Saddam's Mosque Of War

January 17, 2003

                                                                                                         Photo: CBS

The house Saddam built - a gleaming mass of white limestone and blue mosaic -- is suffering from an identity crisis.

As CBS News Correspondent Lee Cowan reports, it is a Muslim house of prayer, but it also stands as Saddam's monument to war.

Four of its minarets resemble the barrels of Kalashnikov rifles. Another four look like Scud missiles, and the similarities are not a mistake.

It's called the mosque of the "Mother of all Battles." Saddam Hussein watched it rise from the day the ground was broken on his birthday.

He spared no expense. The reflecting pool rings the dome in the shape of the Arab world. In the middle there is a monument of Saddam's thumbprint with his initials set in gold.

But it is what is beneath one towering minaret that speaks the most of Saddam's passion for immortalizing himself.

Behind an ornate door in an inner sanctum are 650 pages of the Holy Koran, said to be penned in Saddam's own blood.

Care takers of the site treat it like a shrine.

What does this symbolize having the Koran written in Saddam Hussein's own blood?

"He loves his religion," one worshipper says, "and his God."

But perhaps the most stunning thing about the way this mosque celebrates the Gulf War is the lack of celebration of any of the war's victims. Out of all the monuments here, not a single one is dedicated to the 100,000 soldiers Iraq claims were killed. Sacrifice isn't the message here, victory is.

And as Saddam builds even more mosques -- like this one, he boasts will be the largest in the world -- his people remain in abject poverty.

He may well want religion to be his legacy, but a ruthless hand may be too hard to forget.

SOURCE:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/01/17/eveningnews/main537051.shtml

Related Article

Saddam Had Koran Written in His Blood for Baghdad's "Mother of All Battles" Mosque

Saddam has Koran written in his blood
By David Blair in Baghdad
 

April 12, 2003

Decorated with intricate designs, the delicate Arabic script of the Koran seemed to have been written in red ink.

In fact, a skilled artist copied the 605 pages of the holy book using Saddam Hussein's blood. The Iraqi dictator donated three pints over two years and this, mixed with chemicals, was used for every verse.

The resulting Koran was laid out in the Mother Of All Battles mosque in Baghdad, built to commemorate Saddam's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and his subsequent defeat at the hands of the United States and Britain.

The mosque boasts eight minarets. Four are designed to resemble the barrels of AK-47 assault rifles and four are in the shape of Scud missiles. A hexagonal marble building in which the blood-written Koran is on display is crowned with its own minaret - of the Scud variety.

Saddam is seeking to reinforce his grip on power by wrapping the mantle of Islam around his rule. Iraq's ruling Ba'ath party was once an avowedly secular movement and fought Islamic extremists with unparalleled ferocity.

Yet Saddam has launched a "faith campaign", designed to prop up his regime with appeals to the Muslim faithful. Senior Ba'athists have begun learning the Koran by heart, religious instruction has been stepped up in schools and many ulemas, Islamic scholars, receive official funding.

The most visible part of the campaign is the mosque-building boom in Baghdad. The Mother of All Battles mosque was completed on April 28 last year, Saddam's 64th birthday. Among the items on display is a large plaque, at least 10ft long, bearing his signature.

A stone tablet carries his address to the nation when the war with Iran ended in 1988, after eight years of fighting. "Oh brave Iraqis, sons of our immortal Arab nation, oh you brave men in the armed forces, this day is the day of days," said Saddam. The conflict was a costly stalemate that claimed one million lives and gained Iraq nothing.

Another tablet depicts Saddam's words at the outset of his next military adventure. As the allied ground attack began in 1991, he told Iraqis: "Oh God, open everything to our hearts and our vision." Four days later, his army was hurled out of Kuwait.

The mosque shamelessly mixes Islam with Saddam's personality cult and the glorification of warfare. But some interpret its message differently.

Jassam Mohammed al-Jibori, the ulema who leads afternoon prayers, said: "President Saddam Hussein is a real Muslim. He looks for peace. He wants peace. He is a symbol of peace. God is the most powerful and, with His blessing, the Iraqi people will defend their president and sacrifice themselves. They will sacrifice more for him even than the army."

A few miles away, the second-largest mosque in the world, after Mecca, is under construction. A vast skeleton of arches rises among a tangle of cranes, surrounded by the chaotic jumble of an immense building site.

The dome of the Grand Saddam mosque will be the size of a football field. It will rise from the centre of an artificial lake in the shape of the Arab world, from Iraq to Morocco, and four large towers at each corner of the lake will house an Islamic university. Those, at least, were Saddam's original plans when he appointed himself chief engineer and launched the scheme in 1994.

Eight years later, the Baghdad skyline is dominated by an incomplete shell, formed by a circle of eight arches. There is little visible activity on the building site and the cranes are usually stationary.

While Iraq's hospitals and schools fall apart, grandiose projects still capture the imagination of the leader. But as the prospect of an American-led war looms closer, Saddam's most visible legacy to Iraq might be the shell of an unaffordable, half-built mosque. ~ Copyright 2003
 

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