Islamic New Year

I got a head-start on Muharram, the Islamic New Year, by attending Friday prayers today at the Omari Mosque in downtown Beirut. Part of the building was once a Cathedral built by Crusaders in the 12th century, but converted to a mosque when Islamic armies re-conquered the city in 1291. The whole complex rests on the site of a Roman temple.

On Muharram -- which starts tomorrow and is a holiday in Lebanon -- many Muslims remember the Hijra, the Prophet Mohammed's flight from persecution in Mecca to welcome in Medina. The event is celebrated as the the beginning of a Muslim consciousness, a national identity.

The mullah at the Omari mosque, which is a Sunni mosque, used the occasion to plead with the congregation not to enact their own secular Hijra, not to emigrate from Lebanon. The Lebanese are a diaspora people, the Irish of the Middle East, who for generations have left war and hardship behind them in search of a better life abroad. The trend reversed itself somewhat in the years after the end of the Civil War in 1990, but sadly has begun again of late. Some 70,000 people left Lebanon after the summer war with Israel, according to figures I've seen recently.

Normally, Christian leaders are the ones who have to plead with their people to stay. Christians, who have strong historical ties to the West, have been leaving Lebanon to the extent that their proportion of Lebanon's population has shrunk from around 50 percent at mid-20th century to possibly as little as 30 percent now, according to some estimates. (Figures are inexact because Lebanon hasn't had a census since the 1930's, such is the divisive nature of sectarian statistics.) The well trod path of Christians to the west is one reason why most Arabs in the United States are Christians of Lebanese and Syrian origin.

But today the preacher warned his flock that Muslims who leave Islamic lands might be unable to pass their religion down for more than a generation or two, such being the draining effect of Western culture. And he combined that warning with another plea: that Sunnis here in Lebanon stick together in the face of the diminishing influence of their sect.

This sense of siege emanating from a Sunni pulpit in the heart of cosmopolitan Beirut must be a recent development. Sunnis were long the exception to the old chestnut that Lebanon is a country of religious groups who behave like they each are a persecuted minority. Sunnis, who represent the majority of the Muslim world, typically had a natural sense of security about their place in the scheme of things Middle Eastern and Lebanese.

But I guess that's changing, though it's not hard to guess why. Not much more than two blocks away from the Omari Mosque is the protest campground set up by Hizballah, which is in the vanguard of rising Shi'ite influence in the Middle East.

By historical coincidence, Ashura, one of the most important Shi'ite holidays, begins on the tenth day of Murharram. During Ashura, celebrants beat their chests and ritually gash their heads with knives to bleed in memory of their ancestors' defeat at the battle of Karbala in Iraq in 680, the Ur battle between Shi'ite and Sunni. As a precaution, Hizballah leaders have announced that Ashura celebrations will not be held at the campgrounds in Beirut lest emotions run too high. Old grievances can wait.

By Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut