By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
During an interview with the Italian Catholic press, Archbishop Louis Sako of Kirkuk, Iraq said the West cannot possibly understand the threat of a “reawakening of Islam” in the Middle East and called the region a “scary volcano” since the Egyptian and Tunisian uprisings.
The Catholic News Agency is reporting that Archbishop Sako made the comments to the Italian bishops’ SIR news agency, saying that there would be grave consequences if the unrest spreads throughout the region.
“There are Islamic forces and movements that wish to change the Middle East, creating Islamic States, caliphates, in which Shariah (law) rules,” he warned.
Groups such as Al-Qaida and Ansar al Islam are calling on citizens in other Middle Eastern nations to inject an Islamic influence into the secular protests taking place in Egypt and Tunisia, he said, indicating “the clear intention of fueling … a total religious change” in the area.
“They are voices that could find fertile ground in Egypt and elsewhere and therefore should not be underestimated, also because there are regional powers whose leaders have defined these revolts as the ‘reawakening of Islam’,” he said.
The goal of these fundamentalists is “to create a void to be able to fill it with religious themes, convinced … that Islam is the solution to everything,” he said.
Protestors in Egypt claim that their protests are secular and not driven by religion, but the power vacuum caused by Mubarak’s departure gives fundamentalists the opportunity they’re looking for to step in and take control.
Should Egypt becoming an Islamic state, he said, it would be “a problem for all” and have “undeniable, negative aftershocks for Christian minorities.”
Europe and North America are blind to the possibility of such an “Islamization” of the Middle East, he said.
“The western mentality does not allow it to fully comprehend this risk,” he said.
Politics and religion are interwoven in the Middle East, he said, but in the West, there is “a tremendous void” between the two.
Should Egypt becoming an Islamic state, he said, it would be “a problem for all” and have “undeniable, negative aftershocks for Christian minorities.”
He called the future of the Middle East “unknown and scary” and said Iraqi Christians look on the Egyptian crisis with “sadness.” They are afraid Egypt will fall into the same ethnic and religious division that plagues their country, thus becoming “another Iraq” where the Christian population is being slowly driven out.
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