The Gertrude Bell Jar

Ashura & Shiism

Ashura in New York. Great pictures, plus a very short history of the Shia/Sunni split from the Shia perspective:

It all started hours after Mohammad's death: while his son-in-law (and first cousin) Ali was attending to Mohammad's burial, others were holding a little election to see who should succeed Mohammad as the chief of what was by now an Islamic state. (Remember that by the end of his life, Mohammad was not only a religious leader, but the head-of-state of a significant polity.) The person soon elected to the position of caliph, or head-of-state, was an old companion of the prophet's named Abu Bakr. This was a controversial choice, as many felt that Mohammad had clearly indicated Ali as his successor, and after Abu Bakr took power, these people had no choice but to say that while he may have become the temporal leader of the young Islamic state, they did not recognize him as their divinely guided religious leader. Instead, Ali remained their spiritual leader, and these were the ones who would eventually come to be known as the Shia. The ones who elected Abu Bakr would come to be known as Sunni.

This is the Shia/Sunni split which endures to this day, based on this early disagreement.

This is interesting for how much of the conventional Sunni narrative it leaves out, I think (you can see my summary here, if you skip down to the paragraph beginning “Following the death of Muhammad”; I didn’t know that I was summarizing Sunni-only accounts at the time that I wrote it). In the Sunni version, the split doesn’t date from the time of Abu Bakr, but from after the rule of all four “rightly-guided” Caliphs (Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, then finally Ali), and after the civil war over Ali’s succession. Then, finally, when the community accepts the rule of the Umayyads for sake of peace, this is when the Sunni accept the split between temporal and spiritual leadership the Umayyads represent, and the Shia do not. Presumably from the Sunni point of view, the problem doesn’t arise during the rule of the first four Caliphs because they believe those rulers were also legitimate spiritual leaders. A Sunni recounting of the tale will also never fail to mention that Abu Bakr was Mohammad’s father-in-law, and (possibly only according to Sunni sources?) the first convert to Islam after the Prophet’s wife, Khadija. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Sunni source mention that Ali was excluded from the shura council, or even note in passing that Shia Muslims complain that he was.

This kind of makes me wonder just how much the two groups differ in other areas of Muslim historiography. Shiism is pretty invisible in most mainstream scholarship on Islam, which rarely even bothers to note that Shia Muslims have radically different interpretations of some topics. Tmatt over at GetReligion frequently complains about the lack of attention journalists pay to explaining the differences between the two sects, but I have to say I’ve never come across a really good, comprehensive summary; I think I've probably only encountered a small slice of it in the course of reading other things.

Added to The Blogroll

1. MahdiWatch, a blog by Timothy Furnish, author of Holiest Wars: Islamic Madhis, their Jihads and Osama bin Laden, keeping an eye on eschatological rhetoric in missives from Islamist imams so you don’t have to!

2. Mooselim.ca. According to an article in the Toronto Star, “Tired of the so-called "community leaders" who purport to speak on their behalf, a group of half a dozen twentysomethings are finding the voice of the average young Canadian Muslim – and sharing it at a unique blog cheekily named mooselim.ca.” It looks interesting.

Today In Islamophobia

City of Brass has an excellent essay answering science fiction writer Dan Simmons’ blog post about a “Century War with Islam” and the Eurabia argument in general. Meanwhile, reason columnist Cathy Young argues with Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch et al and Oriana Fallaci, and replies to Spencer’s replies here and here.

"The Press Just Doesn't Get Religion"

I'm adding GetReligion to the blogroll today; it's a blog about press coverage of religious issues. The current entry is about a press report on U.S. Latina conversions to Islam, and links to other commentary by Muslim women on hijab and women's rights under Islam.

Cartoon Comment

Aziz Poonwalla has an excellent post up at City of Brass about the “Cartoon StupidStorm,” with links to a great deal of worthwhile commentary on the controversy. I would draw your particular attention to the Mona Eltahawy piece from which Poonwalla quotes extensively in his own earlier post at Dean’s Place:

Lost amid the ashes of torched embassies and the senseless deaths of Muslim protestors is the fact that the cartoon controversy is as much about freedom of expression in the Muslim world as it is about freedom of expression in Europe.

The violence and the bitter words exchanged over the past few days have little to do with Islam but everything to do with those who want to be its sole guardians and spokespeople. [...]

