KUTCHA SYEDAN: For a small Kashmiri Shia community, last October’s earthquake has brought them closer to another tragedy — the conflict in Iraq. Living on the banks of the Jhelum river, just a few kolometres inside Azad Kashmir, the people of Kutcha Syedan have an ayatollah from Iraq to thank for the tents that have sheltered them through the Himalayan winter.
The canvas sides bear the message “Donated by Ayatollah Sistani”.
Iraq’s top Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has never visited Kashmir, but his name goes before him.
“He is our Ayatollah. He is our leader and it is his duty to look after his people, and he is doing that,” said Zahoor Naqvi, a young jobless man, now active in relief work following the Oct. 8 earthquake that killed 73,000 people and made more than three million homeless.
Iranian-born, but based in Iraq’s holy city of Najaf, Ayatollah Sistani has the largest number of followers among all Shia ayatollahs around the world.
About 80 families live at Kutcha Syedan, some 50 km east of Muzaffarabad. It is one of three tent villages established in Kashmir by groups working in Sistani’s name.
They are also financing the reconstruction of several mosques in the area.
Ayatollah Sistani patronises several leading charities and provides financial support for most of the religious schools or madresas and mosques around the world.
In the camp, young boys and girls with dirty faces sat on mats reciting multiplication tables while older children had lessons inside the tents donated by Ayatollah Sistani’s charities.
“Ours were the first schools opened in this area after the earthquake,” Naqvi said.
Since the late 1980s, sectarian militant groups have killed thousands of Shias with bombs and in drive-by shootings, similar to the violence Iraq is suffering now on an even bigger scale.
Last year, President Pervez Musharraf ordered a new crackdown on sectarian militant groups, along with preachers and publications that spread hate.
So when Shias in Azad Kashmir protested over the February destruction of holy shrines of two sacred Shia Imams in by Al Qaeda’s Iraqi militants, it was noteworthy that they were joined by the student arm of a major Sunni political party, the Jamiat Ulema-i-Pakistan.
“This was a heinous crime. It is unbearable for Shias. This was done to provoke us, to stir sectarian war. But both Shias and Sunnis reacted wisely and did not fall prey to this conspiracy,” said Shia cleric Ahmed Ali Saeedi.
Followers of Sistani say their spiritual leader would not support such a move.
Unlike the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Sistani eschews political office for clerics. Nor does he seek political influence outside Iraq, according to his followers.
“Ayatollah Sistani is an apolitical person,” Sheikh Mohsin Ali Najafi, a senior representative of Sistani in Pakistan, told Reuters.
Still, no Iraqi has wielded as much political clout as Sistani since the US-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein in April 2003.
“The Ayatollah is in control of politics in Iraq, but he never took part in active politics. So what politics will he do in Pakistan or Kashmir if he is not doing that in Iraq?,” asks Najafi.
Although the Islamist parties and Jihadi groups have been at the forefront of relief work in Kashmir, sectarian divisions appear to have been put aside.
Jamat-ud-Dawa, a charity said to be funded by Saudi money and linked to Lashkhar-i-Taiba, one of the most feared Sunni Muslim militant groups fighting Indian rule in Kashmir, said it did not discriminate when it came to providing relief to quake victims.
“It is obsolete thinking,” said Haji Javed-ul-Hassan, head of Jamat-ud-Dawa’s relief operations in Muzaffarabad.
“We have provided relief to anyone irrespective of whether he is Shia, Sunni or Christian.”
