In case any other members of congress are interested, The New York Times offers up a short background briefing on Sunnis versus Shiites. Someone ironically, they don't actually address the question that tripped Silvestre Reyes up, so in case you don't know al-Qaeda appeals to a strain of Sunni Islam group while Hezbollah is a Shiite organization. It also bears mentioning that the religions are organized different. Shia Islam is semi-hierarchical, a bit like Anglican or Orthodox Christianity, while Sunni Islam is organized more like Protestant Christianity where, in practice, some preachers have more status than others but there's no formal institutional hierarchy among them or linking them together.
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Class Notes
18 Dec 2006 10:04 am
Comments (22)
Brian - care to elaborate? I thought the split originated from the time of the fourth caliph (Ali) and has been around ever since. Do you mean the difference in doctrines?
I'm no expert, but the linked article seems misleading in that it attempts to explain the sectarian conflict in terms of historical differences in doctrine, rather than a struggle for political power between groups who define themselves by religion.
It's like trying to understand the history of Irish-English relations by reading about Martin Luther.
In early Islam, you had different currents of political thought. It's not clear if there were any "Shi'ites" as such in Ali's time. By the time you get to the very end of the 7th century, you definitely had some people who believed that the Umayyads were unjust, and that someone from the Ahl al-Bayt, aka "people of the house," in this case that of the Prophet Muhammad, was best qualified to lead the Muslim community. They also looked back at the death of Ali as a turning point, since he was the only close relative of Muhammad among the first caliphs.
The Abbasids, who claimed descent from Muhammad's uncle, used the same sort of propaganda, and absorbed a lot of Shi'ite support, though by the 9th century they'd taken a definitive anti-Shi'ite turn as in early Abbasid times the Shi'ites themselves came to focus strictly on Ali, and usually the children of Ali and Fatima, the Prophet's daughter. The Abbasids still weren't "Sunnis," though, and that would develop as a distinct body between the 9th century and the 11th. Before that it was just "Shi'ites," "Kharijites," and everyone else. I think "Sunni" comes from "People of the Sunna."
The sources for the 7th century were all unwritten until at least the mid-eighth, though they have older material in them. The accounts dealing with Ali are all but impossible to work with, as they all contradict each other based on the biases of people who lived in later times who were in the process of either trying to make Ali into a holy figure and if only he'd lived the world would be better, or trying to argue against that and insist that the Umayyads were in the right during those events.
It's telling, though, that today's Sunnis don't consider the Umayyads caliphs in the real sense - they acknowledge each of the first four as a "rightly guided" caliph, including Ali. The main thing, though, is the Sunna, or tradition of the Prophets words and deeds, regardless of all the imamate doctrines Shi'ites developed. What happened was that the Abbasids (and Umayyads, most likely) tried to claim that they were the highest religious authority, and ultimately failed because people chose instead to follow the religious scholars who had studied the Qur'an and Sunna. Shi'ites eventually wound up in a similar place when the twelfth imam went into occultation and you were left with just religious scholars, though as Matt noted, they developed a different organization model.
To give you an idea of just how different the 7th century was, according to archaeological remains, it seems that until about 680 the Muslim profession of faith was just, "There is no God but God." Muhammad didn't start becoming important until then, and there's some evidence the first Muslims would have seen themselves as following the "religion of Abraham," not Muhammad. You can see the remains of this in the hajj rituals, which commemorate events in his life. He is believed to have built the Ka'aba which Muhammad only drove the idols out of. The Well of Zamzam, which pilgrims usually drink from, is believed to be where Gabriel kicked the ground and made a spring for Hagar and Ishmael to drink from. The end of the hajj is the Eid al-Adha, which commemorates Abraham's willingness to sacrifice a son - this is unnamed in the Qur'an, but Muslim commentators on the Qur'an have almost always gone with Ishmael.
By the way, I think the end of the article addressed James Gary's concerns, but agree insofar as the subheading "How did violence start" is intellectually grotesque.
