Ebberdobby fits in one somewhere - the ancient anthemic caveat "Be cool - or be cast out" is quite powerful of course and in Year 2 of Arab Sprung - it's gon be bloodly uncalled for!
Unlike fun friendly sectarian sects - like the Beatles, Batman, Creddie or Seddie l' shia/sunni schismimus maximus is bleeding bloody.
Every since Ali got bushwacked in Kufa Iraq way back in 661 AD - the sectarian chiz has been off the hook - y'all! Currently - Shiaism seems to be the hot combatty faith d'resistance.
Of either sect - only the shiafied can claim to have stalemated the wicked, woman worshipping West and the never ending cadre of Crusaders, Zionistas and Hindus. Hiz'B'Allah's 'Divine Victory' over Little Satan - shia fed and funded rocketeers that succeeded the suicide bombers of Palestine in HAMAS and Mookie's shialicious Mahdi Army in Iraq.
The collapse of Iraq and the Syrian killing fields seems entirely gussied up in sectarian couture
Behind all this looms a larger question: in the midst of liberating itself from tyrannies, is the Arab world about to stumble into a Sunni-Shia religious war? The rhetoric is getting paranoid on both sides, even though the original reasons for these sectarian rivalries in Iraq and Syria have nothing to do with religion.
Iraq’s army, and therefore its politics, were dominated by the local Sunni minority because the country was ruled for 300 years by the Ottoman (Turkish) empire, whose state religion was Sunni Islam. Sunni rule was only finally overthrown by the American invasion of 2003, and the wounds on both sides of the religious divide are still raw.
Syria is ruled by a Shia minority only because the French colonial army recruited its local troops from the Alawites, precisely because they were a poor and despised minority. That way, the French reckoned, they would be loyal to France, not to Syria. But domination of the military ultimately let Alawites seize political control in independent Syria.If Sectarian Wars were sweetly exploding only in the Land atwixt the Two Rivers and Suriya al- Kubra that would be lucky indeed!
The danger is that Arab rulers start thinking that citizens cannot be loyal to the state unless they have exactly the same religious beliefs as their rulers. Mainly because rulers became convinced that they could not be safe if some of their citizens belonged to a different sect.
Most countries in the world today are living proof that that is nonsense, but Arab rulers, both Sunni and Shia, are fast falling into the delusion that it is true. That would be a disaster.
Pic - "All the other kids better run, better run, faster than my bullets"
1 comments:
As a point of order, the Alawis aren't Shia. They're one of those far-out islamic sects that went out on it's own. They also don't allow people to convert into the Alawite faith and hold their ceremonies in secret. Because of this they've been labeled at times as non-muslims (sort of like the Druze, but of course the Druze don't consider themselves muslims anyway). In fact when Europeans first started coming into contact with the Alawis in the modern era, they weren't even sure that they were muslims, they were sometimes considered a surviving pre-islamic, even pre-christian pagan-neo-platonic sect.
Some people even still call them 'nosairis' today because of this.
The Alawis /want/ to be considered a mainstream muslim sect, and I was actually under the impression that they were courting the Sunnis (Iran and recent events notwithstanding).
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