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Crying at the Tomb of Salahuddin Ayyubi

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As the Muslim Ummah gets into the last Ashra of this Ramazan, we find our hearts perched on the tomb of Salahuddin Ayubi, the great Sultan who united the Muslims from Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Syria and bulk of Levant into a cohesive force and defeated the crusaders (something similar to Nato) of that time. With tearful eyes, we pay our homage to the great Sultan in the city of his resting place, Damascus. Looking around we find brother on brother’s throat, divided on the fault lines of Shiite, Sunni, Kurd, Turk, Arab, Salafi, Allawi, Irani.......and the list goes on!


Is it the collective failure of the people, ulema, political leaders, intellectuals or all of the above?
The Turkish Zaman newspaper had a picture of a smart soldier from the Syrian resistance adoring the front page; a blue-eyed young man with muscular features, brandishing a machine gun.......probably, ready to kill his brothers from Syria. We heard that Bashar Al-Assad’s forces have been pounding their brothers with gunship helicopters and tanks and fighter aircrafts. Go back in 2011, we had the same story being relayed in Tripoli and Ben Ghazi; then it was Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s forces doing the same to his brothers in Libya.


The dangerous and ominous thing is that the countries who are playing with fire don’t realise that it will reach their homes as well. Iran and Turkey are heading to a possible confrontation, despite the fact that unleashing of Iraqi fragmentation and rise of Kurds, threaten both. Greater Kurdistan is now becoming a reality; are we heading for a grand conflagration for a Turkish-Kurdish war, or a Saudi-Iranian war, or a Turkish-Iranian war, leading to complete destabilisation of the Middle East and rise of sub nationalists where Greater Middle East will be redrawn, new states emerge, creating hostilities within the Islamic World for another 100 years? Who will lose and who will win.......you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to answer. That reminds us of a timeline chart drawn in a US Air Force scenario building paper in 1996, with the name of Alternate Futures for 2025.


The combined scenarios had following timelines: 2002 -Saddam eliminated; 2012 - birth of Kurdish State; 2014 -Turkey-Kurdish war; and 2014 - Iran defeated by the US-led coalition after the closure of Gulf.
If you extend the scenarios and link the past two decades, one can start grasping the objective of the long war or the war on terror. Imagine the breakup of the Middle East, a fractured Turkey or Iran - what centrifugal forces could be unleashed as a result of these horrendous scenarios; could Pakistan take sides in the Persian-Arab contest; what will be the fallout for Balochistan where the Hazara community is already being targeted to complete the jixa puzzle of Iranian question; what about Greater Balochistan as Iran fragments? And if a nuclear Pakistan is strategically suffocated, what happens to India? By the way, India has already shown its reservations on the Greater Middle East plan and is using the BRICKS forum to air its views.


We, unfortunately, are in no position to advise the Muslim Ummah, as it does not exist at present. We can only weep besides the tomb of Salahuddin Ayubi Al-Tikriti. Can Pakistani politico military leadership and honourable judges get over with their business as usual and the media sensitise the nation on the threat of extinction knocking at our door. Can we advise the leadership in the Middle East that you cannot have your palaces saved, if you burn the countryside all around you; for the sake of humanity and in the name of God stop bleeding each other. If you cannot understand our poor English, we quote a phrase from Martin Luther King Jr: “The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate.
“In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes…….Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”


We will conclude this article by quoting something from Professor Michel Chossudovsky of Global Research. He writes: “In an article published in December 2007, following the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, I suggested that the US-Nato course for Pakistan consisted in fomenting social, ethnic and factional divisions and political fragmentation, including the territorial break up of Pakistan. Recent developments (including the aerial bombardments of Pakistani villages under the auspices of the ‘war on terrorism’) indelibly point to a broadening of the Afghan war theatre, which now encompasses parts of Pakistan. The underlying tendency is towards an Afghan-Pakistan war. Already in 2005, a report by the US National Intelligence Council (NIC) and the CIA forecast a ‘Yugoslav-like fate’ for Pakistan ‘in a decade with the country riven by civil war, bloodshed and interprovincial rivalries, as seen recently in Balochistan’ (Energy Compass, March 2, 2005). According to the NIC-CIA, Pakistan is slated to become a ‘failed state’ by 2015, ‘as it would be affected by civil war, complete Talibanisation and struggle for control of its nuclear weapons’.“

The writers are freelance columnists based in Zimbabwe.
Email: yalla_umar@yahoo.com

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