When the Sunni chickens come home to roost

"The chickens come home to roost" is a phrase famously used by Malcolm X, that icon of the African-American civil rights movement who is often sidelined in mainstream American discourse, as he commented on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

Two weeks after the incident, Malcolm said it was a case of "chickens coming home to roost", suggesting that violence by white America, which Kennedy had failed to stop, came back to him.

The idiom has since aptly described so many events in recent history. The evolution of Saddam Hussein, armed to the teeth to fight post-revolution Iran in the 80s, and al-Qaeda, both of whom turned against their once providers, are just two recent examples.

More recently in Malaysia, the government suddenly finds itself struggling for answers to know why so many young Muslims have left their comfortable lives to join what they believed was “jihad” in Syria and Iraq. They conveniently forgot that not too long ago, Umno leaders were regurgitating the myths about the Syrian conflict as found on social media, that the struggle against the Bashar regime – a tyrant no doubt – by foreign-financed Sunni groups, is a holy war against the Shia “infidels”.

Television programmes, newspaper features, live talk shows and Friday khutbahs were (and still are) filled with anti-Shia rhetoric, the bulk of which borders on ignorance and historical myths surrounding this age-old conflict. Many were the same stories peddled by Saudi priests in the eighties, attempting to curb Sunni Muslims’ support for the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, which overthrew one of the most ruthless monarchies in modern Muslim history and threatened to inspire similar uprisings against the colonial droppings littered in the Arab world.

Once, during a Friday sermon, I was rudely awakened from my usual weekly afternoon siesta by the Imam lambasting Shia Muslims as infidels, claiming that they have made halal the blood of Sunnis, that they are conducting genocide of Sunnis in Iraq and Syria and that they are the agents of Zionism. He then linked his arguments to “aqidah” (Islamic creed), something which our local Islamic scholars have made so elastic that it now also covers reading a Malay Bible.

All these seem to have been blindly lifted from some obscure works published by some Gulf publishing house awash with petro-dollars. Funnily enough, at the peak of the Shiaphobia, a group of “Islamic NGOs” actually launched a boycott of Iranian products, focussing on the Iranian dates which flood our supermarkets every Ramadan. Some of these groups are the same ones who recently launched a jihad after stuffing their children with Cadbury chocolates!

Again it reflects the sad state of Muslim preachers who fail to do their own readings on the subject by consulting the large corpus of works on Islamic history written by both Muslims and non-Muslims. Such was the case when a PAS Youth leader recently requested that the party’s ulama wing declare whether the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) is indeed involved in a holy war or is deviant. It just lends credence to the argument that Muslims nowadays have turned their scholars into a kind of priesthood, thinking they hold all solutions and answers to problems which they are too lazy to read up on, on their own.

I have never been a fan of Western “terrorism” experts, who are a dime a dozen in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and who have done immense damage to their governments’ foreign policies. In their limited understanding, they would erroneously lump together fringe groups such as Isil and Boko Haram with well-established, legitimate political movements such as Hizbullah and Hamas, just as they do by lumping a diplomacy-savvy and functional Iran with a dysfunctional state like North Korea. Far from it, Hizbullah and Hamas are political movements with a sophisticated understanding of contemporary politics, and have enjoyed support from both Muslims and Christians in their respective domains. And if facts don’t convince, then perhaps a picture of young hijabless Lebanese girls in sexy outfits waving the Hizbullah flags would.

Despite all this, even someone with great dislike of Western “analysts” like me can agree with their stand on Isil.

Isil is not much different from its cousins, who for long have gained footing among second-generation Muslim youths in Europe in search of their Muslim identity. In the nineties, large-scale gatherings were held in Wembley-sized arenas, with fiery speeches calling for the return of the caliphate. Malaysian youths have only recently been exposed to these dodgy ideas, which probably missed an entire chapter on the history of the caliphate: the utter social and political depravity which brought down what was once the pride of human civilisation, but now confined to the dustbins of Islamic history.

Our salaried defenders of faith, ever busy nabbing couples when they are not telescoping the Ramadan moon once a year, were of course unable to counter the convincing arguments by these groups, thanks to their own illiteracy.

The truth is that these ideologies have attracted a large number of Muslims, many with good jobs, though their successful careers could have worked against them. Their hectic lives have, after all, denied them a chance to intellectually scrutinise the speeches they hear on the CD players of their SUVs, and the materials they share on their ever-beeping gadgets.

They have made up their minds on what to do about their empty lives after hearing a sermon or two on the great genocide by the evil forces of Shiism. Like the crusades, which saw thousands of Christians marching to Muslim cities chanting martyrdom, they too now march from faraway lands hoping to redeem their materialistic life with the promised “companions of beautiful, big and lustrous eyes”.

But I believe God is merciful, and He may after all grant them martyrdom, but only because these misguided souls were prepared to die for what they believed in.

Yet, here’s the problem: as they step into paradise, they would get the rude shock of finding out that some of these “big-eyed companions” are Shias, the same people they had fought against.

By the time these Shia virgins are united with the Sunni martyrs, it is already too late for those who encouraged them to go there to say, “We didn’t mean that.” Just as it is futile for them to take pains to explain and redefine the term "jihad". They should instead look back at their ignorant speeches repeated nationwide on television channels and mosques, instead of blaming good but unthinking people who have actually put action where the mouth is and made the ultimate sacrifice.

Long after the conflicts in Syria and Iraq are over, if these youths survived and were spared the nights in paradise with Shia houris, and return only to find it difficult to restart their materialistic lives, they would know who to blame.

And that is probably when the Sunni chickens will come home to roost. – July 5, 2014.

*This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insider.