Nice. I thought I remembered Lebanese government making provisions for Sunni and Shi’a representation owing to relative equality between the two groups in terms of population, but I didn’t have any cites to back my memory up.
For the record, the Christians are split between three “rites” of Catholic (Roman, Melkite, and Maronite), two groups of Orthodox (Antiochan Orthodox, “Eastern Orthodox” in communion with Istanbul; and Syrian Orthodox, “Oriental Orthodox” in communion with the Copts and Armenians); and a bunch of minorities including a few Protestant groups. IIRC, the Lebanese Constitution requires that the President (head of state) be a Christian and the Premier (head of government) be a Muslim. again IIRC with the Deputy Premier being the opposite (Sunni or Shi’a) of the Premier’s allegiance.
The Alawites are a very heterodox subsect of Ithna’ashari ( or Imami or Twelver ) Shi’ism. Some Shi’a authorities regard them as proper Muslims, Sunni authorities have been more equivocal. They’re pretty idiosyncratic, but still consider themselves Muslims.
The Druse are generally considered a seperate religion, albeit one that is a direct offshoot of Isma’ili Shi’ism, as they accept revealed prophecy that postdates the Qur’an.
Wahabism is rather young ( 18th century ) subsect of Sunni Islam as noted, but it’s not quite unique to Saudi Arabia, being also the main faith in Qatar and part of the UAE. It does have its closest ties to the state in SA. It is by far the most conservative and rigid brand of Islam out there ( though the similarly pedigreed Deobandism can get close ) and is so regarded by most Muslims.
As Polycarp alluded Sufism is NOT a sect per se. Rather it is a philosophical approach, representing the mystical strain in Islam. One can simultaneously ( and always are ) Shi’a or Sunni and a Sufi. Sufis organize themselves into “brotherhoods”, which can be considered very rough analogs to monastic orders. Sufis are everywhere, but will tend to clump some areas more than others. In Iraq Sunni Kurds ( mostly followwing the Shafa’i madhab, or school of jurisprudence ) tend to be heavily penetrated by Sufism ( the Barzanis are hereditary Sufi sheikhs ), while the Sunni Arabs ( mostly following the Hanafi madhab ) are much less so.
Wahabis typically regard Sufism as a heretical innovation in Islam.
Isma’ili are, as Angua noted, identical with the Seveners she describes.
Zaydis or Fivers are yet another Shi’a branch.
The Ibadis of Oman ( and some parts of Africa ) are the last remnants of the THIRD major split in Islam ( with the Sunni and Shi’a ), the Kharijites ( though the Ibadi tend to reject that particular label ).
And so forth and so on - there are numerous subgroups and tossing in the whole slew of Sufi brotherhoods, each with its own philosophy, would be a huge affair ( and certainly beyond me ).
Not really relatives at all ( maybe at a sizeable remove, as they were all from the same clan ), except by marriage. Some early Shi’a were of the opinion that any member of Muhammed’s direct family would be acceptable and this group merged into the Sunni mainstream after the Abbasids ( descendents of Muhammed’s uncle, Abbas ) gained the Caliphate. The Ali/Fatima exclusiveness as a definition of Shi’ism therefore postdates 749.
Actually, they’re thick as flies. The term sayyid ( or feminine sayyida ) refers to the descendents of Ali. They are quite numerous and in Shi’a traditions tend to enter the “clergy” in disproportionate numbers ( it’s sorta a family calling with most ). For example most, though not all ( it’s not a requirement ), Grand Ayatollahs in Ithna’ashari Shi’ism are sayyids. Not the same as Sayid on lost by the way - his name just means “happy”.
I’d be interested in learning more about this – I’m not at all familiar with it.
Sorry for having provided misinformation. I thought Abu Bakr et al. were uncles, cousins, etc. of Mohammed.
Again interesting, and apologies for being misinformed. I take it there’s no way to get consensus among them on who is Ali’s proper heir and hence Shi’a Caliph?
Regarding “Say(y)id,” I wonder if there’s a connection of “blessed=happy” there, as in how some modern translations render Jesus’s Beatitudes (Matthew 5): “How happy are those who hunger and thirst for rightousness…”?
