For those who don’t know, the 30 years war was a religious conflict which centered around Germany and was fought by all the major European powers at that time, however, it was the last great religious war fought in Europe and helped bring about a decline in Catholic Church power.
Now for what we’re seeing now in the Middle East, it seems something similar is being played out with Iran on one side and the Sunni states on the other, with the cockpits of power play being Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Bahrain, are the similarities only skin deep? What can the legacy of the 30 years war help us understand about this conflict which is going on right now, and what to expect?
Conflict between modern Muslims does not seem to me to originate with the Sunni-Shia divide, although it may be aggravated by it.
The divide goes back to the generation after Mohammed’s death, when his son in law Ali was first passed over for Caliph, and later killed during civil war while sitting Caliph. I do not know to what extent since then the divide has led to open war between Muslims, but if they are still so hostile after 1300 years they will not get over any time soon.
Also, you have the Persian/Arab divide which is an ethnic divide as well as a linguistic one. There are lots of Arab Shi’a, but few Persian Sunnis. But still, the majority of Shi’a are in Iran and Iraq.
Like any “religious” war, it’s more a political power struggle that happens to fault along religions lines, than a war caused by religious differences. In that sense, the current Middle East conflicts are similar to the 30-Years War. Now, it’s ultimately a struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia to see who is the leading Muslim state. Then, it was a struggle between the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperors. The religious differences are coincidental, but magnified by both sides to rally their supporters.
Although there were religious (Catholic vs. Protestant) motivations involved, the Thirty Years War was by no means entirely, or even mainly about religion. Indeed, its causes and teh shifting alliances that developed during the actual conflict were horrendously complex. The Catholic French ended up fighting other Catholics, and Catholic Italy kept largely out of the fray. The most important Protestant nation, England, was only marginally involved (and England, when she did fight, fought against both the French and the Spanish, Catholic nations who were fighting each other). As the Wikipedia article that the OP links to says:
Frankly it should be obvious that the Thirty Years War bears no analogy to the Shia/Sunni divide. For one thing, the Thirty Years War was a war (or, more accurately, a bunch of overlapping and interconnected wars) and the Shia/Sunni divide, though it may sometimes lead to conflict, is not. You are not comparing apples to oranges here, you are comparing apples to football matches!
Is your real question whether the Shia/Sunni divide in Islam is analogous to the Catholic/Protestant divide in Christianity? At least that sounds like a coherent possibility. I suppose the answer is that they are analogous in some (mostly superficial) ways, but disanalogous in lots of others.
Or are you asking if the Iran-Iraq war (at least it was an actual war, with Shia on one side and a Sunni leadership on the other) was analogous to the Thirty Years war? Here I would say no, they were very different sorts of wars, except perhaps for the fact that, although sectarian differences between co-religionists were involved in both cases, in neither were they the real, main drivers of the conflict.
I’ve heard it suggested that the modern wave of Islamic radicalism is analogous to the more extreme Protestant reformist denominations of the 16th and 17th centuries- think ultra-hardcore Calvinist or Puritan. To the extent that these movements can be considered reactions against the failure of the religious mainstream to address new social and political realities, I could credit it.
I don’t mean to insult anyone, but I’ve always thought the attempt to compare the Sunni-Shia split with the Catholic-Protestant split has always been intellectually lazy and ignores the vast differences between the two groups.
As Bernard Lewis, arguably the most respected and honored still-living scholar on Islam talked about how in the West there’s always been an attempt to “categorize the unknown by the known”. He’s used as examples attempts to classify the fighting in Lebanon between Shia and Sunni factions as “right-wing” Sunnis vs. “left-wing” Shia as well as the way medieval Christians referred to Muslims as “Muhammadans”(which was not intended as a pejorative it just showed that they didn’t understand that Muslims didn’t view Muhammad the way they viewed Jesus).
Here’s a 16 minute video where he goes into the growth of the split and why it’s not helpful to compare it to the Catholic-Protestant split.
I don’t agree with everything he says in the video and think being the Ottomanist he is, he’s far to hard on both ancient Persia and modern Iran and he really doesn’t put the context of “uncleanliness” amongst the Shia in it’s proper context, but I highly recommend anyone interested in the question watch the video.
It is extremely unhelpful and lazy to do so. Firstly the terms themselves are fairly imprecise. There are lots of ostensibly “Sunni” groups which in ordinary Sunni eyes would be seen as more hetrodox than Shia and vice versa. Secondly, the divide only covers parts of the muslim world, from about Syria to Pakistan. You do not have a Shia-Sunni divide in Sub Saharan Africa or C Asia or the Far East, not to say those areas do not have a divide, just that this is not the divide that they have.
I think you can compare the Salafists(more commonly known Wahhabists) to Cromwell’s minions but I don’t think you can fairly compare the modern Shia, not even Al-Sadr or Khamanei to them.
The Calvinists of that time were arguably the world’s biggest prudes who believed that sex was, at best, a necessary evil solely to be used for the procreation of children.
I certainly doubt any Calvinist woman would go before Cromwell while her husband was away at war and say that she missed her husband and was hoping that it would be permissible for her to masturbate while he was away. Nor can I imagine any going before Cromwell after her husband returns and ask “now that he’s returned to show my appreciation is it okay if I suck his cock until his eyes pop” to show her appreciation.
By contrast the Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, who is hardly to be confused with some free love hippy, is often asked questions like that. His answers to the two above were “Yes, if it will help avoid committing adultery it’s discouraged but permissible”(or words to that effect) and “Yes, so long as no fluid enters the mouth.”
Moreover, I can’t imagine Calvinists finding the concept of Mutah(temporary marriage) where people can have temporary marriages lasting as little as one hour, which is practiced in Iran as well as amongst the Shia as a whole(though many conservative Ayatollahs as well as those concerned about the exploitation of women such as Sistani try to regulate and stifle it).
In areas that are overwhelmingly Sunni, I.E. Egypt and Morocco, there’s little hatred and fear of the Sunnis except amongst some Salafis trained abroad.
I have learnt that the less one consider the views of clerics on sex the better you will be.
I think its Menski who said that Mutah was the Jafaria way of getting around adultery. The Hanafi way was by making divorce ridiculously easy.
BTW its not just an Iranian or a Shia thing, you would be surprised as to how many ostensibly not Fiqah jafaria following people suddenly become convinced by that the pro Mutah argument.
