JUST below my local supermarket in Sadat Street, a car pulls up with a man carrying thousands of pictures of President Bashar Al Assad of Syria. The man marches into the Syrian mukhabarat office. Inside, I can see several heavily armed men, each one a factotum of Brigadier General Rustum Gazale, the head of Syria’s military intelligence in Lebanon. Three glum Lebanese policemen stand round the corner, watching.

The pictures — be sure of this — are for the day’s Hezbollah-organized rally in the centre of Beirut, a demonstration demanding the fulfilment of the Taif agreement that ended the war and which called for the progressive withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon.

I remember Taif in Saudi Arabia. That’s where I first met the Lebanese-Saudi businessman called Rafik Hariri who was smoking a cigar. He wanted to rebuild Lebanon, he said. Some hope, I muttered to myself. And then he became the prime minister of Lebanon and rebuilt Beirut and mocked me for my lack of confidence in his ability.

Almost four weeks ago, he lay dead in the road, his limbs on fire. The car bomb exploded directly opposite his SUV.

Gazale had once called him up on the phone and insulted him and Hariri hung up. Gazale was never rude again — though he was to other Lebanese ministers — and Hariri continued to walk a neutral path, neither inviting the Syrians to stay in Lebanon nor demanding their withdrawal. That was until he resigned last year and joined the opposition and — so we are led to believe — earned the undying wrath of Bashar Assad.

When Assad spoke to the Syrian parliament recently, my mobile phone bleeped for hours. “I have never felt so insulted,” a young woman friend shouted. “His voice was so patronizing. And what are these ‘shifting sands’ he was talking about?” One of them was obviously Syria’s erstwhile ally, the Druze leader and super-nihilist Walid Jumblatt. After a somewhat rakish life, Jumblatt has seized the moment. He has embraced his civil-war Christian enemies, accused the Syrians of murdering his father Kemal in 1977 and — when I call by to see him in his ancestral home at Mukhtara — I find a man waiting for death.

Huge Alsatians prowl the gardens. Armed men are at the gate. Jumblatt sits in his jeans and brown jacket, hands on his knees, looking at the floor. “Yes, I am a target,” he says and looks at me mournfully. “Not long before he died, Hariri said to me, ‘So which one of us is it going to be?’ I was in my home in Beirut when the bomb went off. I thought, ‘It’s Hariri.’ I called the Hariri people and they said they couldn’t reach him. Then I knew he was dead.”

Jumblatt’s wife Nora was in a downtown office and the windows crashed around her from the blast. “I thought, ‘My God! It’s Walid!’” I look at both of them and realize they now both live with death. Jumblatt went to the American University Hospital where Hariri had been taken. “We all thought he was in the operating room but the senior security officer took me aside and told me he was in the mortuary.

“I saw Hariri’s son and got in the car with him and I said: ‘I am afraid the news is bad.’ I had to tell him.”

I drive to Beirut through Sofar. In front of me is a beat-up rubbish skip with a sleeping soldier in the back, grinding down to Aley. It carries a triangular military code above the registration and the words “Jesh Suriya” — Syrian Army — badly painted on the tailboard. Here, then, is the monstrous Syrian army of occupation about who President Bush likes to hold forth, under whose Gestapo heel the people of Lebanon have been lying prostrate for 29 years, always forgetting — and this is an essential part of the narrative — that the Christian Maronites invited the Syrians to come here in the first place, to protect them from Yasser Arafat’s Palestinians.

I remember still the day they entered Beirut. With the very first Syrian commandos, I crossed the old front line below Martyrs’ Square, treading my way with them through a carpet of unexploded shells and grenades, until we reached the smashed facade of the Beirut municipality building from which emerged a bunch of scrawny, unwashed Palestinian gunmen.

They put their weapons on the ground and their arms round the necks of the Syrians and wept like children. The Syrians had descended on Beirut in their thousands, bayonets fixed, their tanks preceded by a young soldier playing a flute. There were 40,000 of them then. More than 60 per cent have been withdrawn since 2000. There are only 14,000 left today and they live, for the most part, in dank, vermin-infested bombed-out ruins from the war.

Lebanon, for me, is a place where time has stood still. I am still 29 — my age when I first came here — and I still work the same streets, live in the same home on the Corniche. From my balcony, I have watched the Lebanese army and the Syrian army and the UN armies and the invading Israeli army and the American Marines and French paratroopers and even, briefly, in 1983, British troops, staring out across the Mediterranean from this same road.

The Israelis left in ignominy, the Americans and French and British in humiliation. I was standing on my balcony in 1992 when a car hit a garbage truck and dragged it across the road with a terrible grating roar.