I have a good friend who is Lebanese, and according to him the details concerning how the government is split up is not formalized in the constitution, but it’s an unwritten agreement which includes a req’t that the President be Christian (Maronite, to be sepcific), the Prime Minister be a Sunni, and the President of the Legislature be a Shiite. There is also an elaborate list of “gentlemen’s agreements” about how the vairous sides will act wrt foreign affairs so as not to rock the boat, but I don’t recall what those details are.
A contentious problem is the make-up of the Legislature, which must be majority Christian (6-to-5 ratio), which might have been an accurate reflection of things when the country gained independence in the 40s, but isn’t anymore.
Well, for the Twelver Shi’ites, it gets more complicated than that. The 11th Imam was a guy named Hasan al-Askari, who was poisoned at 27, probably by the orders of the Abbasid Caliphate. Officially, he didn’t have any kids. But the twelvers believe that he had a son, named Muhammed, who was born in secret, because his parents were afraid that he’d be killed by his enemies.
After the 11th Imam died, to protect him, God then hid the boy Muhammed, and he’s remained hidden ever since. But someday, the twelfth Imam will come back and lead the Muslims.
The Kharijites arose out of the first fitna or Islamic civil war. They were originally shi’at Ali ( ‘partisans of Ali’ ) who, it can be surmised, followed him not for genealogical or deputational reasons ( i.e. the idea that Muhammed had wanted Ali to be his successor ), but rather because they thought him the best qualified. Indeed they accepted the sunna of Abu Bakr and Umar ( but disagreed with their favoring of the Quraysh tribe ), that Caliphs should be elected. Ali as the ‘Lion of Islam’ and first male convert was obviously the best choice now that Uthman was dead.
However when Ali entered into arbitration with his opponent Muawiyah after winning an advantage at an initial clash at Siffin, they broke with him. To them caliphal succession was based purely on merit, not bloodline. By entering into that arbitration with an opponent that had earlier been declared a heretic, Ali was taking upon himself a right to judge that belonged only to God and therefore had lost that merit, just as his predecessor had.
There was undoubtedly a political beef here. Uthman had attracted intense opposition for his centralizing, authoritarian tendencies and nepotism. The Kharijites drew their support from independent minded and egalitarian bedouin tribes that had been somewhat shut out of the halls of power by the favor heaped on the Meccan Quraysh. Muawiyah as Uthman’s nearest kinsman, no doubt represented in full the royalist strains and elitism that they abhorred.
Whatever the reasons, they now engendered a three-way civil war. Ali had some success against them on the battlefield, but it was Kharijite agents that eventually assassinated him in 661, bringing the first fitna to the end and allowing Muwaiyah to sweep into power as the first caliph of the Umayyad dynasty.
Subsequently Kharijites became the great rebel sect of that early period. In particular they became quite powerful in North Africa, destroying one large Umayyad army sent against them ( the remnants of which were driven north into Iberia where they would provide refuge for the last fleeing Umayyad prince after the Abbasid coup ), only being put down with great difficulty by a second.
In general they were all about a strict meritocracy, whether one was the son of a prince or a beggar born in a ditch. One branch even regarded women as potentially being fit to rule the community. At the same time they could be intensely ethnocentric ( Islam as an Arab-only religion ) and enormously intolerant. The most extreme branch was quite neo-salafist in their disdain for all other Muslims, which they regarded as heretics deserving of death. Others were mellower.
The modern Ibadis are lineal descendants of one branch of the old Kharijite movement, though like I said they tend to reject the specific label. Generally most folks wouldn’t be able to discern much difference between a modern Ibadi and a Sunni Muslim, but they do have their own madhab and regard themselves as distinct.
As the good Captain noted, for the Ithna’ashari it is an occultated twelth Imam. For some early Isma’ilis it was the occultated seventh Imam. For the Nizaris it is the line of the Aga Khan. For the Zaydis in Yemen at least, it was a properly meritous member of the line of the Yemeni Imams ( the rule of which was terminated in 1960 ). The Musta’lis look to yet different branches. So, no consensus.
Interesting thought. But we’d need someone like Johanna to comment, because that’s a bit beyond my knowledge set :).
