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“Even before the invasion three years ago, there were warnings that the shock of violent change could fragment Iraq into ethnic and sectarian parts…But the spectre of a civil war, pitting the historically dominant Sunni minority against the newly enfranchised Shia majority is now looming, most alarmingly.

“In the early morning of February 22nd, saboteurs overcame guards at the Askariya shrine at Samarra, north of Baghdad, an important site of Shia pilgrimage. The explosives they planted did more than destroy the gilded dome that hoods the tombs of the 10th and 11th imams in what most Shias believe to be a divine chain of leadership among descendants of the Prophet. The bombs ignited an unprecedented spate of sectarian bloodletting. At least 500 Iraqis have lost their lives in the past week alone, cut down by suicide bombs or summarily shot, for no reason other than that they belonged to a different sect from vengeance-bound vigilantes…

“Calls for calm from Shia leaders, effective at first, lost their appeal over time. Shadowy Shia groups began to hunt down individual Sunnis. One recent scandal revealed the existence of an underground prison in central Baghdad, where Iraq’s interior ministry, now led by members of a Shia political party, routinely tortured scores of suspected Sunni insurgents. Militant Sunni factions, bent in their turn on revenge, have caused even greater grief. Accusing Shias of collaborating with Iraq’s western occupiers, they have targeted them singly and in groups, at mosques, funerals, bus stations and anywhere frequented by the nascent police force largely manned by Shia recruits…

…“Discrimination against Shias was pervasive but generally mild before the cruel and turbulent rule of Saddam Hussein. His regime, dominated by Sunni clans from his home town of Tikrit, not only persecuted religious Shias, but systematically crushed alternative bases of Sunni power. Its collapse left Sunnis, many of whom were bitter opponents of the regime, with no credible leaders to resort to except for religious ones…

“Iraq’s experience may be unique, yet it is far from being the only example of tension between Sunnis, who make up 85% of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims, and the multiple sects of the Shia minority. In places as far apart as Pakistan and Lebanon, a centrifugal momentum appears to be exacerbating sectarian feelings. The emergence of revolutionary Iran as an ambitious Shia regional power, and potentially as a nuclear-armed state, has combined with the coming to power of Shias in Iraq to encourage greater assertiveness by Shias in the many countries where they have been historically disenfranchised…

“In fact, throughout most of Islam’s 14 centuries, the Shia-Sunni divide has been peaceful. Geography, for one thing, largely separates the sects. Both the far west and east of the Muslim world are solidly Sunni. Moroccans or Indonesians hardly know what a Shia is. Egyptians or Bangladeshis have little knowledge of what Shias believe. Shias tended to cluster in small, often isolated communities in the centre of the Muslim world – in the Levant, the Indian subcontinent, Yemen and the Gulf – and on the Arabic-, Turkish- and Urdu-speaking fringes of historic Persia…

“In India today, the Shia scholar, Maulana Kalbe Sadiq, has won a large following among both Sunnis and Shias with his passionate calls for Islamic ecumenism. Mr Sadiq often declares that the two branches share 97% of their beliefs, cautioning that extremists from both sides are as big a danger to Islam as its infidel enemies. Both Sunni and Shia leaders in Iraq frequently call for national unity. Less comfortingly, evidence has emerged of radical elements in the Iranian regime giving furtive aid to extremist Sunni groups, allowing the passage of some al-Qaeda members from Afghanistan to Iraq…

“Over time this political division deepened into doctrinal splits, with each branch elaborating its own interpretations of sharia, or religious law. Sunni Muslims preserved their unity by coming to accept four rival, but equally valid legal schools of varying rigor. Shia Islam followed a different course. It continued to split into subsects over questions of whom to recognize as the imam, a leader whose blood links to the Prophet were held to render him an infallible interpreter of God’s will…

“Sunni clerics in Iraq have tended to view the pursuit of jihad against the occupation as a binding religious obligation, but clash with each other over how best to pursue it. Most Shias, by contrast, have bowed to the quiet words of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-sistani, the country’s foremost marja. His counsel has been that although infidel invaders are a threat, their presence is likely to be temporary, so there is no need to oppose them physically so long as their presence brings some benefit…

“And the underlying fear that provokes violent Sunni resistance is no longer of becoming an American colony, but of being swamped and politically marginalised by the 60% Shia majority, which is supported by non-Arab Iran.

“Among a growing number of extremist Sunnis, there is a further fear, which is that Shias are a sort of fifth column, whose historical mission it is to undermine the faith. Ultra-puritan Sunnis, known as takfiris, denounce the Shias as apostates from Islam, and claim that it is therefore legal to kill them (incidentally, it is takfiri mosques that the Shias now claim they are targeting in revenge). Radical Iraqi insurgents, aligned with al-Qaeda, have inflicted the most horrific casualties not on American troops, but on unarmed Shia civilians…

“Examples of recent sectarian hostility proliferate. In India last year, Shia Muslims broke away from a long-established board that governs Muslim family law to establish their own board. Shortly afterwards, three people were killed in a communal riot in the mixed, hitherto quiescent city of Lucknow. In sleepy Kuwait, where Shias have formally protested that their 30% share of the population is not matched by a similar share of top posts, Sunni militants sprayed a Shia mosque with gunfire.

