Posted by FYI (63.93.103.77) on November 05, 2001 at 11:09:59:
By Dr Fereydun Hilmi
Posted Monday November 5, 2001 - 10:55:36 AM EST
Ask anyone and they will tell you that people hate each other because of some aggressive or humiliating action they suffer at the hands of those they develop hatred for. Feuds are normally over land, honour or blood.
It was from this point of view that I tried to understand the Arabs' hatred of the Kurds. I wanted to find out the root causes of the Iraqi Genocidal tendencies towards the Kurdish nation. Why do they support so much the rights of the Palestinians and other Arabs as well as Muslims to lead independent and free lives each in their own little or big state while they vehemently oppose any attempt by the Kurds to enjoy a similar existence.
Why also do the Syrian Arabs insist on calling everything in Syria Arab, knowing full well that there are Kurds and that they had been saved from the crusaders by a Kurdish dynasty spanning several centuries. Why indeed they love calling their women Kurdish names and wear Kurdish dress and use hundreds of Kurdish words in their every day life but completely deny the existence of Kurds among them. Ironically other Muslims seem to accept this racist attitude towards the Kurds without so much a murmur. They are for example completely against inviting any Kurdish representation to their grand conferences, while small Christian minorities are represented and welcome as honoured guests and given the floor to address them as we saw during their last conference.
Throughout history we find no record of any Kurdish atrocities against the Arabs or indeed against the Persians or Turks. We do however find the opposite and plenty of them.
Furthermore Sallaheddin and the Ayyubids treated all Muslims as equal and with equal respect and care and did not differentiate between their own Kurdish nation and the others.
Then when the Arabs decided to take over the reigns of power the Ayyubids let them do so without the slightest bloodshed, the Amawid dynasty was established and later the Abbasids in Baghdad which culminated in the Mongols attacking and occupying the whole region with the most appalling and violent force you could imagine even to this day. Yet we do not find the Arabs disliking the descendents of the Mongols or Persians in the same way they do the Kurds.
Thus, the Kurds who became Muslims by the edge of the sword around 130 years after the birth of Islam, have contributed a great deal not only to the safety and well-being of Islam but also of the Arab language, culture and way of life. They have contributed greatly to Islamic science and literature of which Arabic has always been predominant.
They have supported all Arab and Islamic causes including the Palestinian cause. But we see no recognition or admittance by the Arabs or Muslims of any of that. Far from it, we find them despising the Kurds, standing in the way of their freedom and salvation not just from what they call Arab lands but also of those parts who are ruled and oppressed by the Persians and the Turks despite the fact that they happen to be at odds with Arab national aspirations and expansionism.
One would have thought that the Syrians and Palestinians would be most grateful to the Kurds for liberating Damascus and protecting it from the Crusading hordes before the Tatars came and subjugated the whole area from them and until the British and French came back eight hundred years after that to give it back to them albeit in a colonial form.
But, strangely that is not the case. I mean, it seems the Syrian Arabs think it a kind of degradation or humiliation if they admitted that Sallaheddin was a Kurd and that his dynasty ruled and defended the land, the people and the religion for some three centuries. They seem also to feel that by calling him an Arab, no one will know any better because the Arabs now and the Muslims have for the past 900 years been hiding the facts from the world.
Islam succeeded and spread because it propagated the idea that all are equal before God and so it was prudent to speak Arabic and forget all else. Then when people such as the Kurds forgot about their own nations and served Islam the Arabs treated them as second and third class Arabs who had given up their inferior nationhood and taken up the superior Arab nationhood. They are therefore good only to serve Arab nationalist causes.
In this way they have been denying Kurdish nationhood after the demise of the Ottoman Empire in exactly the same way the Turks and Persians have been denying the smaller and weaker nations who entered into Islam willingly or otherwise, their nationhood. Islamic Protestants and Catholics On the other hand the Arab countries are today practicing a form of Protestantism (Henry the Eighth style) by adopting western culture (which is completely against the rules and teachings of Islam) while maintaining lip service to their own religion and culture. This duplicity has been well learned from the English by all the Arab rulers including the "Servants of the Two Holy Shrines", the Henrys of the Arab world. The policy is: Practice the decadent western culture in all its forms and go to prayers on Friday. Or go to Haj once a year.
The Catholic Muslims are today's Iranians, Afghanis, Pakistanis and some of the most foul forms of Islamic fundamentalism unfortunately found only in Kurdistan, aided, abated and encouraged by the Iranians, the Saudis and lately Bin Laden. This is the kind of Islam practiced by semi-literate and poor usually non-Arab people with little or no understanding of Arabic and hence prone to take everything they know about the religion literally and fundamentally. That is why just as its Christian version it breeds ignorance, backwardness, poverty and fanaticism.
But the denial of identity of the Kurds and isolating and keeping them in poverty and backward conditions has also meant that Islam have not been able to rear another hero such as Sallaheddin and the best they have come up with is someone like Usama Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein. Dr Basha Al-Asad who is by no means a match for the nuclear-armed crusaders of the modern world and their Protestant Muslims, constantly following and supporting the west.
DEALING WITH SAGGING MORALE However from time to time the Syrian and Egyptian Arabs feel the need to make films about Sallahaddin which would boost their failing morale and so they have to brand him an Arab or even National Arab Hero without ever disclosing his true nationality. Invariably they deny that, before the end of the nineteenth century, all Muslims believed they were simply part of an Islamic nation and that Arab nationalism is but a creation of the British, designed purely to drive a wedge between Muslim Turks and Muslim Arabs, and divide and cut off the biggest chunk of the Ottoman empire away from the predominantly non-Arab portion.
