the local arena witnessed the coronavirus related vocal ‘skirmishes’ because a majority of the citizens who were on ‘religious’ visits to iran were infected with the disease.
this phenomenon divided the mps into two groups and they took to fingerpointing at a certain party on the lines of racism and sectarianism forgetting first and foremost we are all brothers and sisters before we are the citizens of one country.
the instinct of hate that enters the souls and minds of the innocent and ignorant people is justified by the political and electoral manifestations meaning there is no better way to win the hearts of unsuspecting people.
those who benefit from the situation are the people who will do everything in their power to inject the poison fully aware that those who have been attacked or their patriotism has been challenged will leave kuwait because no one will take the first available means of transport to make a dash to the borders or coasts of saudi arabia, bahrain, iraq, iran or others, not only because none of these countries will welcome them and if ever any of these countries welcomed them before was because of what they had in their pocket, no more no less.
what is most difficult in the gulf region, is the definition or rather the relationship between the sunni or shiite doctrine in the absence of a strong bond between the arabs and the persians, which date back to the peninsula just before islam, when the then yemeni king seif bin dhi yazan with the help of the persian forces kept at bay the ethiopian invaders.
this was preceded by centuries of the occupation by cyrus, the persian forces in iraq in 500 bc and his empire extended to egypt and other regions of the arab east, as iran was, in the modern political sense, the first colonial state in history.
there is no better explanation for interpreting the meaning of ‘mixed feelings’ than the arab-persian relationship. on the one hand, the persians owe the arabs their religion, which they cherish, and see it not only as their salvation but throughout their history they were sunni muslims until the safavid king came in 1501 chose the twelver shiites as a sect of his kingdom (twelvers believe that the twelve imams are the spiritual and political successors to the islamic prophet muhammad (pbuh).
on the other hand, they did not tolerate the thought that they were once masters on battlefields, the capital of art and beauty, poetry, music, sculpture and painting, bowmen and archers and that a sloppy desert army defeated them – the army that did not possess anything – and knew nothing about the art of war and peace that have always been the source of pride among the persians who were now put to shame, their women enslaved, their palaces were looted and their elders were humiliated.
the persians also did not forget that the desert army changed and influenced their persian language and culture and retained from it what pleased them. here we find in the heart and mind of every persian belief of mixed feelings towards those who gave them religion and perhaps away from them forever the glory and pride.
the subject of mixed feelings applies equally to arabs. they succeeded in breaking the back of the largest empires of that era and making their subjects bow to their whims in various fields. here we can say the mixed feelings and their consequences are here to stay forever among both parties but we must learn to co-exist because it is a no win-no gain situation from the political or sectarian point of view.