Sunni and Shi'i

"You know, all this fuss made in the media about Sunnis and Shia has really been getting to me lately. Iraqis are almost always categorized as one or the other. For example, Fulan al Fulani, the Shi'i politician; Fulan al Fulani, the Sunni cleric.

The same can happen with geographic areas, towns and provinces, e.g. Basra, the largely Shi'i city; Ramadi, the Sunni Arab stronghold; Salah al Din, a province with Sunni majority; Sadr City, the Shi'i district; Amiriya, the largely Sunni district of Baghdad, etc.

The media is so obsessed with these distinctions that I am sure they will soon start to come up with new ideas just to show off they know all about Iraq, like say:...

...My mother told me once that she asked her father when she was very young if they were Shi'i or Sunni after she had heard the terms in school. Her father slapped her hard in the face. That was how far Iraqis were willing to go in order to supress their perceived differences."
Iraqi Reble

This is the new blog recommended by Star from Mosul, but this subject is not new. The Sunni, Shi'a thing, I have been reading about it from the first Iraqi blog I read, always with the same story, no one it would seem knew what or who anyone was. Yet somehow when you talk to someone who was not from a mixed family, someone who was clearly shi'a or kurd, you hear a slightly different story. When your a minority, or not from the privileged class, you know it, even if no one says it out loud. Mind you this is something that is not unique to Iraq by a long shot. There is no doubt that these sectarian and ethnic tensions were hiding just below the surface of Iraqi society. Kept in check by the strict authoritarian rule. Every time I read this story it brings to mind, even if through no fault of thier own, how naive and sheltered some people lived thier lives. I can however suggest a cure, it's called equality the real kind, the democratic kind, not the artificial authoritarian kind that Iraqis were apparently used to.