The guard seemed perplexed and did not engage in further conversation. In the contemporary Muslim world, riven with sectarian strife, to be just a Muslim is to be a new and innovative category.
I grew up in Assam, India, where the entire Muslim community is Sunni. My mother told me that the ummah is one and Muslims believed in one God, and the Prophet Muhammad is the last messenger for humankind. I became aware that Muslims are a divided community for the first time when I joined Aligarh Muslim University. They invited me to join the matam mourning ceremonies. But I did not understand why mourning was so critical to their identity.
The organisers hoped that the presence of the invited scholars from a variety of different countries would stand as testimony of the new found peace in Iraq. I was one of the sixty-one international participants in the conference; and I participated not as a Sunni but as a Muslim, without an adjective.
Muslim is an elusive and invisible claim in the sectarian landscape. The category called Muslim is deleted from the Iraqi lexicon, so it seemed. Blaming and finger pointing have only exacerbated the violence between them. My husband and I consciously refused to take sides. The non-hyphenated, non-sectarian label β Muslim β that we claimed for ourselves separated us from everyone we met in Iraq during our trip.
Events in neighbouring Syria in particular affected interpersonal relationships and accentuated the sense of sectarian identity. The Kurds watched in anxious anticipation the weakening of the political situation in Syria leading to the exodus of refugees into their towns and nibbling away into their economy.
