EVERY night when he comes home from work, Assem al-Hassani sits down and studies. His wife Sausan teaches him the names of the 12 Shia imams, where they prayed and where they are buried. But this is no religious madrassa — Assem is a Sunni, learning from his Shia wife how to pretend to be a Shia to avoid the sectarian death squads stalking Baghdad.
Across the city nervous Sunnis are learning to dissemble to avoid the killers, who are often dressed in police uniforms and set up checkpoints to examine people’s identity cards for obviously Sunni names. Many Sunnis have invested in forged ID cards. There is a website dedicated to teaching them how to fake it.
“At first we were joking about it but when our lives started to be threatened, the joke was over,” Assem, a 43-year-old shopkeeper, said. “It became a serious issue.”
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Assem has taken down the pictures of himself in his pilot’s uniforms and put up tapestry hangings of imams Ali and Hussein in his living room. In general, Sunnis frown at the display of human images as idolatry, but Assem, a middle-class Iraqi, has no strong feelings on the issue. “I feel very grateful to my wife and am lucky to have her,” Assem said. “I have lots of Sunni friends trying to do the same thing but they need someone they can really trust to teach them these things.”
A Sunni website has been set up to guide members of the once-dominant minority. It offers advice such as carrying a turba, a round prayer tablet made from clay gathered in the holy cities, or having Shia religious songs as ring tones.
The site also reassures devout Sunnis that it is not blasphemous to pretend to be a Shia. “According to the clerics, both Sunni and Shia, a Muslim can lie or even say words of sin if he is threatened to be killed.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-2312996,00.html