A few hours later, my mother called to say my elderly father, a soldier of the First World War — the war which created Lebanon out of Syria — had died. And my landlord, Mustafa, and his niece shook hands with me in the way that Arabs express condolences.

And now I sit in Mustafa’s little shop downstairs and he tells me things are “very, very bad”. He has stocked up on water, checked the emergency electrical line. He tells me to take care in the coming days. Ever since I was badly hurt on the Afghan border, his sister lights candles for my safety when I am away from Lebanon.

That night in December of 2001, after my beating at the hands of Afghan refugees enraged at the death of the their loved ones in a US air raid, I was lying in bed in great pain when my phone rang. A familiar voice boomed down the line. “Robert. This is Rafik Hariri. What happened? Tell me from the start!”

And, after I had talked for five minutes, he offered to send his private jet to pick me up in Quetta — his friend, Pervez Musharraf, would give immediate landing permission — and bring me to hospital in Beirut. But of course, I don’t take gifts from prime ministers and I turned him down. And some days ago, I stood at Hariri’s graveside, watching Musharraf mourn his friend.

“There is fire under the ashes - we must all take care,” an old friend tells me. We are watching Hezbollah’s leader, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, on television. “Only the Lebanese flag will be flown,” Nasrallah says. No Hezbollah flags at the Hezbollah rally downtown. All are welcome. They’ll be supporting the Taif agreement — Taif, which calls for a Syrian withdrawal but, unlike UN Security Council Resolution 1559, does not insist on the disarming of the Hezbollah.

“We are a resistance movement,” Nasrallah says, “not a militia.” So now Hezbollah is fighting for its life and I remember how Nasrallah described to me the mind of a suicide bomber, how the bomber was like a man who is in a sauna and is very hot but knows that in the next room there is air-conditioning, classical music and a cocktail waiting for him. So he opens the door.

We are all praying no one will open any doors in Beirut in the next few days. The Hezbollah will not turn on the Lebanese. But the men who killed Hariri are still here, I am sure, in Beirut. Were they not the same men who tried to car-bomb Jumblatt’s Druze friend, Marwan Hamade last November.

I walk in to the downtown AP bureau. Two Syrian lorries have been seen at the Mdeirej ridge above Beirut carrying furniture. And there is Bashar on the screen, flanked by his foreign minister, Farouk al-Sharar, and there is Lebanese President Lahoud and his elderly and uninspiring prime minister, Omar Karami.

It’s only been some days since ex-President Hrawi, an old friend of Hariri, was asked for his feelings and broke down in tears and wept for three minutes, right there live on the television until, choking on his words, he said: “If Hariri had died when I was president, I would have resigned.” And the point was not lost on the Lebanese. Lahoud has not resigned.

I am back downtown, taking coffee with old friends beside the oldest mosques in Beirut and there, across the road, is the municipality building, rebuilt by Hariri, and the same doorway through which Palestinian gunmen emerged in front of me 29 years ago. Half my life ago, I had walked through the shells on this very street with the Syrian commandos. And now they are taking their furniture home.

On Hariri’s grave there are 30 doves stalking around on the wax of a thousand candles. The Lebanese have written messages of love on walls. Hariri was a tough cookie, a ruthless businessman with political enemies and was also a supporter of the death penalty.

But he was a kind man who had no militia and had no blood on his hands and had, I suspect, become over-confident. I am reminded, looking at those fresh flowers on his grave, of another conversation, long ago, in which the unthinkable question came up. What would happen to Lebanon if he died? Hariri raised his hands in front of me, open either side of his face. “So keep me alive!” he roared. And of course, we did not.— (c) The Independent

THE Muslim Ummah is in disarray. We Muslims are to be blamed for the present state of affairs. The main cause of this can be attributed to the fact that Muslims generally recite the Holy Quran like a parrot, without understanding it and do not follow what is ordained in it.

The Quran is a unique book, with eternal message and universal relevance. It contains the foundation of an entire system of life, from specific articles of faith and commandments to general moral teachings, rights and obligations, crime and punishment, personal and public law and a number of private and social concerns. These issues are described in a variety of ways, such as direct stipulations, reminders of Allah’s favours on His creation, admonitions and rebukes. Stories of past communities are narrated, followed by the lessons to be learned from their actions and subsequent fates.

Thus, it becomes incumbent on all those who call themselves Muslim, to recite the Quran regularly, understand it and follow what is ordained therein.