Actually, I'd definitely dispute the NY Times article's contention that the 656 murder of the third caliph Uthman should be considered part of the divide. Uthman was killed by several dozen people who surrounded his house in a dispute over his handling of governorships. The most prominently named assassin is Muhammad b. Abi Bakr, son of the first caliph. Whether Ali was in on it or not depends on whether the sources you're reading are influenced more by Sunnis or Shi'ites.
This is, however, a root cause of the violence that ended with Ali's death in 661, as Mu'awiya, the first Umayyad caliph, was a kinsman of Uthman and wanted revenge, while depending on whom you read Ali was either in league with the killers or trying to promote universal togetherness. Ali also had to fight the Battle of the Camel against an army led by Aisha, the Prophet's favorite wife, who in my judgement was clearly the best choice for caliph after Uthman's death.
That might be a pretty academic point, but then I'm an academic and this is my field, so I obsess over such things.
Shia Islam is semi-hierarchical, a bit like Anglican or Orthodox Christianity, while Sunni Islam is organized more like Protestant Christianity
An interesting point for those who are asking for a "Muslim Martin Luther" to consider. OTOH, there are some similarities between the Shi'ite rejection of some of the Caliphs and Protestantism, nu?
FWIW, I would say the first analogy depends on the Shi'ite groups. Those groups which still follow a living Imam would be like the Orthodox Christians defering to a Patriarch, nu? OTOH, I would think the best analogy for the religious organization of, e.g., the twelvers is the Chasidic movement (whose organization was, to be fair, indeed influenced by that of Orthodox Christianity): they are waiting for the 12th Imam (the Mahdi -- btw, why do they translate "Mahdi army" instead of translating both terms and thus making these people less foreign and more understandable to us by translating the whole name as "army of the Messiah" or some such? -- analogous in some ways to the Messiah) but now they seek guidance from a loosely hierarchical structure at the top of which are several Ayatollas (would an Ayatolla be analogous to a Chassidic Rebbe?) ...
I learned a lot about the founding of Islam from Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" It gives great background on how it started and what Mohammed was like in life. Not to mention that Gibbon is an awesome writer, if I didn't know better I would have thought that he wrote in the 20th century rather than the 18th.
An interesting point for those who are asking for a "Muslim Martin Luther" to consider
More than that. I want a Muslim Erasmus and a Muslim William Penn. And while we're at it, I wouldn't mind another round of William Penn for all of us.
Well, that's Sunni Islam *NOW*. al-Qaeda wants to bring back the Caliphate, which was a single, top-down dictatorial religious structure much like when the Pope personally ruled large parts of Italy, or when the Byzantine Emperor was the head of the Orthodox Church.
Just so we're clear on that. :-)
I strongly suspect al-Qaeda buys into the caliphate of the classicial Islamic political thinkers, in which he just sits around and rules justly while the Sunni religious scholars sit around in their non-hierarchical manner and eat sufganayot while holding all religious authority.
That modern Christian societies are more tolerant than Islamic ones is a result of the Enlightenment, not the Reformation.
The first Lutherans weren't all that tolerant. They persecuted Catholics and rival Protestant sects. They were big on witchcraft trials too.
al-Qaeda wants to bring back the Caliphate, which was a single, top-down dictatorial religious structure much like when the Pope personally ruled large parts of Italy, or when the Byzantine Emperor was the head of the Orthodox Church.
I think that might be a fair description of the Ottoman Empire, in which the offices of Sultan and Caliph were combined, and there was something like a formal clerical hierarchy resembling those of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. But Sunni societies generally have not had such hierarchies, so for the most part Caliphs have not been comparable to Catholic Popes or Orthodox Patriarchs.
Thanks for the link, I read through the Wikipedia stuff on them and could not really understand why they're so different. I'm sure this is perfectly clear to a Sunni or a Shiite... ah well for their edification I present the shorthand Catholic/Protestant/Orthodox divide
Pope = God
Pope =/= God
Pope =/= Not as Good as Our Pope + We like Pictures
Amazing comparison. Let's take it further.
