Our Last Best Chance_ The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril - King Abdullah II [139]
The controversy illustrates some of the difficulties of speaking to the media. I was talking politics, not religion, but my comments were deliberately distorted. My concern was that some Iranians were trying to invoke sectarian sentiments to serve their own agendas, thus creating conditions that could lead to Sunni-Shia confrontations across the Muslim world. I accept and respect the Shia as one of the legitimate branches of Islam and strongly believe that it is not acceptable to judge people according to their faith. Shias have made an enormous contribution to Arab and Muslim culture as well as to the defense of the Arab nationalist cause, and they have been loyal to their countries, whether in Lebanon or Iraq. I never meant to suggest that they would, by virtue of their faith, automatically align with Iran—only that the Iranian government would manipulate the situation to its advantage and foment divisions. In fact, Iraqi Shia fought valiantly in defense of their country in its war with Iran in the 1980s.
Contemporary Shia thought covers a broad spectrum of beliefs. At one end are some of the most conservative thinkers in the Muslim world, and at the other some of its most liberal. Iran is the home of some visionary clerics, who are leading the Middle East in addressing certain social issues. When we in Jordan were looking at different ways of tackling birth control, we turned to Iran to understand how religious authorities there support contraception, a sensitive subject in the Arab world. The late Lebanese Shia cleric Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah believed that women should have equal rights and play a role equal to that of men in society. So clerics can be a force for positive change, but they can also be reactionary.
My fear was that some in the Iranian regime were setting in place the conditions for a devastating sectarian conflict that could speedily spread from Beirut to Bombay. Across the centuries, some of the most violent moments in human history have been preceded by politicians’ decisions to use religion to justify a war or political interest. From the Crusades to the Spanish Inquisition, great cruelty and suffering have often been imposed by those with the divine conviction that they are in the right.
Speaking in the name of God can all too easily serve as a justification to suppress debate. Putting yourself on a moral and spiritual pedestal allows you to condemn any challenger as morally bankrupt. And this absolutist view becomes dangerous when it is combined with politics. Suddenly, your political opponents become not merely people with differing values and ideas about how to organize society, but enemies of God.
I wanted to point out the risk of this potential new sectarian conflict. Unfortunately, the controversy over my interview generated more than hostile words.
On Christmas Eve 2004, a tanker truck packed with explosives heading for the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad blew up, destroying a nearby house and killing nine people. Subsequent investigations revealed that the attack had been planned by a certain well-known Shia political group with support from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. My hopes that my visit to Tehran the previous year would lead to improved relations between Jordan and Iran literally went up in smoke. This was the second attack on our embassy in Baghdad. The first, in August 2003, was a car bombing by Sunni extremists linked to Al Qaeda. Now we had also been attacked by Shia extremists linked to the Iranian government. In the Middle East, moderates have no shortage of enemies.
As the New Year began, people across Iraq were getting ready for the elections. I asked my people to prepare an analysis, based on what we were hearing and seeing, of the Iraqi political situation for President Bush, who had just been reelected to a second term. To keep it simple, I asked them to use a traffic-light system. They put together a large chart with three colored columns, in which they placed pictures of thirty Iraqi politicians, organized by party and affiliation.