Where mercy is absent, memory can turn violent.
In Gaza, rescue workers recently unearthed over thirty bodies from the rubble in a single day, some still breathing, most not, reminders that homes have become mass graves, and hospitals, burial grounds. After 21 months of indiscriminate massacre, over 59,100 people have been killed and more than 139,077 wounded in Gaza, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. The humanitarian crisis deepens with over 1.9 million Gazans, more than 85% of the population, displaced.
In southern Lebanon, renewed Israeli airstrikes continue to displace thousands; as the conflict escalates, up to one million people have fled their homes. Civilian casualties now exceed 2,247 killed and more than 7,191 injured since October 2023, with strikes continuing through the summer, compounding the suffering.
And in Pakistan’s Kurram district, a November 2024 ambush on a Shia convoy killed at least 54 worshippers; retaliatory violence soon brought the toll past 130 in the weeks that followed, before tribal elders brokered a fragile ceasefire and dismantled local bunkers. Grief moves like ash across these geographies, and old divisions are reawakened by those who profit from flame.
We are no longer shocked. That may be the deepest wound of all.
The Sunni–Shia divide, once a theological conversation conducted in libraries and study circles, has metastasised into a convenient fault line, politically redrawn, militarily exploited, spiritually desecrated. Loyalty is reduced to tribe. Piety becomes performance. The sacred is conscripted into the profane.
And yet, in places overlooked by satellite and screen, something resists extinction.
In Amman, Jordanians (Palestinian, Syrian, and native-born) gathered in solidarity at blood drives for the wounded in Gaza. In Lebanon’s Chouf and Bekaa regions, Sunni, Druze, Shia, and Christian families have quietly opened homes to those fleeing bombardment in the south. Relief caravans organised by local interfaith networks have distributed food without asking for sectarian affiliation.
In Pakistan’s northwest, where violence turned neighbours into enemies, tribal elders from both sects came together after the Kurram attacks. They formed joint jirgas, dismantled sectarian checkpoints, reopened roads, and brokered agreements to protect places of worship, ceasefires negotiated not by officials but by conscience. And in Iraq, during Ashura in Karbala, Sunni volunteers from Baghdad and Fallujah handed out water and tended wounds alongside Shia mourners. Their presence was sacramental.
These gestures are humbly grand, rarely televised, but they carry the fragrance of the eternal.
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“And the servants of the Most Merciful are those who walk upon the earth humbly, and when the ignorant address them harshly, they say: Peace.” (Quran 25:63)
There is a gentleness in this verse that confounds the logic of retaliation. Mercy, in the Quran, is regarded as strength under restraint, a discipline of the spirit, an accountability to the Source of all justice.
The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, was no stranger to betrayal, humiliation, or bloodshed. And yet, upon his return to Mecca after years of exile, his first words were not a declaration of vengeance but a pledge of forgiveness: Go, you are free.
“Repel evil with that which is better; then the one between whom and you was hatred will become as though he were a devoted friend.” (Quran 41:34)
We return to these verses as orientation. They remind us that to conduct ourselves with grace, even when wronged, is not optional. It is binding.
To follow the Prophet’s example is to resist the reduction of faith to faction. It is to speak the language of the heart even when the world shouts in slogans. As Ibn Arabi once confessed: “My heart has become capable of every form… It is the pasture for gazelles and a monastery for monks… I follow the religion of Love.”
Such love is a remembering of the unity beneath all superficial differences, the rope the Qur’an enjoins us to grasp: “Hold firmly to the rope of God, all together, and do not become divided.” (Quran 3:103)
But how do we hold that rope when our hands are full of rage?
Perhaps by beginning where we are. By refusing to forward a message that deepens hatred. By listening where condemnation is easier. By mourning the dead on all sides, not only those who share our name. These acts, hidden and uncelebrated, are the scaffolding of a better world.
While we await wiser leaders, the work falls to ordinary people.
For over a century, villagers have come by foot and cart to Shah Jeewna, drawn by sorrow remembered. In hushed procession, they chant the names of the martyred where their elders once stood. The verses, the paths, even the pauses between laments remain unchanged. Around them, the world may convulse. Here, memory holds.
In Bahrain, during Muharram, Sunni imams have quietly crossed thresholds to join Shia congregations in mourning. They have stood in black, reciting praises of Ahl al-Bayt, to honour a grief that belongs to all.
In Yemen, in the war-weary cities of Taiz and Ibb, Zaidi and Sunni clerics have met to pray. Their gatherings, modest, often unnoticed, reject the tidy labels of proxy and sect. They affirm instead that even now, God’s names include Justice and Reconciliation.
During Islamic Unity Week, held between the Prophet’s birthdays as marked by Sunni and Shia calendars, communities gather to sit with differences, faithfully. In Baghdad, in Sidon, in Manama, believers recite from one book in varied tongues. They do not agree on every verse, nor must they. What binds them is the attempt, halting and sincere, to remember the Messenger in the company of one another.
“O you who have believed, be persistently standing firm in justice… even if it be against yourselves or parents or relatives.” (Quran 4:135)
Justice, to be meaningful, must be self-reflective. It demands inner scrutiny as much as outward courage. Its path is difficult, but it dignifies those who walk it.
It would be naive to expect those entrenched in power to lead such a transformation. Many owe their authority to the very divisions they bemoan. But power is not the only form of influence. Conscience, too, is a force.
And those unrecognised by headlines, blood donors, tribal mediators, grieving mothers, reluctant hosts, are already doing the work of repair. Even when extremist groups threaten interfaith harmony, communities persist in older traditions of unity, trusting that spiritual bonds outlast political fracture.
This is no way to romanticise suffering or diminish the demand for justice. It is to recover what the best of our traditions teach: cruelty is effortless. Conscience is harder. But only conscience restores what cruelty destroys.
To address centuries of strife, we must ask ourselves if we are willing now to remember what faith at its most essential requires: that we answer cruelty with conscience. That we cease asking who is worthy of mercy, and begin asking how we might be worthy of mercy ourselves.
Yahia Lababidi is a writer of Palestinian descent and the author of a dozen books, including Palestine Wail (Daraja Press, 2024), a love letter to Gaza and an appeal to the human family. His latest book is a collection of original aphorisms, What Remains To Be Said (Wild Goose Publications, 2025)
Follow Yahia on X: @YahiaLababidi
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