To the Arabs of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Islam has always been about the advancement of Arab nationalism and that the countries they now consider to be the "Arab World" have been so for thousands of years. To them these nations did not exist as non-Arab nations who entered Islam by the power of Nomadic tribes coming out of the Sahara desert. During his public humiliation of Tony Blair a few days ago, Bashar Al-Asad claimed that Assyria and Syria were one and the same thing, who had never attacked another country, talking about 6000 years of peaceful Arab history in what they today call Syria.
The Arabs of today's Egypt and modern Iraq also claim similar pedigree claiming the entire history of those lands as Arab and their own heritage. Thus they all deny that the names of these modern states and their borders and constituents were all part of the "dreaded" Sykes-Picot accord and that the Arabs themselves did not choose or had a hand in any of them. The historic facts however show otherwise.
And so, it is apparent that the Arabs dislike the Kurds for all the wrong reasons. The basis I believe is a form of deep and innate Bedouin fascism and nothing less. The Kurds have served Islam like no other non-Arab nation, selflessly, consistently and loyally and asked for no rewards in return. Rather than denying their existence and nationality and instead of gassing and annihilating them, any other nation of pedigree and honour, believing in equality before God, would have placed them on a pedestal and afforded them the greatest possible respect, love and appreciation. Sadly the Arabs, and in particular those whose history and existence have been considerably touched by Kurdish selfless sacrifice are among the first to have consistently behaved in the most ungrateful way towards them.
The Syrians are currently making a film by the name of Sallaheddin Al-Ayyubi. But you will never throughout the film hear the truth about his origin, that he was Kurdish, that he believed he was fighting and protecting Islam and not some Arab nationalist cause or piece of real-estate. Nevertheless they are portraying him as an Arab Nationalist Hero who did not only fight for Islam but for Arab nationalism (something which the Syrian Arab Ba'ath are brainwashing everyone with). As far as the Syrian regime is concerned, the whole of the Arab world has always been Arab and Ba'athist. Anyone who lives within their 70 year-old modern states designed with secret Franco-British nation-reengineering plans, is an Arab and must be a Ba'athist. There is no room for anyone else just as is the case in their northern neighbouring state where everyone is a "Turk". But that is no surprise because the Syrians have been under the great influence of the Turks in everything including their way of thinking.
Therefore, the Syrians should understand the British and the Turks well. The British created Frankenstein states deliberately to maintain their influence on them. They lumped part of Kurdistan with the Baghdad and Basra Wilayets to form an unstable and week state and signed secret deals with the minority government they put in charge. They created a Pakistan made up of two parts with the whole Indian Subcontinent between them and divided Kashmir among them for the same reason. They created with the aid of the French, Syria with Kurds and Arabs and Lebanon with Muslims being ruled by a minority of Christians and so on and on.
From the Ocean to the Gulf But although they had promised a Jewish homeland in what they were later to name Palestine, their secret agreements with the French had not included such in it, and so they had to declare that they intended to do so later through the Balfour declaration. They then created Israel and put the original Arab majority under Jewish rule, which to this day is a source of the greatest instability not only in the Middle East but in the whole world.
Even so the British awakened something in the region. They managed to brainwash the "Arabs" that they were a single great nation whose past formed an Arab national history.
We must remember that neither the first Crusaders nor the second in 1914 ever accepted that Islam was a true religion. To them they could see Arabic-speaking people who had a culture and a civilization of considerable importance and influence. To all intents and purposes Christianity was the only religion, which came down from God. Therefore, the "nation" they were facing, were Arabs.
In this typically British simplistic way, all of the fifteen hundred years of Islam was simply Arab history. Not only that but everyone speaking Arabic was an Arab and therefore all the history of the Muslim Middle East belonged to the Arabs and the Semites in particular. This mentality is evident in the thinking of the British and French explorers who started roaming in their newly-acquired lands for evidence which could prove their book of faith, i.e. the Torah which coloured their views of the history of the Middle East to the extent that everything had to have some direct or indirect link with Semitism, the race of their Jewish and Christian prophets.
Secondly, the British had looked at themselves and found that they were a mixture of races of disparate origins all speaking (mainly) English. They also gave the impression that they were now all "English". Hence they wanted to create their protege nation in the same image, which is why they lumped people like the Saudis, Lebanese, Iraqis, Syrians, and others together and implanted the "Arab National Identity" in them. This suited their plans down to the ground and has worked wonders for them for the past century or so.
In fact, as far as they were concerned, they wanted to create a great deal of wealth for themselves by discovering and exploiting the oil, increasing their home production of goods which needed and fed the newly acquired markets.
The Arabs in turn were happy to take and enjoy the newly founded nation status made from the remnants of all sorts of peoples and small nations who had been forced into Islam in a long gone era, and loved the idea of the Arab nation from the Ocean to the Gulf, never questioning this false notion and the fact that such a nation never ever existed except as a multi-ethnic Islamic one. The great conflicts and contradictions we see today within the Arab world quite apart from the striking racial differences among the Black Sudanese and Blond and Blue Eyed Lebanese at the opposite ends of the spectrum are testaments to the falsehood of the existence of such a nation.
However, having been made partners in the exploration of Oil and major players on the international political and economic scene, the Arabs have taken all the good while continually blaming the West for all their ills and for "dividing" the great "Arab homeland" into little states. Notwithstanding the fact that they are quite happy they have 22 states and votes in the UN and will from time to time attack the Sykes-Picot agreement because they say it divided them up.