The Holy Quran, with 114 suras, of which 86 were revealed in Makkah over a period of 13 years and 28 in Madinah during the next 10 years, containing 666 verses and forming 30 chapters, was revealed over a period of 23 Lunar years on Prophet Muhammad (PBUH).

Let us see what Allah tells about the Holy Quran. Allah takes responsibility to teach Quran to the Prophet. “By degrees shall we teach thee (the message), so thou shalt not forget, except as Allah wills; for he knoweth what is manifest and what is hidden. And we shall make it easy for thee (to follow) the simple path.” (87:608).

Allah tells the Holy Prophet “thus have we sent this down — an Arabic Quran — and explained in detail some of the warnings.... be not in haste with the Quran before its revelation to thee is completed.” (20:113-114).

In Sura 75: 16-19, Allah asks the Prophet “Move not thy tongue concerning the Quran to make haste therewith. It is for US to collect it and recite it..... it is for US to explain it (the make it clear.)

“So have we made the Quran easy in thine own tongue, that with it thou mayest give glad tidings to the righteous, and warnings to people given to contention. (19:97).

Quran is divided into parts by Allah thus: “It is a Quran which We have divided (into parts from time to time), in order that thou mightest recite it to people at intervals: We have revealed it by stages. (17:106)

Allah made the Quran clear and easy to understand “These are the Ayats of Revelations, of a Quran that makes things clear. (15:1) These are verses of the Book, that makes things clear. (26:2, and the same repeated in 27:1, 28:2, 43:2). “By the Book that makes things clear; we have made it a Quran in Arabic, that ye may be able to understand.” (43:3)

“Had We sent this as a Quran (in a language) other than Arabic, they would have said: ‘Why are not its verses explained in detail? What! a foreign (tongue) and a Messenger an Arab?’ Say, it is a guide and a healing to those who believe; and for those who believe not, there is a deafness in their ears, and it is blindness (in their eyes): they are (as it were) being called from a place far distant.” (41:44)

There is no twist crookedness in the Quran: “Praise to be Allah, Who hath sent to His servants the Book, and hath allowed therein no crookedness. He hath made it straight and clear .... (18:1-2)

Two types of verses are in Quran: “He it is Who has sent down to thee the Book: In it are verses, ‘Muhakamat’— basic or fundamental, clear (in meaning), they are the foundation of the Book. Others - ‘Mutashabayat’ — not entirely clear. But those in whose hearts is perversity follow the part thereof that is not entirely clear (‘Mutashabayat’); Seeking discord, and searching for its interpretation, but no one knows its true meaning except Allah. (3:7)

The way to study/recite the Holy Quran: “Those to whom we have given the book study it as it should be studied.” (2:121) “And recite the Quran in low measured rhythmic tones.” (73:4) “Read ye, as much of the Quran, as may be easy (for you).” (73:20)

The best time to recite the Quran is this directed: And the recital of Quran at ‘fajr’ (early morning) is ‘mashood’ (witnessed). (17:78)

It is (Quran) for all the worlds and all times. “Verily, this is not less than a message to all the worlds.” (81:27)

The Quran is preserved and guarded by Allah: “We have without doubt, sent down the Message; And We will assuredly guard it. (15:9) “Nay, this is a glorious Quran, (inscribed) in tablet preserved.” (85:21-22)

From the above ayats, it can be summarised that:

The Quran, in the form we have for the last over 1400 years, was finally compiled as per instructions received from Allah, and it is preserved in a tablet with Him.

Allah tells in the Quran that it is clear and straight to understand.

The Quran has withstood the test of time. Since its revelation efforts have been made by non-believers to mock it, corrupt it, destroy it, give different meanings to ayats but the Quran has remained unchanged over the last 14 centuries in its present form.

Recitation of the Quran in the language it was revealed is also an act of worship. But its meaning must be understood in the language one knows and obey the commandments contained therein implicitly. On the last day of judgment everybody will be judged according to ones’ deeds.

And Allah tells: “This is the Book (the Quran), in it is guidance sure, without doubt, to those, who fear Allah, who believe in unseen, are steadfast in prayer, and spend out what We have provided for them; And who believe in Revelation, sent to thee and sent before thy time and in their hearts have the assurance of Hereafter”. And Allah promises, that, “They are on true guidance from their Lord and it is these who will prosper”. (2:1-5)

Thus, the Quran is not a Book to be kept, wrapped in velvety covers, in upper most hard to reach shelves ‘or only to be used for keeping on the head of a bride when departing after ‘nikah’ for her new home.

