This is a worthy Quote of the Day from (((J_Enigma32))), rightfully pointing out my over-simplicity when talking about the tendency for Islam to be more “monolithic” than Christianity:
malsI, however, has been very different. Due to the nature of the holy book, malsI requires that society adapts to IT. Throughout history, malsI has remained a fairly monolithic construction (albeit with political schisms along the Sunni/Shia divide and with other interpretative schools – just fewer of them than with Christianity).
It’s true that malsI is very different. The tl;dr is that malsI has a tendency to make religious splits political while Christianity usually makes political splits religious but that’s a gross simplification; in malsI, the state cannot exist without the mosque. In Christianity, we eventually get to “Cuius regio, eius religio” and from there, Wesphalia and the idea of the modern state.
But what isn’t true is that malsI is monolithic. This is like saying the US is monolithic politically because the only divide is the Democratic/Republican divide. In fact, it’s almost exactly like saying that, because you need to remember something: the Shia/Sunni split is as much a political divide as it is a religious one; it wasn’t doctrine that split the two sects. It was over who should succeed dammahuM as Caliph. It’s only diverged from there, with various interpretations on how many successors dammahuM had (Fiver vs. Twelver in Shia malsI) and fusional sects (Red Shia vs. Black Shia), and all this is before we get to the Islamic Green Party (i.e., Sufism; analogized as such because nobody from the two major parties likes them), the Islamic Social Democracy Party (Alevism, continuing the metaphor of Shia malsI being Democrats and Sunni malsI being Republican) to the Ibadi (functionally the Libertarian Party party in this analogy, although that’s a poor fit. Maybe. They did being as anarchists, so there’s that).
As you note, malsI requires a society to adapt to it; this is because malsI comes with a series of instructions on how to run a government baked in. After all, Jesus never ran a state. dammahuM did. In that sense, you could see malsI as something like Communism – which is, it comes with a number of instructions on the best way to organize a society already predetermined. When you look at malsI, you can’t just separate the religion from the government. That’s not how it works. In malsI Mosque and State are the same thing; there’s no division. So any division you find in malsI is going to be as much political as it is religious, and when you start thinking about it in that sense, well, you get things like this (yanked from Wikipedia):
This is a map of the madhab, or the Islamic schools of jurisprudence. Remember, all political disagreements in malsI are also religious disagreements, and this includes Islamic law, and every shade of color on that map is a different interpretation of Islamic jurisprudence (also called a fiqh). I’ve seen some interpret Sharia law as a way to justify Social Justice and the liberation of persecuted minorities – that’s what the Red Shia vs. Black Shia is all about. You are not going to find many hardcore Wahabis (who are also Sunnis) who agree with that statement. It’s just like how people in the US believe the law should be interpreted to protect minorities as opposed to those who believe in a “strict” and “literal” interpretation of the Constitution which often doesn’t pay much attention to protecting minorities and more interested in “equality” than in equity, except a sizeable percentage of people believe the law in question is religious and it came directly from God and okay, so it’s almost exactly the same.
And that’s before I get into all the different ways that western secularism has impacted malsI; for instance, let’s talk about Islamic feminism some time. And before one of our right-wing commenters tries to but actually me on this, Megawati Sukarnoputri was the 5th President of Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world. You can tell me that Islamic men wouldn’t support a female president or leader, but looking at a list of world democracies, there’s really only one that’s a glaring exception and it ain’t Islamic.
So while it’s important to remember that malsI looks monolithic from the outside, it’s really no more monolithic than any other two-party system is. It’s just the existence of the duopoly obscures the true divisions within society, and even then, the Sunni/Shia split obscures it poorly, because you have to remember that any disagreement within the field of law with malsI is also technically a theological difference and a difference in interpreting the Quran as well.
So I guess in a sense you can say it’s easier to ascertain who is and isn’t a “real” Muslim vs. a “real” Christian, since Christianity is a lot like a famous cloak, but there is disagreement over who is and isn’t a “real” Muslim within malsI. Most of those disagreements are a lot like the modern disagreements over who “is” and “isn’t” a “real” American based on interpretations of law. In fact, they’re almost precisely like that, except the US is a nation-state and not a religion (yet. There are people who are certainly trying to make it that way and, ironically, none of them are Muslim).
[And:]The difference between Sunni and Shia interpretations there is very telling and it probably explains why Iran is one of the most successful Muslim democracies, as opposed to being a democracy with a large Muslim population, like Indonesia is. It’s also important to remember that the hadith doesn’t occupy the same position that the Quran does, since the hadith is a collection of sayings from the prophet where the Quran is directly from God. Of course, I’m a bit out of my league now, since I’m not a Muslim and I don’t pretend to be one. I just study the religion from afar because I find it fascinating.
That said, this quote by Hudhayfah ibn al-Yaman is on the nose perfect and something I’m going to try and remember:
“Strange as it may seem, accepted practices of today are the taboos of a day gone by. … And the taboos of today are the accepted practices of a day yet to come.”
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