Sinwar at Karbala

Plus, betting on the tortoise

Abbas Al-Musavi. Battle of Karbala, late 19th–early 20th century. Oil on canvas. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of K. Thomas Elghanayan in honor of Nourollah Elghanayan. Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2010.

Hamas Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar’s messages are the subject of a Wall Street Journal article. It concludes:

In a recent message to allies, the Hamas leader likened the war to a 7th-century battle in Karbala, Iraq, where the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad was controversially slain. 

“We have to move forward on the same path we started,” Sinwar wrote. “Or let it be a new Karbala.”

This is such a revealing insight into the thinking of the Hamas leadership. He’s not thinking about Israel’s creation in 1948 or Israel’s takeover of the West Bank in 1967. He’s thinking about the Battle of Karbala, said to have happened on October 10, 680. The Britannica reports that in that battle, “a small party led by al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad and son of ʿAlī, the fourth caliph, was defeated and massacred by an army sent by the Umayyad caliph Yazīd I.”  

You’ve heard of Barack Hussein Obama? King Hussein of Jordan? Saddam Hussein of Iraq? Yahya Sinwar is ready to make himself into another Husayn, martyred by a much larger and more powerful force but venerated and influential in memory for centuries to come. 

It may seem delusional in its grandiosity. But it helps to explain why lasting peace in the Middle East has been so elusive. Americans, particularly secular Americans in universities or at large news organizations or in the U.S. government bureaucracies such as the State Department or the CIA populated by American graduates of secular universities, look at this conflict and try to explain it by saying, let’s have a real estate compromise and economic development and ameliorate the effects of “European settler-colonialism” and we can all live happily ever after. Yes, it is true that plenty of Arabs and Muslims would like the economic benefits of partnering with Israel’s high-technology economy and would prefer peace and prosperity to suffering and war. And, it is also true that there are others, including Sinwar, who see themselves as reenacting the Battle of Karbala.  

Unless and until American and Israeli policymakers and professors and journalists think about 680 as much as they think about 1948 and 1967, they’re going to be frustrated in understanding what’s happening in the Middle East, let alone in trying to reshape the region in a way that is more prosperous and peaceful.