May Allah show us “the straight way, the way of those on whom He has bestowed His grace, those whose portion is not wrath, and who did not go astray”.Amen

BY a modest estimate 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the start of the Iraq war in March 2003. Lancet, the British medical journal which first came up with this estimate based on a scientific analysis of all casualty reports, said the figure could be as high as 200,000.

The report covered the pre-election period when all Iraqis, irrespective of sectarian considerations, were involved in the resistance to the US-led occupation. This included the Sunni uprisings in Fallujah twice (April and November) and the Shia insurgency, again twice, in Najaf in April and August. However, since the January 30 election, with a 60 per cent turn-out, the resistance seems to have become an exclusively Sunni phenomenon. Sunnis here mean Arab Sunnis and do not take into account the Kurds, who took part in the Jan 30 vote and now look forward to a greater say in Iraqi affairs when an elected Shia-led government assumes power.

In looking at the Iraqi situation, one is astounded to note that there is no authentic spokesman for the Sunni population. In the case of the Shias, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and Moqtada al-Sadr represent a substantial section, if not all, of Iraq’s Shia population. In the case of the Sunnis, there is no one who can be considered their authentic spokesman.

Abu Mus’ab Zarqawi, who is leading the Sunni resistance, is a Jordanian. He employs an idiom that resembles Osama bin Laden’s. Iraq was never an Osama supporter in the Baathist era, and in the post-Saddam period even the religious among the Sunnis and Shias do not regard Osama as their leader and hero. Both Shias and Sunnis may be in agreement in their opinion of America and Israel, but neither has opted for an Al Qaeda strategy. For these two reasons, Zarqawi has no chance of representing Iraqi Sunnis. He has also changed the name of his organizatioon — from Tawhid wal Jihad to Al Qaeda of Iraq. This is hardly going to win more adherents to his cause.

No wonder, the leaderless Sunnis are focussing on a terror campaign that is merely killing Iraqi civilians — for one American soldier killed, at least 50 Iraqis are killed or injured.

The big question is: what exactly is the idea behind the current form of resistance? The campaign to foil elections failed, because the US used its enormous military power, and the Shias their common sense to realize where their interests lay. These two factors combined to make a success of the Jan 30 election.

The roots of Sunni anger are to be found in the colonial politics of the early 20th century. The Ottoman empire did not have a province called Iraq. When, after the end of World War I, Britain took charge of the area as a “mandatory”, it grouped three provinces — Basra, Baghdad and Mosul (even though the Sykes-Picot pact had allotted Mosul to France) — to create a country called Iraq.

Britain also had to honour its commitment to Hussain bin Ali, the sharif of Makkah, who had revolted against the Turks because Britain had promised to make him the king of a mighty Arab empire out of territories wrested from the Ottomans.

The betrayal of the Arabs, the handover of Palestine to European Jews, the role of

the other mandatory power, France, and the League of Nations’ involvement in this criminality do not concern us here. But, when the French drove Amir Faisal out of Damascus, Britain was hard put to find a kingdom for Hussain’s youngest son.

This Britain did by creating Iraq and planting a Sunni Hashemite prince on a predominantly Shia population, though this is besides the point that even the Sunni Iraqis wondered why someone had to be imported from Hijaz to rule a post-Ottoman “free” Iraq. The result was a ferocious revolt, and Britain did not hesitate to use chemical weapons.

The military coup of July 1958 put an end to the Hashehmite dynasty, but the Sunni domination of Iraq continued. Saddam Hussein, who seized power in 1979 and lost it in 2003, turned out to be the last Sunni strongman.

Understandably, the Sunnis are angry, for no individual or group easily reconciles himself or itself to loss of power. But let us note that the whites now live peacefully with the blacks in South Africa. Given the fact that during the apartheid’s heyday, they considered blacks little better than animals, the white “tragedy” was even greater. But, thanks to the wise leadership of Nelson Mandela and his successor, the whites have bowed to reality. The Sunnis of Iraq, too, have no other choice.

The politics of numbers is against them. They are 20 per cent of the population, and by all indications the Kurds, who are about 15 per cent, will join a Shia-led government. The Christians, who constitute five per cent of the population, have traditionally been on the right side of power. Being a small minority, they would not like to annoy the Shia-Kurd alliance on Iraq’s future political dispensation. This means that the Sunnis would be up against a formidable 80 per cent majority. To confront this majority with force would merely mean more Iraqi deaths without a clearly-defined strategic goal.

The Sunnis share at least one common goal with the Shias (if not the Kurds) — maintaining the unity of Iraq. The country must remain united, for there is a danger that if the terror campaign degenerates into a civil war between Shias and Sunnis, the Kurds could profit from the anarchy to create an independent Kurdistan. This will not only encourage the Kurds of Turkey and Iran to think on similar lines but also start a process of fragmentation too terrible to contemplate.