“Yet taken together, what all these examples really show is that the essential splits between Sunnis and Shias, beginning with their original schism, have had far more to do with politics than with doctrine…

“One obvious factor is the upsetting of old balances by the intrusion of western power, not only in Iraq, but in Afghanistan and far more widely, through the global campaign against Islamist terrorism. But this intrusion was in turn largely provoked by something else, the radicalization of large numbers of Sunni Muslims, fired by ideas of a return to ‘pure’ Islam and of uniting Muslims into a single nation modeled on the early caliphate.

“The most famous proponent of such ideas, Osama bin Laden, has always carefully refrained from any reference to the Shias. Yet he and many fellow-travellers adhere to a school of thought, influenced by Saudi Wahhabism among other currents, which holds the rival sect to be an elemental threat to Islam as a whole…”

To read the entire six-page article, click on http://www.economist.com/world/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5572723

“SECTARIAN CONFLICT IN IRAQ – A MOST OMINOUS SIGN FOR EVERYBODY
by Cengiz Candar”

Our title and quotes are from an article in THE NEW ANATOLIAN, Turkey’s only independent English language daily:

“…With Sunni mosques burning, individual Sunnis kidnapped and slaughtered and Shiites wary of a new Sunni assault on them, we could only depend on the sobering influence of the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and the statesmanship of Iraq’s new political leaders, if they have any. Or, if reason could prevail among the Iraqis themselves, if any of it remained.”

To read the complete article, click on http://www.thenewanatolian.com/opinion-1433.html

THE ISLAMIC CONCEPT OF GOD

The most thorough description of this that we can find is in Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. To access its five pages, click on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allah

“DECADE-LONG EXAMINATION OF U.S. WATERWAYS FINDS PESTICIDES IN MOST STREAMS”

Our title and quotes are from a posting on SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN.COM on 03/06/06:

“Farmers, exterminators, homeowners and others in the U.S. use roughly one billion pounds of pesticides every year to eliminate weeds, insects and other nuisances. But many of those chemicals end up in the nation’s waterways…

“Hydrologist Robert Gilliom of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and his team tested waters in 51 areas across the country for 75 pesticides between 1992 and 2001, including water samples from 186 streams and more than 5,000 wells as well as sediment from more than 1,000 waterways…

“Only 10 percent of the agricultural streams surveyed exceeded human health standards for any of these chemicals, most located in the so-called Midwestern Corn Belt, where herbicides like atrazine are regularly employed. But fish and other aquatic life face potentially harmful concentrations in 57 percent of streams in agricultural areas and 83 percent of city streams. And these fish are still carrying the toxic legacy of DDT and its derivatives 20 years after its ban, according to the USGS…”

To read the complete article, click on http://www.sciam.com and then on our title.

USED BOOK SALES

We offer for sale all used books listed at http://www.vardaman.com/booksale.php.

OUR SYSTEM FOR BUYING OR SELLING LAND OR TIMBER

For details, click on http://www.vardaman.com and then on the red horizontal bar “Buy/Sell Land/Timber.” You can offer to buy or sell timber or land. You must post the general area of your interest; be sure to include the state. You must also post your E-MAIL ADDRESS and the URL of your Internet site. Our tracking report will not report the number of visitors UNLESS you enter your URL. If you are selling, you should post the name of the tract. When you have entered all details, click on “Submit,” and what you just entered will appear on our Internet site at the bottom of the page under the red horizontal bar “Buy/Sell Land/Timber.” Be sure to check for and correct errors.

For each tract posted and whose owner posted his URL, we charge $0.50 for each visit his ad receives. On each Friday at 0900 Central Time, we will e-mail him a bill for $0.50 for each visit his ad received during the week just ended. You can pay us by e-mailing the money to “Vardaman Virtual Forestry Company” at PayPal or mailing it to P.O. Box 12293, Jackson, MS 39236. We will delete your ad when your payments cease.

SELL LAND

For tract in AL, send e-mail to landsale@larsonmcgowin.com

BUY LAND

For tracts in SC, send e-mail to loblolly@surfbvi.com
For tracts in SC, send e-mail to rich@CHRISTOPHERRADKO.COM
For tracts in MA, send e-mail to leonelmtz65@hotmail.com
For tracts in OR, send e-mail to 7200moore@charter.net
For tracts in OR, send e-mail to ptodd@orclinic.com
For tracts in FL, send e-mail to hot63vdub@hotmail.com
For tracts in TX, send e-mail to reedkimbley@hotmail.com
For tracts in TX, send e-mail to gilmerboy2@yahoo.com
For tracts in GA, send e-mail to RNP1003@aol.com
For tracts in AL, send e-mail to jbeale@sterlingmanagement.com
For tracts in TN, send e-mail to robmccarthy@redstoneproperties.com
For tracts in SC, send e-mail to south607@acun.com

BUY TIMBER

For tracts in AR, send e-mail to dyork@digitalpassage.com
For tracts in IL, send e-mail to psftimber@hotmail.com
For tracts in MT, send e-mail to crawlings@mtcdc.org

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The Most Direct Link to Knowledge Workers in the Southeast Forest Economy

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