This is not a clash of civilizations but a battle between the extremists - Muslims and non-Muslims alike - and the rest of us who refuse to allow them to speak for us. This is about control. So of course it is about freedom of expression - in Denmark and in the Muslim world.

Also, another book to add to the reading list: Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained. Sounds like essential reading based on the GNXP comment Poonwalla highlights.

"Self-Validation"

I decided to drop in on Guillemette* and see if she had anything to say about the rioting in France. Here is my questionable translation:

"The periodic violence highlights France's failure to integrate immigrants into the country's broader society, a problem that has grown in urgency as the unemployment rate climbs," The New York Times wrote yesterday. Today’s editorial is much the same. This morning I participated in the recording of a broadcast for Europe 1. The Canadian Jean-Benoit Nadeau was also a guest. He made I thought a very interesting comparison between the near-delight that Americans seem to take in seeing in the riots in the suburbs of Paris the failure of the French model, and the French eagerness to find evidence of American social failures in the rescue operations for Katrina in New Orleans.

A reader comments:

He’s not wrong. He could also have spoken of the near-delight of the “French” concerning the Iraqi mud pit, which has me very disturbed. In particular at the time of the US invasion: we hoped every moment for a (bloody?) response by the glorious Iraqi Republican Guard ... then, Leningrad-style street-fighting.

*A French journalist who lives in NYC and reports on American life in the French media. I started reading her a while back mostly to brush up on my French, since her entries tend to be short, in lucid and correct French, and on general subjects without so much need for specialized vocabulary. I still had to look up lots of words, though, and backslid after a while. It’s a nice blog, though, I should try to start reading it regularly again.

Arab Immigrant Statistics

Further to my earlier post on "Eurabia," Drezner has some interesting statistics about Arab immigrants in the U.S. vs. those in Europe. The comments section is well worth reading too.

"Eurabia"

Here’s an interesting article arguing that European Muslim discontent is overrated.

I've always thought the "Eurabia" thing seemed hysterical and overblown, largely because alarmist predictions about population explosions in general have a history of being politically motivated and ultimately proving false; it is great to see so much info pulled together to prove it baseless in the here and now. I would add to the theory presented in the article about schadenfreude the additional agenda I've noticed in the writings of people like Mark Steyn, to fold "Eurabia" panic into a narrative about sexual degeneracy (abortion, divorce, birth control, the sexual revolution, feminism in general) leading to the demise of Western Civilization as a whole. In this model, the Muslim takeover is just the wind that blows over our house of cards, and there's an underlying admiration of Muslim sexual conservatism there; strong Islamic family values will naturally defeat weak Western secular ones.

Anti-war rhetoric has also contributed its share to the panic; rhetoric about Western aggression inevitably making more terrorists is bolstered by overstating Muslim hostility worldwide, and accordingly I've noticed anti-war sources relying a little too credulously on sketchy reports of stepped-up terrorist recruitment among European Muslims since the beginning of the Iraq War. And arguments against democratization from the anti-war left nearly always feature alarmist predictions about any given group of Muslims alleged propensity to "elect Osama bin Laden" if allowed to vote. All through the Presidential election campaign last year I saw bits and pieces of rhetoric lifted from Imperial Hubris: How the West is Losing the War on Terror, an anti-war book by a CIA "expert" on Islamist terrorism that was harshly critical of the Bush administration. I can only hope that most who repeated its predictions hadn't actually read the thing; his basic theory is that nearly all Muslims are Islamists, so that our two options are to kill as many of them as possible (and he treats that as a serious option), or to completely withraw from all relations with the Middle East and wall ourselves off in a fortress America.

The notion that Islam and Arabs are inherently hyper-violent therefore serves many political agendas, which is perhaps why it seems to have solidified to such a degree across political affiliations. (Or maybe the fact that both groups mostly only turned up on the news when blowing stuff up in the 20 years or so preceding 9/11 made beliefs based on this stereotype easy to adopt).

Madrassahs, Oh My!

