The Druze aren’t supposed to talk about their religious beliefs with non-Druze, so they definately could be keeping it secret from you.
What do we know about what Jesus taught apart from what other people - eg Paul - have told us He taught?
I go by the words reported to have come straight out of Jesus’s mouth, as it were. Yes - they were written down by other people - but the consistent message that one gets from Jesus’s reported words and deeds is a very simple one of love and tolerance. It is later on, when other start organising the “church” and writing letters, that weirdness, intolerance and oppression creeps in.
Consistently? Like in “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword”? There isn’t that much consistency, even in the gospels. Much of it is about interpretation. One could reread the gospels and interpret them in way which wouldn’t be a very simple message of love and tolerance. Is “tolerance” even mentionned once in the gospels?
Interesting. For a number of years, my family has done business with an Iranian Baha’i family who emigrated to Canada after Khomeni. They’re fine people but I don’t know the first thing about their beliefs. Could you point me to some online resources?
That’s all I meant, really.
Hodge, The official site of the Baha’i faith. Enjoy.
Tamerlane said:
But the point of unreality is my favourite point though…
I agree with you but I think there is some anti-islam feeling in Iran though. The reason I think this is because they occasionally have demonstrations (mostly the students) protesting against the government. I’ve read reports of these demos from reliable sources (BBC etc) and they have definitely said that the demos are “protesting against the government and protesting against islam”
I remember this specifically because I was quite surprised.
Of course this could just be a case of students protesting against anything and everything. And once the mullahs have gone none of this may actually translate to people leaving islam.
I’m NOT saying that there would be large numbers of people leaving islam and converting to zoroastrianism, just that there would be some who would leave. Of those who leave, most would probably identify with no particular religion but a small number may try to revive zoroastrianism.
Of course the vast majority of people would remain within the fold of islam and the new government would still be islamic in nature. As you say, democratic but with a few religious laws still on the books.
Like Istara, from what little I know of zoroastrianism it seems like a pretty funky religion. In fact, when the mullahs go, I might go over to Iran and try to start up a zoroastrian movement myself. Or maybe not.
But it seems only right that there should be at least some zoroastrians in Iran, the country of it’s birth. I think it only forms about 1% of the population at the moment.
According to this timeline most Iranian zoroastrians fled to Europe and America after the islamic revolution in 1979. And it seems they’ve had a pretty hard time over the centuries:
Hmm…that name seems vaguely familiar 
I think quite a lot of the Iranian zoroastrians were forcibly converted to islam (just from googling a few links on the subject). If my ancestors were forcibly converted to another religion I think I would deliberately not be a member of that religion (whether it comes from God or not) just on general principle. But that’s just me.
By coincidence, I met the first muslim I’ve ever met in my whole life today who thinks religion (including islam) is a load of crap. I wanted to kiss him but I don’t generally kiss other men so I just agreed with him instead.
One of the half-dozen or so Baha’i Temples in the world is maybe 5 miles from here, and is still one of my favorite biking destinations. If any of you are in the neighbohood, please stop by and check this out:
http://www.photo-mark.com/cgi-bin/set.cgi?set_id=24&n=22
They have an educational center in the basement, with a slide show on the Baha’i faith, etc.
The students were protesting against Islamic rule - that is, rule by Islamic law and, in Iran, rule by a clerical class (the velayat-e faqih discussed by Tamerlane). If they had a beef with Islam, it was with Islam as the root of government. There is NO, repeat NO, widespread movement against the religion of Islam in Iran.
There might have been some conversions from Zoroastrianism to Islam recently, both forcible and not, but the vast majority of Muslims in Iran adopted Islam 1400-odd years ago. If there was a complete collapse of Islamic government in Iran tomorrow, maybe a couple of Zoroastrians converted in the last few years might go back to their former practices, but it is alien to 99% of the Iranian population. Zoroastrianism doesn’t advocate, or even allow, conversions, and I’m sure they don’t acknowledge 1400-year-delayed reversions.
Well, if he thought that, then he wasn’t a Muslim. He’s an atheist, and I’m sure you’ve met plenty of them. Are you done with the hijacking now?
IIRC, they have to lead good life. You know doing acts of charity and such as well as refraining form evil acts. God sits in judgement weighing your good against your bad. IIRC, some say that non-Muslims can qualify for admittance in some circumstances. The most common name for God in the Koran is something about The Most Merciful and Benevolent (?). The name begins almost every surah except one, IIRC.
lambchops said:
I never said there was. I said that some students were protesting against islam as well as the government according to some news reports I’ve read. And zoroastrianism is still present in Iranian culture according to reports like this one for example, where a group of students were holding a zoroastrian fire ceremony (something which is done all over Iran, by the way) which turned into a big anti-khomeini riot.
