Juan Cole Informed Comment
The phony controversy cooked up by rightwingers over Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s participation in the upcoming anniversary mourning the September 11, 2001 al-Qaeda attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York is mired in bigotry and Islamophobia, and most of all in ignorance.
Not wanting Mamdani to preside over 9/11 commemorations, carried out by radical heretics from a Sunni background, because he is a (Shia) Muslim, is like not wanting a prominent Christian of Swedish Protestant extraction to preside over the commemoration of massacres of Aztecs by Hernán Cortés and his lieutenants, who were Spanish Catholics.
The ignorance has to do with what al-Qaeda was. It was a tiny cult with a peculiar ideology. That ideology was what I call fundamentalist vigilantism, the belief that volunteer militiamen should arm themselves for violence because Muslim states had failed to protect the Sunni Muslim community from Western imperialism. Al-Qaeda departed from traditional Sunni Islam, which forbids indiscriminate decrees that other Sunnis are infidels. But al-Qaeda saw mainstream Sunnism as compromised and cowardly. Sunni Islam recognizes the prerogatives of the ruler of the community and doesn’t think it is legitimate to rebel. Al-Qaeda wanted to overthrow all the Sunni governments.
Al-Qaeda members hated the Shia branch of Islam with a white hot passion.
That’s right. Muslims aren’t all one thing, any more than Christians are. Imagine if a group of Kentucky snake-handlers, Christian Pentecostalists, went to Shanghai and died there of snake bites. People in China who saw the headlines might think Christians are all snake handlers. That is pretty much the analogy for those Americans who think all Muslims are al-Qaeda.
Islam is divided into three great branches, the Sunnis, the Shia, and the Ibadis (Oman and northern Libya). Sunnis believe that after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, the community had the right to elect his successors from among notables of the Prophet’s clan, the Quraysh. The Shia believe in a dynastic principle, that close relatives of the Prophet should lead the community. Some 90% of today’s Muslims are Sunnis. The Shia predominate in Iran, Iraq and Bahrain and form significant minorities in Lebanon, Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Al-Qaeda is a heresy coming out of the fringes of the Sunni tradition, influenced by Saudi Wahhabism and by the modernist fundamentalism called Salafism, and it is virulently anti-Shia.
Mamdani’s mother is Hindu. She is the renowned director of films such as Mississippi Masala, Monsoon Wedding, and Namesake, and her work has a distinctly anti-racist cast.
Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) blows up targets in Hindu-majority India.
Mamdani’s father is a Shia Muslim of Gujarati heritage, and a renowned professor at Columbia University, and Zohran took his father’s faith.
The Shia have been special victims of al-Qaeda, which considers them infidels. Al-Qaeda operative Ramzi Yousef, who was involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, helped blow up the mausoleum of Imam Reza in Mashhad, Iran, a major Shia shrine and pilgrimage site. He and others set off a bomb that brought down a wall of the tomb and killed 26 pilgrims, most of them women.
Zohran Mamdani at the White House. Public Domain. Via Picryl
Osama Bin Laden formed the 055 Brigade of the Taliban from foreign, mainly Arab, fundamentalist volunteers. Because some of them were veterans from armies like that of Egypt, and because of monetary support from Bin Laden, they were an especially effective fighting force on whom the Taliban depended more than is commonly realized.
Francesco Bruno writes, “[T]heir presence was felt in the campaign to capture Mazar-i-Sharif in 1998, the battle for Bamiyan in 1999, the massacre of Shia population near Hazarajat in 2001.”
When the Taliban, including the 055 Brigade, took the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif in 1998, Human Rights Watch points out, “scores and perhaps hundreds of Hazara men and boys were summarily executed, apparently to ensure that they would be unable to mount any resistance to the Taliban. Also killed were eight Iranian officials at the Iranian consulate in the city and an Iranian journalist.” These were anti-Shia measures likely especially spearheaded by the 055 Brigade al-Qaeda fighters.
The massacre of 170 Shia Hazara at Yakawlang over 4 days in 2001, while it was a Taliban operation, involved the 055 Brigade al-Qaeda contingent, according to Bruno.
Bamiyan is 85% Shia, and the population suffered massacres at the hands of al-Qaeda.
All this is not to say that Sunni Muslims shouldn’t officiate at 9/11 commemorations. Some of the victims were Sunni Muslims, and vanishingly few Sunnis agree with al-Qaeda’s radical tenets. Many Sunni troops died fighting al-Qaeda. My point is only that it is especially unserious to exclude a Shia from such ceremonies.
Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Distinguished University Professor in the History Department at the University of Michigan He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Follow him on Twitter at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page
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