More on Muslim outreach, but of the overseas kind, by the Bush administration. It is somewhat entertaining to read the comments while bearing in mind that funding secular grade schools in the Middle East was one of the main proposals mentioned by John Kerry’s foreign policy team in a longish article published in TNR just before the election. (My immediate reaction at the time was that funding secular education for the express purpose of replacing religious education in Muslim countries was not exactly calculated to counter the perception that the U.S. is on the warpath against Islam that Kerry’s advisors were so concerned about. And that sponsoring religious schools instead—nice tolerant Sufi or just genuinely traditionalist Sunni ones, say—might run into the constitutional problems that a commenter to the article above mentioned.) Actually this does have some potential to become a mini-scandal. Clearly Joe Biden had no idea that the administration was already doing stuff like that when he was interviewed for the TNR article, and you would expect a Senator to know that kind of thing.

(I haven’t read the indeed very long article the blog posting links to there, though I intend to and so may have some additional comments later. It looks interesting.)

Those Pesky Hand-Holding Saudis

Well, here’s a previously unsuspected (by me at least) conflict among Republicans about relations with the Muslim community in the U.S. It seems to be related to a problem Steven Schwartz discussed at some length in his Two Faces of Islam, the White House’s obvious need to do some kind of networking with this community (and not just to secure votes, but as a matter of policy, I would think) vs. the fact that most Muslim institutions in the U.S.--mosques, charitable and community groups etc.--were coopted by Wahhabism via Saudi money and influence in the 80s and 90s. According to Schwartz, about half of the U.S. Muslim leaders Dubya held a photo op with shortly after 9/11, for the laudable purpose of discouraging harassment and persecution of Muslims in the U.S., were in fact Wahhabists. At the time Schwartz thought it was simply an error, Westerners being tone-deaf to deep conflicts among Muslims as usual, but it can hardly be a mistake by now.

Schwartz of course advocated naming names and ending any association between Wahhabist leaders and U.S. officialdom in any capacity, but I imagine it’s a bit difficult to declare Wahhabism per se an enemy of the U.S., since it is after all the official state religion of Saudi Arabia, which in turn is still officially an ally with whom we apparently continue to enjoy warm relations. And indeed Wahhabism itself is not Islamism or terrorism, but instead is more like a feeder religion to the political movement, and the dissolution of the House of Saud along with all other regimes (of Muslim nations) deemed illegitimate by Islamists and the reinstatement of the Caliphate is the fundamental goal of Islamism. It may be that the White House believes that Wahhabist groups and individuals still under the influence of the Saudis will have ceased their support of Islamist terrorist organizations just as the Saudis have ostensibly done since 9/11 (vs. their previous strategy of cooptation through funding), so that these contacts are consonant with rather than diammetrically opposed to our interests. It may also be that this belief is monumentally naive. Either way, I’m not sure I have a strong opinion on what the official attitude towards CAIR or similar organizations should be. It’s not as if there is much of an alternate institutional structure for maintaining basic contact with the American Muslim community anyway, so what are you gonna do?

This all came up, btw, because Daniel Pipes has lately accused Grover Norquist of being, himself, an Islamist, or at least a crypto-Muslim. I came across this tidbit via a posting by Jonah Goldberg at the Corner, along with the background link above, and this email to Goldberg from a reader calling the accusation against Norquist ridiculous, on the basis that Norquist’s wife does not veil, and the couple still serve alcohol at social functions. Pipes is correct that in Islamic orthodoxy Muslim women are not supposed to marry non-Muslim men, but this is an interpretation based on a verse in the Qur’an about a husband being one degree above his wife--since it is considered inappropriate for a non-Muslim to be in a position of superiority over a Muslim in any context, if a husband rules over his wife, a non-Muslim man may not rule over a Muslim woman in marriage. But plenty of Western Muslimahs reject the "rulership" reading of the verse and consider it an expression of male responsiblity for women instead. I haven’t happened to hear anyone so far say they also therefore reject the marriage rule, but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if many do. Besides, just because something is orthodox doesn’t mean all Muslims observe it all the time, and it doesn’t sound like Norquist’s wife is particularly near the fundamentalist or even orthodox end of Muslim faith anyway. Pipes' assertion that the mere fact of Norquist’s marriage to a Muslim woman proves that he himself must have converted to Islam, let alone Islamism, is indeed absurd. (I should probably get around to reading Pipes’ book on Arab paranoid consipiracy theories about Jews and Israel sometime soon, it sounds like he has a flair for that sort of thing).