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Is that art?! |
![]() |
Is that art?! |
The last time I attended Babylon International Festival was in 2000. Then, it was a celebration of the world’s arts and culture and a revival of a civilization’s history. There performed various Arab, Asian, European, American and African artists, dancing and playing traditional and contemporary music, leaving Iraqis enjoy precious times as they endured the hardships of the Iran-Iraq war and the 12-year international sanctions.
But today, seven years after it was canceled due to the US-led invasion, the festival opened with failure and disastrous atmosphere. No dancing, no singing! Nothing but two badly-performed plays on globalization and hating the United States. The reasons, according to The New York Times, were religion and politics!
The Times reported that the deputy governor of the Babil province, Sadiq al-Muhanna, “declared the ban on music and dance… which he called offensive to Muslims during religious ceremonies for Imam Sadiq.”
This news came in like a lightning strike to me. It is really sad that religion hijacked the entire Iraqi society, whose culture and art battled and survived dictators, wars, barbarians and invasions throughout history. Iraq was a country where culture and arts met and flourished. It was a country that gave birth to great artists whose imprints were recorded for thousands of years across the globe. But today it’s a country marked by religion and only religion. Instead of reviving our glorious history, the leaders of the new Iraq are forcing that form of submission. They coat Imams’ graves with pure gold; they block streets for weeks in celebration of death or birth anniversaries of those Imams and now they cancel the entire basis of the Mesopotamian civilization: appreciation of art and culture.
We have become worse than the most conservative countries in the Middle East. Even in Saudi Arabia, where men and women are flogged if found mingling with each other, people celebrate their culture by dancing and performing in national festivals, and they don’t even have Mesopotamian heritage to revive.
My heart breaks for Iraq. It makes me gravely sad to see how religion has become the winner in the former secular country that I remember.
I dream of going back. Every day. But the Mullahs hijacked my country and turned it into a bigger mosque, where people cannot do anything but pray to deaf ears. I’m afraid the dream is shattering. I’m collecting the pieces but not sure how long this will last.
Celebrating Eid Al-Fitr in Baghdad this year came with the reopening of the Kadhimiya shrine domes! The domes, that had been already coated with pure gold hundreds of years ago, were re-coated with new shining, pure gold tiles.
“The [project] was directly funded by the Shiite Endowment. The total of number of tiles used to cover the dome is 10261. The work process lasted 6000 hours (equivalent to two years of continuous work). The total weight of the pure gold that was used to cover the dome is 112,400 Kilograms, and that 300 workers, engineers and technicians worked on it.”
I cannot believe he actually said that!
I have two comments on Crawford’s statement: first, nothing describes what he says other than the fact that he was trying to brainwash his church followers with incorrect information, which obviously aims to present Muslims as mean, immoral people who don’t even care about God in the first place. Secondly, it seems that Crawford has no knowledge whatsoever in the simplest teachings of Islam which proves that he didn’t study theology. It would be a disaster if he did!
Muslims believe that God (Allah) is closer to them than their own veins, which is something stated in Qaf Verse in the Holy Quran:
“And We [meaning God] have already created man and know what his soul whispers to him, and We are closer to him than [his] jugular vein.”
So if Crawford was right, how come Muslims believe that God cannot see them if they have high ceilings by the time they believe He’s closer to their souls than their own veins?!
Personally, I feel that religious worship houses- be it a mosque, a church or a temple- are no longer a place for worship. It seems to me that sheikhs and pastors, for instance, are competing on who brainwash as many people as they can to win this invisible religious war. Who’s the victim here? It’s me and you! So why go there in the first place when you can spare yourself from their poison?