January 26, 2007
THE WAXING CRESCENT:
Fear of a Shia full moon: Events are proving that the king of Jordan was right to warn of a 'Shia crescent' across the Middle East - even though the phrase was a tad undiplomatic (Ian Black, January 26, 2007, Guardian Unlimited)
Late in 2004, King Abdullah of Jordan coined a controversial phrase that still resonates powerfully in the Middle East: there was, he argued, a "Shia crescent" that went from Damascus to Tehran, passing through Baghdad, where a Shia-dominated government had taken power and was dictating a sectarian brand of politics that was radiating outwards from Iraq across the whole region.The king's words were certainly prescient: the divide between Sunni and Shia Muslims looks like being one of the big themes of 2007 as both come to terms with the apparently unstoppable chaos in Iraq, the rise of Iran as a regional power, and the fear of new and catastrophic consequences if the US and/or Israel enter into armed confrontation with the Islamic republic.
Now some scholars are even talking of a new "30 years' war" between the two branches of Islam - something akin to the struggle between Protestants and Catholics in 16th-century Europe. [...]
Protests from Iraq itself and from Lebanon were predictable. But there was nervousness in the Gulf, too, where Bahrain has a Shia majority and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia (in its oil-rich eastern province) sizeable Shia minorities.
The Thirty Years War analogy is entirely apt. Note that the divide isn't just religious, but is between authoritarian regimes vs. their own people and the proto-democracies.
Posted by Orrin Judd at January 26, 2007 8:06 AM
Fascinating how almost all serious observers of the distinction between the partisans of Ali and the other mob family, when they do draw a comparison between the Protestant-Catholic divide, come to the opposite conclusion.
Vali Nasr, and others, hold that Shi'ism is more analogous to Catholicism, it possession of something more like a hierarcy and a greater degree of church-state separation. The Sunnis are more like the weak church/strong prince, cujus regio position of Protestantism, or even the caesaropapism of Orthodox Christianity.
We need to remind ourselves that all these analogies are weak, and the spiritual jailhouse is still a jailhouse, even though we should favor Shi'ism as more amenable to reformation.
Posted by: Lou Gots at January 26, 2007 1:11 PMFascinating how almost all serious observers of the distinction between the partisans of Ali and the other mob family, when they do draw a comparison between the Protestant-Catholic divide, come to the opposite conclusion.
Vali Nasr, and others, hold that Shi'ism is more analogous to Catholicism, it possession of something more like a hierarcy and a greater degree of church-state separation. The Sunnis are more like the weak church/strong prince, cujus regio position of Protestantism, or even the caesaropapism of Orthodox Christianity.
We need to remind ourselves that all these analogies are weak, and the spiritual jailhouse is still a jailhouse, even though we should favor Shi'ism as more amenable to reformation.
Posted by: Lou Gots at January 26, 2007 1:15 PMThe Left believes in process not ideas, so they think the hierarchy matters, not the Messianism and Separationism. The hierarchy of the Catholic Church turns out to be no bar to the End of History, indeed hastens it, once it accepts the ideas.
Posted by: oj at January 26, 2007 3:14 PMRodger that.
The Catholic Church, possessed of teaching authority, is capable of a continuing reformation. Denominations bereft of the magisterium are at once liable to both idiosyncratic flights of fancy and to scripture-based rigidity. Snake-handling and eschewing electricity stand as manifestations of these irregularities in the extreme.
The Sunni mob family, with its tame Koran-thumpers yoked to the service of its princes, is frozen in time and doctrine, in much the manner of Christian "churches" who imagine that their scriptures were dictated by an angel in a cave.
Posted by: Lou Gots at January 26, 2007 6:59 PMYes, the Sunni are the Catholic Church before American Catholics Reformed it.
Posted by: oj at January 26, 2007 9:49 PMIt is interesting (tiresome, really) how the American media keep calling the struggle in Iraq "sectarian" violence, without ever reporting on the sects. One would think that the bombing of the Golden Dome in Samarra might have opened some eyes.
But all the AP and Reuters want to do is see who can do the best National Enquirer imitation. A few reporters (John Burns, for example) know the score, but no one else does.
Of course, the political class is even worse.
Posted by: ratbert at January 27, 2007 12:02 AMIt is interesting (tiresome, really) how the American media keep calling the struggle in Iraq "sectarian" violence, without ever reporting on the sects. One would think that the bombing of the Golden Dome in Samarra might have opened some eyes.
But all the AP and Reuters want to do is see who can do the best National Enquirer imitation. A few reporters (John Burns, for example) know the score, but no one else does.
Of course, the political class is even worse.
Posted by: ratbert at January 27, 2007 12:04 AM