Truthout: Is the Sunni-Shiite Rift Mostly Politics & Media Hype?

After getting an email from a Christian friend claiming that "all Muslims" deny the Holocaust, are terrorists, and eat babies for lunch (yeah,yeah, I'm exaggerating), I got wondering why the perception of Muslims is so negative. Then I found this article:


http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/050108E.shtml

Doha, Qatar - As imam of the largest mosque in North America, Sayyed Hassan al-Qazwini feels the frustration of trying to convey a moderate image of Islam to a Western media seemingly fixated on extremists.

"When I speak, or other moderate Muslim scholars speak, we will not find any outlet for our words," he says. "But if a grocer in Karachi goes out on the streets and calls for jihad against America, he will find many media outlets there ready to cover his insanity."

A televised public debate Tuesday in this tiny Gulf state was dominated by the perception that it is extremists - whether Islamic militants or anti-Islamic commentators in the West - coupled with a "sensationalist" Western media that set the parameters for defining Islam's global image.

But it strikes me that this is a North American perspective.

Sunni-Shiite violence has been going on for a decade or so in Pakistan, probably longer. Yemen's had its share--some is political, but many very conservative Muslims consider Islam to be political, and not just a purely religious or social enterprise. Teasing out the political and religious in Yemen is a bit of a problem. Shiites have a hard time in Sa'udiyya, as well; a prime example of mixing religion and politics in such a way as to render the distinction difficult. Then again, Wahhabi intolerance of Shi'ism goes back a couple of centuries--the ostensibly purely political struggle against the Ottomans seems to have been reflected in killing Shi'ites and rendering Shi'ite territory Sunni, an odd endeavor for a purely political struggle. The Taliban in Afghanistan had a problem with Shi'ites; one could say it was political, but Sunni groups that didn't like the Taliban had an easier go of it than Shi'ite groups that didn't like the Taliban.

The MSA when I was in grad school apparently had a thing about Shi'ites. You could belong, but you'd better do everything the way the Sunni leaders in the MSA said. So it was pretty much all Sunni ... even the Shi'ite Iranians that joined as frosh usually were at odds with their families by the time they were seniors or had dropped out long before the end of their freshman year. Then again, the MSA was fairly Islamist.

And it appears to me that it is incorrect, historically and at present, anywhere you go. It would be better, in my opinion, if we abandoned the idea, and confessed that religion is by it's nature about power and money.

they are on the road to extinction, much like the Catholic Church in Europe, whose cathedrals are visited by more tourists than parishioners.

They need the power of coercion to silence their critics and corral the otherwise apathetic (and their checkbooks) into their fold.

Eventually, people will take the major religions about as seriously as the Greek gods or their horoscope.