But in most of the Middle East cities, the neighborhoods themselves are either Sunni or Shiite.
So if you live in a Sunni neighborhood, someone who moves in (either buying a house or renting an apartment) would almost certainly also be Sunni. Otherwise the landlord wouldn’t rent to them, or the previous owner wouldn’t sell to them. They would face definite ostracism if they ignored those prejudices. That kind of peer pressure is how neighborhoods are kept that way.
Similar social pressures were used (still are, sometimes) to keep American neighborhoods segregated. Banks here in Minneapolis used to give mortgages to Jews only if they bought in certain neighborhoods. Same was done to blacks, Hispanics, and Asians later on. Realtors, insurance companies, builders, etc. all participated in this ‘ghettoization’.
Just like in Northern Ireland – given someones address, you can make a fairly accurate guess at their religion, because most neighborhoods are either Catholic or Protestant.
I am in your debt! Thank you for putting that together - it helps quite alot.
(Ya know - this is one of the things I absolutely love about the SDMB. Not only are there people who can answer just about any dang thing, but many are willing to take it that extra step!)
If I could ask one more question: What about the Sunni sects? There is much here describing the Shiite sects, but little about the Sunnis. Atticus Finch mentions the “the vast majority of Muslims are Sunnis” but I don’t see much else. Since I know essentially nothing about Sunnis, I am happy to take anything you’ve got.
No problem. Its something I’ve been meaning to do for a while, partly to get my own notes in order. Its a highly simplified version though!
I know very little about the Sunni sects, but I’ll take a look through Lapidus when I get some time over the next few days and try and knock something together. Unless someone else can provide more information.
In Baghdad, it’s true that there are many neighborhoods that are either Sunni, Shi’a, or Christian, but there are also (soon to be were) many neighborhoods that are mixed. These are the neighborhoods where you are seeing the most intense violence.
In mixed neighborhoods, everyone knows everyone else’s religion. Baghdad is really nothing but a big small-town. Families have been living in neighborhoods for decades and know who go to what mosque or church. When the Sunni or Shi’a mob comes in, they know before hand who they want to grab. My staff report militias coming in to neighborhoods with printed lists of people with their addresses to kill. They most likely got this list from someone in the neighborhood who helped them compile it.
Similarly, when you hear about a Sunni group snatching all the Shi’a in an office building, or Shi’a grabbing all the Sunni, it us because someone in that office helped them plan the operation.
There have been cases of people getting snatched and being able to lie about their sect to get out. One problem my staff face is that it isn’t always clear who is snatching you, so you don’t know which sect to claim to be a member of.
Case 1: Here are two examples from my colleagues experience here; one Sunni and one Shi’a. A Sunni colleague was married to a Shi’a woman. He was about to take his family and flee to Jordan. Before he left Iraq, he paid a courtesy call to his Shi’a in-laws who live in Sader City (a Shi’a district of Baghdad). All his in-laws neighbors knew him from before the war when he would visit many times without trouble. Word spread he was in the neighborhood and by the time he came out of his in-laws house, masked Shi’a militias were waiting for him. They took him to a police station (the police are dominated by the Shi’a) tortured him to death and dumped his body back in front of the in-laws the next day.
Case 2: A Shi’a colleague was living in a mixed Sunni-Shi’a neighborhood. One day he didn’t show up to work. His wife said he was missing for the entire weekend after some Sunni neighbors invited him over to watch a football game. The next day his family found his decapitated body and fled the neighborhood. It’s pretty clear that people they had grown up with and gone to school with had played a part in his kidnapping murder.
What these incidents have in common is that in both cases people knew the victims and knew them well. That is what is so chilling about it. I saw the same thing in the Balkans when colleagues would tell me about atrocities committed against their family by guys they played basketball with in high school.
Baghdad is a little diffferent than most other parts of Iraq and the distinctions between the sects are not always clear cut. That is why one of the first targets for the sectarian fighters are mixed neighborhoods and mixed marriages (fairly common in Iraq). They need to eliminate any kind of middle ground and force people to choose sides.