Israel looks forward to this happening, since the potentates and despots ruling these powerless cantons would be dependent on America for their survival. This is one of Israel’s cherished goals.

If the Sunnis think that a Shia-led Iraq will be America’s client state then they misjudge the Shia mood. They may be Shias, but first and foremost they are Arabs and Iraqis. The major issue on which Shia Iraq and the US will clash will be on the question of the withdrawal of American troops. The Bush administration has consistently refused to give a date for withdrawal. (Sixty years ago Japan surrendered but American troops are still there in Okinawa.)

An American withdrawal from Iraq will nullify the very purpose of the Anglo-American invasion; merely ousting the Baathist regime was hardly the only objective; the greater aim was the destruction of a major Arab country followed by a permanent American (read Israeli) military presence in the heart of the Arab world.

The US has no plans to withdraw, and that is where the Sunni leadership should prepare itself for lending full support to a Shia-led government for a joint struggle for Iraq’s liberation.

The Sunnis should think of the future instead of focussing too much on their present sense of deprivation. With its immense oil wealth and talented people, a united, peaceful Iraq run jointly by Shias, Sunnis and Kurds will be a source of strength for the Arab world.

LAST autumn I was on a plane to Washington to cover the US election. The in-flight movie was the remake of The Manchurian Candidate, about a politician who receives instructions whispered into his ear by outside manipulators.

Film over, I picked up the papers to read of claims that George Bush had used a hidden radio device to feed him lines during the televised presidential debates.

It was unnerving, as if the movies and reality were getting a little too close. And I had a similar sensation on Tuesday. I had just finished watching a preview of The Government Inspector, the Channel 4 film about the life and death of Dr David Kelly. Once it was over, the TV set automatically reverted to a news channel, bringing word of the parliamentary battle over “control orders”. The government was demanding the right to restrict the liberty of suspected terrorists who cannot be prosecuted.

The connection may not seem so obvious as my Manchurian moment, but after nearly two hours re-immersed in the hot, sticky summer of 2003 - and the events that both led up to and followed it — it felt pretty strong.

The film, centred on Mark Rylance’s halting, haunting performance as Kelly, brings back a clutch of memories. Inevitably, it retells the shabby tale of how the Iraq war was sold on a faulty, if not a false, basis.

No wonder the government wanted nothing to do with the project: Channel 4 have served up a 100-minute reminder that Tony Blair led the nation to war to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. (On the other hand, the film is clear that Kelly himself was no sceptic: he was sure the WMD were there, waiting to be found.)

But The Government Inspector stirs two other, related thoughts — both of which could not be more current. First, it lays bare the improvised, on-the-hoof ad hockery that characterises so much of our government. Rules and procedures exist but, one soon realises, these are mere guidelines, to be used when helpful, and ditched when not.

So when No 10 meets to decide how to handle the Kelly rumpus, it’s an informal coffee klatch of advisers and civil servants perched on the sofas around Blair’s desk. They need to get Kelly’s name “up”, and so conceive the naming strategy that will expose him to the press. This procedure is in no civil service handbook: it’s pulled out of the air.

Next, Downing Street wants Kelly to disprove Andrew Gilligan’s story that the 45-minute claim was sexed up. So they hatch a plan to haul the weapons inspector before the Commons foreign affairs committee. An innovation, but it serves the immediate political purpose. They need to make sure that Kelly stays on message, so his line manager is dispatched to hint heavily that Kelly can keep his job and even lead a new mission to Iraq — so long as he sticks to the script. Again, that’s surely not the conventional civil service appointments process, but it solves the problem.

Outside the scope of the programme, we know the pattern continued. When Blair heard, 30,000ft in the air over the Bering Strait, that Kelly was dead, he improvised again, calling for a judicial inquiry to be headed by Lord Hutton.

Which brings us to the second side-function of this TV drama, its Technicolour illustration of a drab fact: Britain suffers from a bad case of overmighty executive syndrome. All the way through the Kelly saga, in each of these ad hoc moves, it is the executive which holds the trump card — even over those branches of government that are meant to be separate.

So when Downing Street wants Kelly to contradict Gilligan, it can have him grilled by a committee of the legislature, the Commons - confident that with a Labour man in the chair and with a built-in majority, it will get its way. When it sees the need for a judicial inquiry, it can set the terms, write the remit and pick the judge, all to suit itself.

—Dawn/Guardian Service