Sayyed Fadlullah: Fighting the culture of division is a major task that our religious and political leaders should pursue to achieve unity in the face of the major challenges ahead .

Asked in his weekly seminar the following question : How do we fight the culture of division?

The Religious Authority, Sayyed Muhammad Hussein Fadlullah, said:

Religions have always sought to unify and not to disperse. Islam in particular has called for unity and abhorred fighting and the culture of division that is the product of tyranny and autocracy as well as tribalism, sectarianism and sometimes even fanatic nationalism. It has always considered fanaticism as something that contradicts religion.

Islam has not only sought to deal with the causes of division, it also sought to build unity through its unifying concepts that have always acted as a weapon to fight disperse and fragmentation.

Moreover, fanaticism and tribalism, being an element of division have always been one of the windows that the international arrogance was able to penetrate through to exploit all the sectarian, racial and national divisions that were instituted on tribal foundations and not ideological differences. Thus, the international arrogance was able to broaden the existing gaps and present itself as a savoir, hindering any awakening of this giant
(the Islamic nation) that could constitute an intellectual and civilization competitor.

But then there was also the problem of the political and even religious leadership that did not confront the culture of division by calling for unity and coherence in their political and religious discourse, or in their general movement. On the country, they chose to underscore the existing differences by dividing the nation into categories of reactionaries and progressivists .

Such a categorization was not founded on national or religious basis, but rather on political or jurisprudence affiliations.

Thus a large section of the nation was nourished the culture of division by accusing others of being either politically or religious apostates, relying on its priorities and that of the nation, and pushing for the adoption of the nation for these priorities, which led into a deep division in defining the national or Islamic goals, and ultimately to a nearly irreversible loss of all our causes.

With the arrogant powers trying to make use of our political divisions which they themselves instituted in the first place when they split the region into spheres of influence in the aftermath of the First World War, we have to be aware of the dangerousness of the arrogant efforts to wipe out the Palestinian cause from the nation’s collective conscience, and leave the Palestinians on their own in confronting the big American and Zionist pressures.

As for the Palestinians themselves, they are trying to preoccupy them with daily security details, so that it will turn into a center of tension, which the other states should hurry up to diffuse, instead of being the basic cause of our nation since Israel was installed by force in the region.

We are also afraid that the culture of sectarian and confessional division that was consolidated by the Lebanese elections is going to be universalized in the coming projects to serve the international powers that aim at throwing Lebanon in the region’s turmoil, by using sometimes the slogan of reform and by promising economic aid in others. All this proves that their underlying aim is to move Lebanon to the side that promotes the American projects in the region, and to relieve Israel's worries, the fact that such a turn of events would let Lebanon fall in a lot of internal problems notwithstanding.