veiled4allah

prayer for Darfur

Via Global Day for Darfur, a prayer (PDF) for Darfur by Shaykh Ibrahim Mogra of the Muslim Council of Britain:

Bismillahi rahmaan iraheem Verse 104 in Surah Al Imran of the holy Quran says that: "And let there arise from amongst you, a nation which invites to goodness, enjoins what is right and forbids what is evil. Such are they who are successful." (3:104) O' God! Let us here today be the people that invite to goodness, enjoin right, and forbid evil. O' God! in you is the best consolation against any calamity, in you is substitute for every loss, and replacement for anything sorely missed. O' God! we trust in You, seek Your aid, and are hopeful of Your mercy. O' God! All Knowing, All Seeing, All Hearing, we ask you to comfort the hearts and minds of the people of Darfur, to give them patience, strength and solace. To give them hope, faith and light. O' God! we ask you to alleviate the oppression and end the atrocity. We ask that the killing stops, the bloodshed ends, that women and children are safe and healthy and happy. O' God! protect the people, and protect their helpers. Give the people of Darfur back their homes, their families, their communities, their humanity, and their hope and dreams for the future. O' God! put an end to the violence, the horror, the rape, the starvation, disease and mass slaughter of innocent victims. O' God! we ask that the international community wakes up in the face of crisis and acts quickly, and that a humanitarian crisis is not permitted. O' God! we ask that further genocide is prevented and that the world does not stand by and witness another holocaust, another Rwanda, or another Bosnia. O' God! we ask you to give our leaders wisdom, and the ability to use their power for good and not evil. O' God! forgive our selfishness, and enable us to feel Darfur's pain, and enable us to (believe that we can) make a difference, and stand united and strong in the face of adversity. O' God! give us greater understanding, greater empathy, and the power to remember. O' God! purify our hearts and souls, banish racism and pride from our being. The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said: "Help your brother, whether he is an oppressor or he is oppressed." People asked, "...It is right to help him if he is oppressed, but how should we help him if he is an oppressor?" The Prophet said, "By preventing him from oppressing others."

The Global Day for Darfur site has many more resources and things you can do for Darfur.

Darfur burns

While people are busy with other concerns, Death toll in Darfur tops 100,000 since UN directive:

More than 100,000 people are now believed to have died in the Darfur region of Sudan since the United Nations Security Council set a 30-day deadline last year for the Khartoum regime to begin to resolve the crisis in the area. Humanitarian agencies and the African Union are warning that the situation in Darfur is again deteriorating, with five AU peacekeepers killed in the past week and parts of the region inaccessible after an aid convoy was ambushed and the staff stripped and beaten. Shocking new evidence of atrocities committed by the Sudanese government and its janjaweed militia allies in Darfur region has emerged in previously confidential African Union reports, and in the United Nations' own briefing papers. The evidence includes accounts of rapes, murders and the razing of entire villages - accounts which have been confirmed by AU monitors.

I believe that people will look back later and ask how we could have let something like this happen.

further thoughts on Darfur

I've been continuing to read about the situation in Darfur. It's really quite astonishing the claims that various groups are making, to justify this or that position. The best overview of the crisis that I've seen is The Darfur Conflict: Crimes Against Humanity in Sudan by the Crimes of War Project. To the best of my understanding, the situation is this. There's been a long-standing low-level conflict between tribes in Darfur who consider themselves to be ethnically Arab, who are generally nomadic, and tribes who consider themselves to be ethnically African, who are generally pastoral. Some of the commentary makes a big deal out of the fact that the two groups are both black-skinned Sunni Muslims who appear the same to outsiders. The point is, the groups do consider themselves to be ethnically distinct from each other (for a background on the development of these identities, see Ethnicity from Perception to Cause of Violent Conflicts) , and have been taking sides against each other on this basis. Do we imagine that if we in the West decree that they should consider themselves to be the same ethnic group, that this will magically resolve things? How stupid. In any case, the African tribes have also been engaged in conflict against the central Sudanese government. As noted in Ideas on the Background of the Present Conflict in Darfur (PDF), the region was independent of the rest of Sudan until 1916 and has been fighting against the Sudanese government for most of the time since then. There are several armed rebel groups in Darfur. One of these, the Justice and Equality Movement, has ties to Hassan al-Turabi, an Islamist who founded the National Islamic Front party that took power in Khartoum in 1989 but has since fallen out with the NIF. Thus, some people argue, Darfur is hardly an innocent victim. All of this may be true, but it's beside the point. The current crisis results from the Sudanese government using the Janjaweed militias (armed groups from the Arab tribes) to attack civilians. The Crimes of War site explains:

Incapable of controlling the situation because it had few troops (and many were made up of Westerners [Western Sudanese] who refused to fight their brothers) the government used three types of tactics to try to curb guerilla activities: * Extensive use of airpower. Mil Mi-24 combat helicopters engaged in indiscriminate bombing and machine-gunning of civilians while Antonov An-12 transports were used to drop makeshift bombs on villages and IDP concentrations. * Recruitment of large numbers of “Arab” militiamen called “Janjaweed”, mounted on camels or horseback. These were at times recruited in neighboring Chad and were motivated by a mixture of cultural/racial prejudice and the lure of looting. They mercilessly engaged in the massacre of civilians. * Destruction of the means of livelihood of the population. Wells were filled, cattle were killed and foodstuff stores were destroyed. This caused massive displacement of civilians who either fled to what they hoped were “secure” areas of the province or to Chad. The government's hope was that the civilians would be terrorized into submission and that the civilian pool on which the guerillas depended for their political and logistical sustenance would dry up.

The crisis that people want to stop is the displacement and killing of civilians. There have been tens of thousands killed and at least a million displaced. While people stand around arguing over whether the Arabs and Africans in Darfur should really consider themselves to be different ethnic groups, or which side's armed groups are worse, there is a humanitarian catastrophe going on. Can we at least agree to help the refugees in Darfur while we try to figure out how to end the larger conflicts that lay behind this?

more on the history of Darfur

The name Darfur is from dar fur which in Arabic means "the abode of the Fur". The Fur are the predominant ethnic group in the Darfur region. The Fur began to be converted to Islam in the 1300s or 1400s. In 1596, the Darfur Sultanate was established and Islam declared the state religion. The Darfur sultanate remained independent through various conflicts in Sudan including the Anglo-Egyptian conquest of Sudan in the late 1800s before finally being subjugated by the British in 1916 and made part of Sudan. You can read a brief history of the Darfur Sultanate. Fouad Ibrahim of the University of Bayreuth in Germany provides a brief outline (PDF) of his ideas on the Darfur conflict. He gives emphasis to Darfur's long history of independence and its resistance to various other groups seeking control of all of Sudan. I also found a paper by Mohamed Suliman of the Institute for African Alternatives written in 1997, which looks at the roots of two conflicts in Western Sudan, one of which is Darfur. He argues that although the indigenous peoples of Darfur (the Fur and several other tribes) and the Arabs have always had distinct identities, they generally got along well until resources became scarce, then they made ethnicity and race the focus of their conflict:

