Naah.
There’s no such thing as absolute truth. I meant there is, but we will never discover it. Except, for Muslims of course. We have our 2 sources of absolute truth. But those themselves, requires explanations and interpretations, which somehow sometimes, deviate and disturb us from seeing the truth.
The Syrian Revolution started as a what you say a “normal” uprising in the Arab world. You know, one of those riots and clashes than turn out to be a mass scale revolution.
15 March 2011. That’s when it started. Almost parallel with other uprisings which later be known as the Arab Spring. The time when Ben Ali, Mubarak, and Gaddafi crumbled down.
Then it proceed just like the others, demonstrations and clashes between security forces and protesters , killing many, and of course , many on the weaponless side, as in the case of any other demonstration-turn-bad cases. More than 100 protesters are killed in the first massacre and quadrupled in the next several conflicts.
Sounds familiar right?
For some, it’s just the same boring plot and storyline that every Arab uprising possesses.
So, some of us might be asking, why the fuss? It’s the same old sh*t about dictators and tyrants waiting to be removed. If you are in my world, you are blatantly wrong.
2 Reasons Why Syria is Not Another Egypt and Libya
1. It’s Shiite vs Sunni It might looked as if it is the battle between tyranny and freedom, whereas if we delve deeper, sectarian sentiments was playing behind the scene. And in case for those who the knowledge about this does not reach them yet, extremist shiites believe that it’s halal to kill sunnis and take their property and in fact, it’s encouraged. And if you search on Youtube, there are a lot videos showing massacres done by Shiites to Sunnis.
Here’s the thing, most of the highest government officials are Alawis, a smaller sub-sect of Shia. In simpler words, they are Shiites. That explains their hate and hatred shown through the countless videos of torture done by the soldiers. And that explains how this crack down, looked more like a genocide rather than a suppression of freedom.
2. Degree of Massacre In Egypt, hundreds are the costs of the uprising. Syria, according to the UN, 9,100–11,000 people have been killed. 600 detainees and political prisoners have died under torture, 400 children have been killed. Soldiers move from house to house in Homs, ‘cleansing’ whatever or in this case, whoever left inside. It’s a genocide.
Another Conspiracy?
Some of us might argue that all of this might be another western-played drama. Divide and Conquer. Paint bad image of an influential leader, turn his people against him and Voila! , you get the country and it’s supplies of oil. I meant, come’on , most of the sources that we induce our statements and accusations are from the Internet, you know , Youtube, CNN, BBC , Al Jazeera and all the so-called West-controlled media.There is no solid evidence that can justify all the claim that we’ve made. We learnt that the media can influence our perception towards a particular issue, using the power of language as the tool.
And the fact that Bashar Al-Assad is a close friend of China and Russia, where both communist superpowers vetoed out the UN resolution for military intervention in Syria just like in Libya, has created a possibility lingering on our minds that invisible hands might be playing their game here. Might be the capitalist bloc are in this, so that they can remove the only Communist Bloc Naval Base in the Middle East and establish their own.
There are plethora of MIGHTS. Might be this , might be that.
And yes, we can continue our quest of verifying the sources. We can continue debating of possibilities that we are being led to believe that Assad is the bad fella while the real thing that it’s not. We can do that.
But with every seconds passed, real flesh and blood are being ripped apart. Not just normal flesh and blood , but the very flesh and blood of our brothers and sisters. And verily, the Believers are Brothers.
For me, it’s enough for me to know that THIS IS NOT A CONSPIRACY based on 2 reasons:
1. It has happened before and this kind of act is not new to Al-Assad’s family. They came into power by a coup, a kind of a forced transition of power. Brute force. And they have done exactly the same thing in the Hama uprising by Muslim Brotherhood in 1982. It’s been going for a long time now, or we can say that it is the tradition of the Assad family to use violence as a mean to stay in power. No outside influence from the West.
2. Believable Sources. Firstly, a lot of ulama’ has spoken, including Yusof Qaradhawi, one of the most prominent scholars in the Muslim World through his assistant, Sheikh Dr. Khalid Hassan Al-Hindawi. He has affirmed that this is real, real people are dying and real Muslims are suffering. You can read it here . Secondly, a lot of my friends who are currently studying in neighboring countries of Syria said that almost every week , the Friday sermon will talk about this issue. And sometimes, the Syrians who had fled the country themselves had told them how horrorful life is for an average citizen in Syria.
But then again, you can still doubt the sources. And it will be never ending, because we can’t avoid it as it is an inherent problem in epistemology or Theory of Knowledge , called The Regress Problem. It happens when we want to prove something, we use a particular justification or reasoning. But in order to make it true we need another proof to prove that justification. We need to justify our justification.Next, we need to justify our justification of justification. Then justify our justification of justification of justification. You know, it will finally ends up in a circle.
What I’m trying to say here is that sometimes we need to neglect searching the real truth for the sake of what matters. For during the course of proving the trueness of something, we might overlooked the thing that we need to prioritize.
And now, we have to hold on to what we have. And for me, it is crystal clear now that our brothers and sisters need our help .
But we are hopeless aren’t we?
We can spit thousands of rhetorics and do a thousand of demonstrations. But at the end of the day, we couldn't do a thing to change their fate. Almost nothing compared to the people at the times of the Caliphate. A single women being harassed thousand of miles away, battalions of soldiers are sent to protect her dignity.
Nevertheless, we can’t simply afford to sit down, scrolling our news feed, tweeting about our life while our brothers and sisters are being slaughtered without even the slightest thought about them.
No Good Deed is A Small Deed
We can at least pray for them. Does not require so much effort. Just put your hands up after solah, and pray for their safety and strength to overcome all this. Pray that their suffering will end soon.
Demonstrations, sharing stories about them on our FB walls, tweeting to give awareness to people out there, all of this are small things.Small things that matter.
Because, when the times comes and we are asked by Allah, :
what do you do when your brothers are ripped apart by bombs and shells?
what do you do when your sisters are robbed of their dignity and treated like animals?
what do you do when your small children are slaughtered without mercy?
We have something to answer.
That we did something.
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