Varieties of Islam

[Young Master Smeet]

https://theconversation.com/au/topics/understanding-islamic-state

A series of articles on the origins of the Islamic State.  teh latest is an interesting peice on the varieties of Islam, that is qute useful:

Quote:

There are historical reasons for this variation. Despite popular opinion, Islam didn’t appear fully formed at the time of Muhammad (570-632). There were huge debates over the nature of religious and political authority, for instance, and who was or was not a Muslim.

It’s similarly misguided to assume that a unified teaching simply spread throughout the Mediterranean region and beyond.

How Muhammad’s message developed into the religion of Islam — complete with legal and doctrinal content — took centuries to develop and cannot concern us here.

 

Quote:

The Hanbali school, backed by the wealth of the Saudi ruling family, has also tried to make inroads into other areas. Those associated with this legal school, for example, have built madrasas (religious seminaries) in regions traditionally influenced by other legal schools of thought.

Most fundamentalist movements in Islam, including Islamic State, have emanated from such ultra-conservative elements. The Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, for instance, are influenced by the more conservative elements of Hanbali ideology, even though they exist in a predominantly Hanafi legal environment.

So, IS is part of a power play within Islam (or within Islamicly cultured societies).

[ALB]

That's as bad as the Trotskyites ! Some don't seem as bad as the others. For instance, the Ahmadists (slogan "Love for All, Hatred for None")  and the Ismailis (the Aga Khan's lot) seem relatively reasonable, at least in their everyday attitudes as do the Alawites (or Nusaryi as the Sunni sectarians like IS and Al Nusra call them before killing them). And then theres's the Sufists (who IS execute as witches). The Ismailis and Druze in Syria are also trembling in their boots at the prospect being ruled by bloodthirsty phoney Sunni caliph.It is a tragedy of history that the world's biggest oil reserves should be in an area controlled by a particulary obnoxious variety of Islam, the Wahbis of "Saudi" Arabia, providing them with a parasitical income to spread their intolerant doctrine into other Muslim areas. But it's in an area inhabited by Shiites, so expect trouble at some later point in (perhaps not so distant) history.I always thought, given what happens in Iran and Saudi Arabia, that the difference between Sunnis and Shiites (mustn't forget the second i), at least between their obscrurantist priests, was over who shall throw the first stone at an adulteress or how many fingers you chop of a thief's hand.But I don't suppose ordinary nominal muslims believe what their priests say they should any more than ordinary nominal christians do (virgin birth, transubstantion, resurrection of the dead, who really belives that bollocks).

[Hud955]

I think that's right.  Before the US invasion of Iraq I remember seeing that one out of three marriages was between a Sunni and a Shia and that there were many mixed as well as Shia families living as part of Sunni tribes and vice versa.  Hezbollah which is Shia has long been supported by the majority of Sunni muslims and so on.  The current sectarianism, as we would expect, appears to be a response to the current political situation.  And of course there are internal fissures as well.  In Kurdistan I was repeatedly told that 'we pray for all Muslims, but we are beginning to realise that they do not pray for us.'  Which, when unwrapped from its religious ideology simply identifies the political conflicts of interest between various muslim groups.

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