As to Darfur prior to the mid-1980s, conflicts in northern Darfur were infrequent, highly localised and of low intensity. Arab pastoralists were allowed into Jebel Marra after the harvest was collected and usually stayed there until the first rains in April or May. Indeed, some of their livestock belonged to rich Fur peasants. Ethnic barriers were low and easily surmountable. All people inhabiting the area were Sunni Muslims with Arabic as their lingua franca. The prolonged drought dealt a severe blow to the tradition and spirit of cooperation and tolerance between herders and peasants in the region. Fuelled by the neighbouring conflict between Chad and Libya and the influx of modern weapons, skirmishes turned into large-scale armed conflict. On both sides of the conflict divide, people fell back to their time honoured, traditional group solidarity and reciprocity. The barrier between the Fur and their erstwhile good neighbours began to grow. People found solace in entrenchment within their ethnic and cultural niche. The conflict was widely perceived as ethnic/tribal. Party political affiliations, which ran across ethnic and geographical borders, began to collapse. Ethnic brotherhood became paramount and the conflict was seen by all as an ethnic strife. Fourteen years later, the transformation of the perception of the conflict into an unshaken conviction about the true nature of the conflict is proceeding fast. The ethnic divide already constitutes, for good or for evil, a formidable social force in northern Darfur. Without a comprehensive solution to the protracted conflict, that also restores the economic and social fabric of the region, renews cooperation between the two factions and opens new vistas for economic and social development, the spreading malaise of ethnic hostility will continue to grow. In its wake, efforts at conflict resolution will be hampered and the palpable presence of ethnic hostility will indeed constitute a concrete and tangible cause of future violent confrontations. Most violent conflicts are over material resources, actual or perceived. With the passage of time, however, ethnic, cultural and religious affiliations seem to undergo transformation from abstract ideological categories into concrete social forces. In a wider sense, they themselves become contestable material social resources and hence possible objects of group strife and violent conflict. Usually by-products of fresh conflicts, ethnic, cultural and spiritual dichotomies, can invert with the progress of a conflict to become intrinsic causes of that conflict and in the process increase its complexity and reduce the possibility of managing and ultimately resolving and transforming it.

Arabs, Africans, Muslims, and Darfur

A few days ago, I posted about how to send aid money to Darfur, Sudan, and pointed you to a large number of posts at Prometheus 6 about Darfur. The horrific violence in Darfur and the terrible humanitarian tragedy that's unfolding there is a conflict between Arab militias supported by the central government in Khartoum and black Africans who live in the region. The Arabs one can guess are Muslim. But what about the victims?

The war in Darfur is in many respects a replay of the war in southern Sudan, waged with weapons that include ethnic militias, scorched-earth tactics and denial of humanitarian access. Both wars pit Sudan's Islamist, Arab-dominated government against African rebels demanding equal rights and an end to decades of neglect. In the south it is the SPLA that is doing the fighting; in Darfur it is the similarly named but quite separate Sudan Liberation Army (SLA). But there is one big difference between the 21-year war in the South and the 15-month war in Darfur. The ethnic Africans of Darfur, unlike those of the South, are Muslim. And not just Muslim: deeply, devoutly, unshakably Muslim. Theirs is not the shrill, extremist Islam of the fundamentalist generals who seized power in Sudan in 1989, but a quiet, tolerant Islam that has characterized Sudan for most of its recent history and that still characterizes most of its citizens - Arab or African.

Julie Flint, a researcher for Human Rights Watch writing for the Daily Star of Lebanon, has plenty more to say about the nature of the conflict:

The government's swift and bloody crackdown on the rebellion in Darfur reflects the unique importance of the SLA rebellion within Sudan. For the uprising is not only proof of Muslim opposition to the country's totalitarian rulers. It is, perhaps even more importantly, a war that cannot be depicted as a rebellion against Islam. The rebels cannot be condemned as "infidels" as they were in the South. And so they are vilified as "thieves and robbers" - thieves and robbers, however, who have proved capable of mounting a formidable military challenge to a government that has the advantage of air power and the added punch of the Janjaweed. The war in Darfur has laid bare the racial animus that has always underlain the war in Sudan. The killing there is not about religion. It is about race and ethnicity. In Darfur, the government's drive to "Arabize" a country that is made up of myriad ethnic groups has found a full and willing partner in Arab nomads whose search for new water and grazing land for their herds has led them into conflict with the majority population of settled African farmers. When the SLA took up arms in February 2004, protesting government inaction in the face of increasingly violent encroachment by Arab nomads, the government responded by increasing its support for the nomads - reincarnated as Janjaweed - and embarked on a campaign of ethnic cleansing designed to lay waste the countryside and starve the rebels of support. "The government wants to kill all African people, Muslim or not Muslim, in order to put Arabs in their places," says Izhaq Abdullah, unwittingly echoing the conclusion of many analysts. "We Africans are good Muslims. We pray all the time. We read the Koran all the time. It is they who are bad Muslims."

