Afghans destroy books from Iran
Officials dumped them into a river. A disputed complaint said the texts insulted Sunnis.
KABUL - The Afghan government quietly dumped more than 1,000 Shiite texts and other books from Iran into a river after a local governor complained that their content insulted Afghanistan's Sunni majority.
The move appeared to be an attempt by President Hamid Karzai's U.S.-backed government to smooth over a potential thorn in relations between the Muslim sects.
But instead of burying the issue along with the books at the bottom of the Helmand River, the government faced condemnation from Shiite leaders yesterday after news leaked a month after the dumping.
"It is a humiliation for all Shiites," said Mohammad Akbari, a prominent Shiite member of parliament. He said a joint commission of Sunni and Shiite leaders should have reviewed any complaints about the books.
Merchants who had ordered the books for shops in Kabul said that nothing was offensive about their content and that they were destroyed because of prejudice against Shiites, who make up about 20 percent of the population.
The dispute highlights the continuing tension between Sunnis and Shiites in Afghanistan despite government efforts to preach tolerance across the sectarian divide.
Shiites were persecuted under the largely Sunni Taliban regime that ruled the country until the U.S.-led invasion in 2001. Since then, the two sects have settled into an uneasy coexistence.
The latest episode started six months ago when a container full of books arrived in western Nimroz province from neighboring Iran, said the governor's spokesman, Haaji Nazir. Nestled among boxes of computer and English instruction manuals were more than 1,000 history and religious books promoting Shiite Islam, he said. Iran is a mostly Shiite country.
"Books like these are more dangerous than Taliban bullets," Gov. Ghulam Dastagir Azad said. But the Kabul booksellers who ordered them said ethnic prejudice had motivated the governor, a Sunni from the country's dominant Pashtun ethnic group.
After seizing the books, authorities in the province sent samples to the Information and Culture Ministry in the capital for a ruling. A commission found that at least some of the books were "dangerous to the unity of Afghanistan."
Culture Ministry official Aleem Tanwir said the ministry agreed to dump the books in the river as an alternative to burning, because it is against Islam to burn a book that contains the name of the prophet Muhammad.