Then there is this page. Don’t click on that link, it’s all in farsi. I haven’t got a clue what it says but the google link to it describes it as the “Iranian Resistance Against Islam”.
And I recall seeing a few news reports where the protestors have been described by the BBC as anti-islam as well as anti-regime. I’m not saying they have numbers or anything, I’m just saying that I think it exists (on a small scale).
I don’t think it is alien to them. It was their religion from 1600 BC until 700 AD. Zoroastrian-infused festivals are still held all over Iran according to that link I gave earlier. Zoroastrianism is a part of Iranian identity as much as islam is. You can’t be the dominant religion in a country for over two thousand years and then just disappear from the culture. It will have left it’s footprint.
They’d find a theologically-correct way round the problem I’m sure. I think that Hinduism also doesn’t allow conversions but they get round this problem. If a person wants to convert who’s ancestors used to be hindu (like a Pakistani, for example). They describe it as “reverting” to hinduism, not “converting”.
Could be wrong on not being allowed to convert to hinduism but I was under the impression that that’s why people became Hare Krishna types. Because they aren’t allowed to convert to hinduism.
No he’s not a muslim obviously. I meant that he was the first born-muslim I’d met who was a disbeliever. I kinda assumed people would understand that was what I meant. I’m sure there’s lots of disbelieving born-muslims in the world but you don’t meet them very often is all I’m saying.
But he’s not necessarily an atheist. I think religion is a load of crap too but I’m not an atheist.
Not really. The hijacking is more interesting than the OP.
To try to get back to the OP, what are the main sects of Islam? I thought that I had heard that there are currently 3 main sects (?Ba’ath, Shi’ite and Sunni?), and that the Bath(?sp?) sect is the main one causing the terrorism?
In my experience here on the StraightDope, if someone makes an incorrect statement, it will be corrected and/or clarified before you can say “Refresh”.)
Sunnis, Shiites, and Sufis
To my knowledge, Ba’athists are just a political party.
Don’t you get sufis from both sunni and shia though? I thought sufi isn’t a sect,as such, more of a tradition.
Paging Tamerlane.
Ba’athism is not an Islamic sect, it is a secularist, socialist, pan-Arabist political movement. See the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ba’ath_Party.
The two major sects of Islam are Sunni and Shi’ite. Most Muslims are Sunnis; Shi’ites are found mostly in Iran and southern Iraq. The split between them dates back to the first generation after Mohammed’s death in 632. Mohammed had many wives and daughters but for some reason, no sons, so there was no clear line of succession to the leadership of the Islamic community; it was decided by a combination of consensus and armed force. The first Caliph (“successor”) was Mohammed’s friend Abu Bakr; the second was his friend Umar, who died in 644. There was a faction that supported the election of Ali, Mohammed’s cousin and son-in-law (he married the prophet’s daughter Fatima), who was the third person ever to accept Islam. (The first two being Mohammed himself, and his first wife, Khadija.) Instead, the community chose another of Mohammed’s sons-in-law, Uthman. After Uthman was assassinated in 656, Ali and his partisans again challenged Uthman’s son, Muawiya, for the succession; while the matter was being debated, Ali was murdered by one of his own followers, and Muawiya became Caliph (his dynasty is known as the Ummayad). But Ali’s party (shia) survived and evolved into a sect, based on the hereditary right of Ali and his known descendants (imams) to rule Islam. In fact there were only six recognized imams before the line died out, and since nobody even claims the title of Caliph any more (the title lapsed with the abolition of the Ottoman Sultanate), one might think the whole issue is now moot. But the Shi’ites persist in thinking of themselves as a very different sort of Muslims than the Sunnis, go figure. They are generally more conservative and fundamentalist than the Sunnis – most Sunnis, that is. Saudi Arabia is dominated by a very conservative and puritanical Sunni subsect, the Wahabbis.
There have also been some minor religious movements within Islam, such as the Ismailis (the medieval Order of Assassins, or Hashishim, were Ismailis), the mystic Sufis – and there are offshoots such as the Druze, whom most other Muslims regard as not really Muslims at all. (Much as Catholics and Protestants alike look askance at the Mormons.)
Are you accusing us of being anal? Huh? Are you? 
Anyway…
The Ba’ath aren’t a religious sect, but rather a pan-Arabist political parrty that originated in the late colonial period in Syria. Indeed, quite the contrary, the party ( at least as originally constructed ) was quite explicitly secular and vaguely socialist ( one of the party founders and ironically one of the key players in elevating Saddam Hussein in the party ranks, was a Christian Arab - Michel Aflaq ). The Ba’ath successfully seized power in Syria and Iraq, but quickly devolved in all but name from pan-Arabism to Syrian and Iraqi nationalis, repectively. Both also eventually became nothing more than a political extension and front for ruling strongmen and their familial allies - the Hussein family in Iraq and the Assad family in Syria. As discrete political entities they are effectively dead, the ideals they once championed no longer terribly popular outside of a declining generation of middle-aged and older, vaguely left-wing Arab intellectuals and the parties themselves, as stated, mere facades. Insomuch as the Ba’ath was the bastion of Saddam Hussein and the approved single party government in Iraq, much of the so-called pro-Saddam Hussein resistance there is characterized as “Ba’athist” for.