Closing of the gate of ijtihad = Priesthood of all believers
Orthopraxy = Orthodoxy!
"By the way, I think the end of the article addressed James Gary's concerns, but agree insofar as the subheading "How did violence start" is intellectually grotesque."
To put it mildly. I suppose my question (which the NYT article doesn't come close to answering for me) is: "How much of the violence in Iraq is the result of long-standing ethnic grudges (as in Yugoslavia), how much is the result of particular groups getting revenge on their former oppressors, and how much of it is the result of genuine disagreements in theology?"
The answer, as far as I can tell, is that it's a combination of all three. But I've yet to see, in any print, TV or online media, a clear overview of exactly why the sectarian violence is occurring.
How much of the violence in Iraq is the result of long-standing ethnic grudges (as in Yugoslavia) [...] - James Gary (hypothetically quoting himself)
I happened to be hanging with a mainly Afgani crowd around the time of the rise of the Taliban. Judging by who was saying what about how bad the Taliban really were (and their various reports from "home"), it seemed that a large part of the supposed "extremist version of Sharia law" being imposed by the Taliban was really a matter of selective enforcement of an extremist version of religious law, the selective enforcement of which was designed to settle ethnic (the Taliban were mainly Pushtun, IIRC) and other grudges.
Organize different.
Brian Ulrich's remark that the Shi'ite/Sunni split occurred significantly after the original events described (the death of Ali, etc.), is still debated among scholars.
What is not generally contested is that the political implications of the split, at least regarding Twelvers (the large majority of Shi'a) only really became significant in the 16th century. Until that point, Shi'a were politically quietist.
It was the new Safavid dynasty in Persia that made Shi'ism the state religion there (until then, Shi'ism had been centered in Iraq). It was they who challenged the (Sunni) Ottoman Empire, and not only called for Shi'a in Ottoman domains to rebel, but engaged in forcible conversions and other anti-Sunni policies when they captured parts of Iraq and eastern Anatolia from the Ottomans.
The Ottoman response was to treat Shi'a as potential fifth-columnists, and engage in their own rounds of persecution. When they did recapture much of Iraq in the 17th century, they ensured that the ruling elite remained reliably Sunni.
I think it makes much more sense to understand the sectarian violence today in terms of this political legacy, than in terms of the original religious schism of the 7th century.
To use the Balkan analogy, Serbo-Croatian violence in the 1990s is more attributable to the intersectarian violence of WWII than to the Great Schism of 1054 that divided Orthodox and Catholics.
It's not bad, but it leaves out the big nuggets. First, there really aren't a whole lot of major religious differences between bin Laden and most Gulf Arabs. They are all Salafists, a type of fundamentalist Sunni who believe that Islam is a complete religious, political, and legal system to govern the lives of, well, pretty much everyone, including non-Muslims.
What makes bin Laden a terrorist are his ideas about restoring the caliphate and expanding Salafism by force.
But the dirty little secret is that imposing religious law on everyone is pretty much a given in a wide swath of the Muslim world, at least Saudi Arabia.
Another important relgious point: A lot of the higher-ups in Syria's military and intelligence forces are Alawite Shiites. Alawaites are a Shiite sect that reveres Ali so much that many other Muslims, even some Shi'ites and especially strcut , regard Alawaites as heretics. This explains why Syria seem quite willing to go after Al Qaeda and torture those suspected of belonging to Al Qaeda.
It also explains why Syria and Iran support Hezbollah.
Basically, the Middle East is just a big and extremely violent version of the 8th grade.
"even some Shi'ites and especially strcut"
should read
"even some Shi'ites and especially strict Sunni Salafists like bin Laden"
Comments closed January 01, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
That's actually a decent overview, refreshingly aware of the differences from one area to another. My main quibble is a historical one that barely affects the piece: The Sunni/Shi'ite divide as we understand it today probably developed in later centuries and was simply projected back onto the early caliphate.
Juan Cole also touched on this is one of his posts today.
Posted by Brian Ulrich | December 18, 2006 10:28 AM