I’ve got to go sit on a jury this morning, so a little short, but…
In general Sunnism, as the establishment faith, has been a little less prone to fractionation than the scattered and fringe divisions like Shi’ism and Kharijism. Also those seeking different perspectives have perhaps more often taken to forming Sufi orders, rather than revising central doctrine ( though the dividing line here can be thin ). When you have seen factionating ( wonder if that’s a word ) it has often been as revivalist waves, usually originationg at the fringes of the Islamic world, which result in more distinct Sunni sects.
Some are defunct like the al-Mourabitun and al-Muwahiddun in North Africa and Iberia, better known to western history as the Almoravid and Almohade dynasties. The Umayyads and their taifa successors themselves, practiced a distinct madhab and rejecting the authority of the Abbasid caliphs, likely could have been referred to as a distinct sect. The Mahdi movement in 19th century Sudan might be another example.
Some are still around - the rise of the west and reactions to its dominance ( somtimes just by inference, sometimes directly ) engendered a couple of different sorts of reactions. One was a type of Islamic modernism, the other a return to roots extreme conservatism. It is the latter that produced the Wahabi and Deobandi movements in the Arabian penninsula and India respectively. Both drew on the writings of a conservative 13th/14th century scholar, little followed in his day, Ibn Tayimyyah. Both are extremely conservative ( in most respects, but not all - theologically the Wahabi at least reject the commonly held notion that itjihad is closed ), rather puritanical movements with many similarities, including rejecting “modern” ( post-High Middle Ages at least ) innovation in Islam, such as Sufism. They are distinct, though. Just as one example the Wahabi follow the relatively rare and rigid Hanbali madhab, the Deobandi are Hanafi. The Taliban were/are Deobandis, infused with generous heaping of cultural accretion in the form of pushtunwala ( the local Pushtun tribal honor code ), plus some Wahabi influence from SA preachers imported during the Afghan war. The conservative Islamic establishment in Pakistan is mostly Deobandi in orientation.
The Barelvi are another modern subcontinent Sunni sect, rather more moderate with strong Sufi influences. Traditionally rather more numerous than their frequent antagonists the Deobandis.
Yet another Sunni sect is found at the other end of the world in North America. The old Nation of Islam, after the majority shed some the blantantly heretical notions of the NOI and mainstreamed themselves with nominative Sunni Islam have often been referred to as Bilalian Muslims. There faith is still slightly idiosyncratic enough to perhaps be considered a distinct sect, though they are now considered safely within orthodox boundaries. Note they should NOT be confused with the splinter sect of Farrakhan’s surviving NOI, who are still in that grey area of Muslim/seperate religion due to the retention of certain problematic beliefs.
I missed this thread the other day because I was traveling and not online. Just found it.
In Arabic, the two words سيّد sayyid ‘master’ and سعيد sa’îd ‘happy’ are distinct and not confusable. The former word comes from the root s-w-d which means both ‘black’ and ‘to be master’. (A semantic combination that will make Black Power linguists happy.) The latter word comes from the root s-‘-d meaning ‘to be happy, lucky, fortunate’. It’s only sloppy transliterations in English that make it harder to see the differences between the two words. I once knew a guy with both names–Sayyid Sa‘îd-- but the way he spelled his name in English made it hard to tell exactly which word it was.
The word sa‘îd means ‘happy’ implying ‘lucky’–like when things happen to go your way, you feel glad. That must have been too mundane for the Arabic translators of the Bible, because in the Beatitudes the word they used for ‘blessed’ is طوبى tûbá. The resemblance to a large brass wind instrument in English is totally coincidental, I can assure you of that. In Arabic, tûbá is a special word just used for religious beatitudes, derived from Hebrew or more likely Aramaic טוב tob meaning ‘good’. It also occurs in descriptions of Islamic Paradise as the name of a special tree.
Although the name “Kharijte” is used in English for writing histories of Islam, if you say it to a Muslim you’ll get a blank look. The actual name for the group is Khawârij, the Arabic broken plural of khârijî ‘outsider’.
).
- his name just means “happy”.
) it has often been as revivalist waves, usually originationg at the fringes of the Islamic world, which result in more distinct Sunni sects.