oilfields are all located in the east of the country -- where the Shiites live. If the Shiites were to break away from Saudi Arabia, it would spell the end of the country's oil wealth. Yet simply making the Shiites citizens with equal rights would amount to a declaration of war against the country's religious establishment, as well as against large parts of the population, which have been raised in a culture of hate. Saudi Arabia's general population is far more conservative than its 88-year-old monarch Abdullah -- and even he has not yet managed to allow women the right to drive a car.

Declining Western Influence

The same conflict between Sunnis and Shiites also runs through Iraq. In the decades under the ironclad dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, religion in Iraq was a private matter -- not because the Iraqis themselves had decided it should be, but because any show of partisanship amounted to a challenge to the state, and that was a dangerous thing. Even during the eight years of war with Iran that began in 1980, participants on both sides shot at enemies who shared their faith. Many of the Iraqi soldiers were Shiites -- as were most of their Iranian opponents.

Soon after the US Army swept out Saddam's regime over the course of 19 days in 2003, Iraqi Sunnis began fighting the Americans who had forced them out of power. Shiites also fought against the US troops. But more than that, fanatics from both sides began killing each other. Starting in 2004, Baghdad alone was often rocked by multiple attacks a day.

Karl Marx described religion as the opiate of the masses, but religion also serves as a sort of cocaine for those eager to fight, a first-rate means of inciting groups against one another. Iraq remains a divided country to this day, with neighborhoods, local governments and even garbage collection split along denominational lines. Currently, power is in the hands of a Shiite government led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Iraq is ruled by the fear that its Sunni minority could take strength from the coming downfall of Syria's regime and threaten the Iraqi government once again.

The conflict between these religious factions has become so virulent partly because perceived enemy forces from outside the region are growing weaker. The West, and especially the United States, no longer plays such an important role. The occupation of Iraq is over, the US would prefer not to get involved in Syria either and, in general, the Arab revolutions caught the country off guard. When the GCC approved the invasion of Bahrain, it didn't even ask the US, although the Fifth Fleet of the US Navy is stationed there. Saudi Arabia was far more concerned with the possibility that a Shiite takeover in Bahrain, located so close to Saudi Arabia's own Shiite minority, would jeopardize the Saudi rulers' control over oil production.

 

A Dangerous Rebellion

Yet, in a sense, the Sunnis' rise to power in the face of Assad's coming downfall is little more than an adjustment to reflect the demographic situation in Syria, which is home to considerably more Sunnis than Alawites.

Something similar happened in 2003, when the Shiite majority took over power in Iraq at the same time that Hezbollah, also Shiite, was making gains in Lebanon. In 2005, Jordan's King Abdullah II, a Sunni, warned of a "Shiite crescent" that would soon stretch from Baghdad to Tehran. Now the pendulum is swinging back in the opposite direction.

For a time during the revolutions in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, it seemed that the divide between Sunnis and Shiites didn't play a significant role. But things look different in Syria, which is another reason why this is a particularly dangerous rebellion.

There is an apocalyptic prophecy in Islam that some attribute to the Prophet Muhammad. It's only a fragment, the legend of an evil being known as the Sufyani that will one day arrive to sow death and ruin among the faithful. This tradition, supposedly ascribed to Muhammad, says the Sufyani will rise from the depths of the Earth beneath Damascus.

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