Flint describes some specific outrages of the Janjaweed against Islamic sites and symbols in Darfur:

The mosque in the village of Urum was packed with people mourning Yahya Abdul Karim, 80, when armed men on horseback rode in, firing indiscriminately. The village imam, Yahya Warshal, ran out of the mosque to try to protect his orphaned grandson. Some of the attackers rode into the mosque, where they killed 16 mourners. Others chased the imam into his grass hut and killed him there, along with the 3-year-old boy he was trying to protect. Before leaving the village, the attackers, driving over 3,000 stolen animals before them, tore up Korans found in the mosque and set the building on fire. Barely a week later, the horsemen returned with soldiers from the regular Sudanese Army and in a four-day rampage killed 80 more people, including women and children. "The soldiers stayed on the edge of the village," said a 37-year-old man. "But they saw everything." In the village of Sandikoro, soldiers and horsemen tore up Korans and defecated on them before burning the mosque, with its imam inside. In Kondoli, they killed another imam, Abrahim Durra, as well as a second imam and the muezzin. The story is the same across Darfur, Sudan's westernmost region. In 25 days of research there and among refugees on the border with Chad, Human Rights Watch documented 62 attacks on mosques in Dar Masalit, the homeland of one of Darfur's three main African tribes. Several of them were accompanied by murders inside mosques, often during prayer time. Korans, prayer mats and other symbols of Islam were routinely desecrated.

As far as I am aware, the Janjaweed are not claiming an Islamic justification for their actions - and it's hard to imagine how they could while pillaging and desecrating mosques! Flint calls her article "The Shameful Muslim Silence on Darfur". I wonder if many Muslims realize that the people of Darfur are themselves Muslims. I didn't until I started learning more about Darfur. We have a simplistic assumption that Arab=Muslim and therefore African=Non-Muslim. Many Muslims who are so eager to condemn the U.S. or Israel for actions taken against Muslim peoples are silent about what Muslims themselves may do in the name of Islam. Sometimes that the guilty people are Muslim, even if their actions are done in the name of nationalism or any other ideology and not Islam, is enough to "shield" them. I hope that will not be the case here. If Muslims can't be led to speak up against the genocide in Darfur because the victims are human beings, perhaps they will speak up when they realize that the victims are Muslims. And perhaps some day more of us will speak up just because they're human beings.

how to send aid money to Darfur, Sudan

One of the worst humanitarian crises in the world right now is in the Darfur region of Sudan. Brother P6 has been following events there for several months and has a number of posts about it. For Muslims who would like to do something to help the refugees in Darfur, I found the following Islamic charities have set up relief funds for Darfur: Islamic Relief, Islamic American Relief Agency, and Muslims for Humanity. There may be others as well that I haven't found yet. Please give as much as you can

sick, sick, sick

The BBC reports:

More than 100 women have been raped in a single attack carried out by Arab militias in Darfur in western Sudan. Speaking to the BBC, the United Nations co-ordinator for Sudan, Mukesh Kapila, said the conflict had created the worst humanitarian situation in the world. He said more than one million people were affected by "ethnic cleansing". He said the fighting was characterised by a scorched-earth policy and was comparable in character, if not in scale, to the 1994 Rwandan genocide. "It is more than just a conflict. It is an organised attempt to do away with a group of people," he said. Arab militias, backed by the government, have driven hundreds of thousands from their homes, in retaliation for a rebellion launched a year ago by two armed groups. They accused the Arab-dominated government of ignoring the black African inhabitants of Darfur. More than 100,000 people have fled across the border into Chad, but have continued to face cross-border raids...

Via Prometheus 6