Losing National Pride
The darnest things have been said about Iraqi people. Take this speech for an example.
“ O people of Iraq! You are like a pregnant woman who, on completion of her pregnancy delivers a dead child and her husband is also dead and her period of widowhood is long and only remote relation inherits her. By God, I did not come to you of my own accord. I came to you by force of circumstances. I have heard that you say about me that I had spoken lies. May God curse you! Against whom do I speak lies? Whether against God? But I am the first to have believed in him. Whether against his Prophet? But I am the first who testified to him. Certainly not! By God, you failed to appreciate what I tried to say, and you were not capable of understanding it. Woe to you. I am giving out these powerful expressions free of any cost. I wish there were vessels good enough to contain them. “
No it wasn’t George Bush who gave this speech, but rather Imam Ali. The man who married prophet Mohammad’s daughter and is highly respected as a close follower of the prophet by all Muslims and is especially revealed among the Shea. Imam Ali gave this speech when he got fed up with Iraqi people that were dragging their feet at supporting Imam Ali in his fight against his rival. This speech is recorded in the book Nahj al Balaga “path of eloquence” that records the most famous of Imam Ali speeches and sayings. The book is considered to be one of the top examples of eloquent usages of the Arabic language.
If this is said about us by the people we adore, can you imagine what is said about us by the people we loathe?
“O people of Iraq! O people of divisiveness and hypocrisy.
I see before me heads that have ripened
And I see that the time has come to harvest them. I am going to be that harvester
Already I can visualize the blood flowing between your turbans and your beards.
The Prince of the True Believers has spread before him the arrows of his quiver and found in me the cruelest of all his arrows.
This is a small part of an address of the brutal governor of Iraq, Al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf. Having come to Iraq to quell a rebellion during the Umayyad dynasty. The “prince of true believers” is a reference to caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, who sent Hajjaj to Iraq to suppress the rebellion against him. The speech must have sent shivers down the backs of his audience. He proceeded to rule over Iraq for about 20 years with an iron fist. It is reported that he liked to gouge peoples eyes out with his own hands and chop people’s ears off. After his death many rulers had difficulty ruling over Iraq because he was a tough act to follow. Saddam came close. After Al-Hajjaj, the Iraqi people kept assassinating their rulers and rebelling against them. Earning us the dubious reputation of being supreme trouble makers. Al-Hajjaj promised and then he proceeded to deliver.
Luckily not all those wishing to rule over us deliver on their promises. Like George Bush promising us peace and prosperity . Oh well! you know what they say about something sounding too good to be true. On the weekend I heard on the radio George Bush say that Iraqi people are not used to freedom and that force is necessary to deal with us.
Mon Dieu! We must be the most miserable nation on earth. Sometimes it does seem that way. It seems like we are inherently violent. We are cursed. But then, I remember violence in hockey in Canada, L.A riots in the US, mob like lynching of Nazi collaborators in the Czechoslovakia after WWII and I force myself to remember that we are inherently human.
Here is a speech that I long to hear and so far haven’t
O People of Iraq. One day you will become the people of mediocrity and boredom.
We have been at the forefront of major historical events for far too many times and we have paid a heavy price for it. The time has come for us to take our leave and sink into obscurity. Let us give away our oil for free to the US, in fact let us deliver it to them for free with no extra charge, for this wealth has been nothing but a curse upon us. The land of the proud and free are more deserving of it, anyway, we are neither proud nor free, so we have no use for it. Let us tell Iran that they are welcome to their fight against great satan, for their quest is brave, but we shall ask them to conduct their blood bath against Americans off our lands. We shall tell the American’s that their war on terrorism is fair and just, however we shall ask them to conduct it far away from us. We have no desire to liberate Palestine, though we wish our Palestinian brothers and sisters well on their own quest for obscurity. Furthermore we have no desire for the Messiah to come back. We do not wish to be a model democracy in the middle east, because we think that Israel is doing a fine job of it, the slow genocide against the Palestinians is a nice middle eastern twist to the concept of democracy, but I digress. We simply want to raise our kids and spend our time taking care of our families. In the afternoons we shall sit around drinking tea and chat idley away for hours. We will be so bored that we will have to makeup stories and riddles in order to entertain ourselves. O People of Iraq, the time of national pride is over, we have pioneered dreams of Arab nationalists and Islamic idealists, but now we must leave all that behind. We shall become the most boring nation on earth. But wait a minute, that might become something to base national pride on. Ok! I revise that, we shall become the almost most boring nation on earth. We will allow a country like Holland earn the first price in that category, but we will be a close second. My goal is to ensure that all our lives get into a rut. From now on, our country will not be mentioned on CNN, history books will ignore us and powerful world leader will find nothing to say to us. The time of grandiose visions by powerful men is over.
There is a way between voice and presence where information flows.