The two major splits in Islam are first Sunnism, from Sunna, meaning tradition, representing the mainstream corpus of Islamic belief descended from the dominant faction that originally chose a “traditional” tribal method of selecting the successor to Muhammed. Second is Shi’ism, Shi’a meaning “partisan”, fin this case the partisans of Ali, representing the minority view descended from those that preferred a familial succession to Muhammed as exemplified in his cousin and son-in-law Ali. Just as with Christianity, these two major groupings subsume within them a myriad of semi-separate sub-sects. The Shi’a are the numerically dominate groups in Iran and Iraq and were long the single most potent force in Yemen ( though not the largest group there, the Zaydi Shi’ites of northern Yemen, who follow a quite different version of Shi’ism than the Ithan’asheri Shi’ites of Iraq and Iran, were militarily the most formidable and dominated that larger region ), the Sunni are dominant pretty much everywhere else in the Muslim world. Well, except Oman, below.
An at one time major third split was the Kharijites, now largely confined to the Ibadis of Oman and small parts of North Africa. However their at one time quite radical agenda is now fairly close to mainstream Sunnism in many respects.
In addition there are several offshoots of Islam ( mostly Shi’a Islam ) that qualify as seperate religions or are on the borderline. Groups like the Druze of the Levant and the Baha’i are essentially seperate faiths. Others like the Alawites ( a minority group the Assad’s of Syria are members of ) are more equivocal and are classified by some ( including themselves ) as Muslim. The Farrakhanite Nation of Islam in the U.S. falls into that grey area as well.
The other grouping that many get confused with are the Sufis. Sufism is not quite a religious sect per se, but rather a religious philosophy/approach that embraces mysticism and the individual attempt to reach/contact/merge with the divine. One can be simultaneously Sunni or Shi’a and still be a Sufi. Where it gets confusing is that Sufism is broken into numerous orders ( perhaps very slightly analgous to monastic orders ), which on occasion have verged on the heterodox to the point of almost being a sect unto themselves. But technically they’re not, exactly.
So if for example we take the Kurds of Iraq, we find that they are mostly Sunni Muslims. But they follow Shafa’i jurisprudence ( one of four main madhabs or schools of religious jurisprudence in Sunni Islam ), whereas the Sunni Arabs and Turkmen in Iraq are mostly Hanafi. The Sunni Kurds more importantly are also split between two main Sufi orders, the Naqshbandiyya and Qadiriyya. Further, in addition to the majority Sunni kurds there are some orthodox Ithna’asheri Shi’ite Kurds ( some of them Nurbakhshi Sufis ), some Yezidi Kurds ( not Muslims ), some Alevi and Ahl e-Haqq Kurds ( highly heterodox Shi’ites, to the point of being on the ragged edge of seperate religions ), some Jewish Kurds ( mostly in Israel now ) and some Christian Kurds ( Assyrian rite for the most part ).
- Tamerlane
Curse you for beating me. Just for that I must wreak my vengence through nitpicking :D…
No armed force was necessary. Ali was caught by surprise by a coup de main and sullenly acquiesced with no recourse to violence and Umar in particular worked hard to regain his good graces ( with partial success ).
Not a son, but Uthman’s closest living adult relative within their clan of the Banu Umayya - more a cousin. He was the long-standing governor of Syria and as such quite powerful.
“Debate” in this case being an active civil war, the so-called first fitna, three-sided by this point ;). Ali was assassinated by a former follower, now a Kharijite and the third ( minor ) faction in the civil war. It was the first fitna that saw the emergence of the Kharijites as a faction, when they broke with the Shi’at Ali.
Depends who you talk to - the majority of Shi’ites are Itna’asheri who count twelve :).
Oh, I’m not sure I agree, actually. I think this is a skewed view coming out of the very visible Iranian theocracy, which represents a minority view in Shi’a theology.
A sub-sect of Shi’ism, rather than an entirely seperate sect in of itself and these days notably moderate for the most part :).
- Tamerlane
Now who would do that? but if I may (or even if I may not I will anyway), this…
…is an abomination against God, mankind, and proper apostrophe usage in the English language. (O Merciless Leader of Rampaging Hordes, please don’t pillage my village for nitpicking you to death! Forgive me, for I am at least as anal as you, only about different things…)
I knew that! I was just…uhh…testing you. Yeah.
- Tamerlane