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Muawiyah Among Us... Sharpen Your Swords!
The event is monumental. The character is alluring. It whets the appetite. Everyone can throw in their opinion about it; whether Shia, Sunni, Alawite, Christian, Druze, secular, or even an atheist, they can all express a viewpoint if they are not swayed by the temptation to engage in it. We are a society of sects and hatred, raised on fear of one another, so how can we distance ourselves from this grand incident? We will not let it pass quietly, or else our skins will itch. Do the merchants of religion have a more fertile ground than this to invest in? Where will drama producers find a controversial figure like the Umayyad caliph Muawiya ibn Abi Sufyan to achieve their massive profits through him?
"The owner of the money is a coward." This truth has never been denied by history. The merchant knows how and where to invest; he understands the right moment to cast his nets to increase his wealth. He is also greedy. The merchant knows that Arab and Islamic peoples are always ready to die for their history. He realizes that we continue to sanctify our heritage, and that evoking it can easily spill our blood and sow discord among us whenever needed. He knows we are children of sects, not nations, and that religious and sectarian bias is ingrained in our genes. The merchant reads too—not to understand, but to profit. He invests in the stones of the graves of our predecessors because he knows they still control our present and shape our future. The merchant cares about history only enough to play within its gaps, of which there are many, to ensure guaranteed profits and ample resources.
Therefore, it only took a simple announcement of the name "Muawiya" as a television series for Ramadan. The episodes of the series may not exceed the holy month, but only God knows where its repercussions will stop. With the first marketing signal, the fever of excitement and partisanship exploded on social media, and “internet users” took their positions as if they were on the front lines of the Battle of Siffin; one side cries "Woe to me," while the other exclaims "Woe to Muawiya," as the clashing of loyalties, opinions, and pre-made thoughts resounds without us knowing when it will end or how.
Thus, it is a trade that has not seemed, and will not seem, to fade until the Day of Judgment in the market of these afflicted peoples. The cost is simple; it requires nothing more than shaking the course of history a little to stir the stagnation and provoke the already packaged emotions of the masses, ready at any moment to engage in a war that they have no stake in. However, being loyal children of history with hearts yearning and groaning for ancestral glory, believing that there is no salvation for us except in heritage, we have sworn by the strongest oaths to the righteous and the unrighteous predecessors, that we, as children of the twenty-first century, will remain committed to protecting our ignorance and backwardness, and confirmed to them that we will not have a hand in building human civilization nor in shaping its future. We have bound ourselves to history, wandering in it and nursing illusions of its past.
With these past-oriented peoples, Muawiya ibn Abi Sufyan will continue to be able to move them, and his scepter will persist in directing the armies of Facebook and other internet platforms in whatever direction he inclines. The first caliph of the Umayyads, who passed away over 1300 years ago, still commands all the tools necessary to reignite war.
What we hope for now is that the script of the series does not provoke a new incitement to strife, lest we believe that the hour has come, and we sharpen our swords to descend into the fields of battle to defend or combat Muawiya.
The initial ramifications that can be read following the first episodes of the series clearly affirm that we are peoples regurgitating our history and heritage, and that we are immersed in the minutiae of the past and its figures, and that this amazing heritage still holds a tremendous capacity to mobilize the streets despite the passage of time and the divergence of standards. Our peoples have not yet realized, unfortunately, that they do not possess any form of cognitive structures except those offered to them by the pages of history and heritage, which contain the fleeting glory that falsehood cannot approach from before or behind, and all else is worthless.
Thus, we do not call for a severance from this heritage, but at least to study it carefully and from a scientific and historical perspective rather than as a sacred text, and to reread all its characters based on an academic methodology, just as we read Gandhi, Lenin, John Kennedy, Charles de Gaulle, Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat, and other names that played roles in history.
by: Bashar Abboud
