An Iraqi Shiite cleric who served in his country’s parliament from 2005 through 2010 gave a lecture on sectarian conflicts in the Middle East at Bridgewater State University on Monday, predicting that war between factions of political Islam will break out during the coming years.
Ayad Jamaluddin, founder of the Tajamua Ahrar party that promotes a secular government and political distance from Iran, spoke about the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood’s brand of political Islam in the Arab world, and about how the Muslim Brotherhood will fight against the ruling Wahhabists who control the oil and holy sites in Saudi Arabia.
Jamaluddin, talking to a group of students, teachers and other guests at the Maxwell Library, said with the Muslim Brotherhood rising to power in Egypt, and with the strong Muslim Brotherhood factions in Turkey, Mauritania, Libya and other countries, the Wahhabis will no longer be allowed to have so much control.
“There are 90 million Egyptians without oil, and there are 90 million Turks who don’t own any oil,” said Jamaluddin, through an Arabic translator. “The problem with the new Muslim Brotherhood empire is the holy places are not under their control, Mecca and Medina, and they do not own the oil. The new war will be to take over all the holy sites and the sources of oil. Both of them are sacred, Mecca and the oil. The Muslim Brotherhood will be forced, they will have to take over Saudi Arabia. There is no chance that the holy sites and the oil will be under the control of a small ruling group which is the Wahhabists.”
Jamaluddin, speaking at the event organized by the Bridgewater State Center for Middle East Studies and the Minnock Center for International Engagement, said that the Saudi Wahhabists are well aware of the threat of the Muslim Brotherhood. In addition to trying to sabotage Brotherhood plans, Jamaluddin said that to gain more power the Wahhabis in Saudia Arabia will attack the factions of political Shia Islam in Iran and Iraq.
“The Wahhabi in Saudi will have to attack the Shias for survival,” Jamaluddin said. “It will be achieving its next goals. It’s to demolish the historic enemy, which is the Shiism. And also through doing this it will control the Islamic world generally. And it will this way be able to evade the ill intentions of the Muslim Brotherhood.”
Jamaluddin said that the ruling Wahhabi faction continues to solidify its stronghold by saturating the airwaves with a strict dichotomy of sexualized content and an overabundance of very religious programming through the dominant Saudi media. The strategy, he said, is to manipulate the masses to think in a black and white mentality, in that Saudi’s religious government must be good because it is religious.
“Islam has become a way to dilute personalities,” said Jamaluddin, comparing Islam today to what Communism was for Soviet Russia.
At this point, specifically when Jamaluddin talked about Islam being “cursed” because it has resulted in mindless suicide bombings, the lecture became too controversial for a translator from the university who left the room mid-lecture. The translator asked for someone to take his place because he disagreed so much with what the Iraqi cleric was saying.
Introducing Jamaluddin, Minnock Center for International Executive Director Michael Kryzanek said that the Iraqi’s speech on sectarian strife was relevant because of the divisiveness of elections in the U.S. Kryzanek said that while Jamaluddin promotes secularism, the American principle of separation of church and state is the “glue” that keeps U.S. society together.
“We’re having our national elections tomorrow and we certainly have our differences and divisions in the United States until the point that maybe we are divided equally between one side and the other,” Kryzanek said. “They are not necessarily sectarian conflicts but they are certainly divisions that bring divisiveness.”
Jamaluddin also later talked about how Shiite poets are the ones who should be considered representative of the sect, rather than members of the political and religious establishment in Iran and Iraq.
Jabbar Al-Obaidi, director of the center for Middle East studies, introduced Jamaluddin and thanked him for his courage addressing some of the issues he talked about.
Jamaluddin was featured as the author of an opinion article about the political exploitation of Shiism in the Wall Street Journal in July. For that piece, Jamaluddin wrote about the threat to the historic Shiite religious academy in Najaf, Iraq, coming from the Khomeinist political Shiism of Iran.
Contact Marc Larocque at mlarocque@tauntongazette.com
