Sunni -v- Shia: Fundamentalist Religion as Usual
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 22 — A powerful explosion shattered the golden dome of one of Iraq's most revered Shiite shrines this morning, setting off a day of almost unparalleled sectarian fury in cities and towns across Iraq as protesting mobs took to the streets to chant for revenge and set fire to dozens of Sunni mosques.
The bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, left its famous golden dome in ruins but injured no one, and only a handful of people appear to have been killed in the widespread street protests and violence that ensued.
Sheesh... The way these muslim humans are acting you'd think Shia shrines had statues of Mohammed in them or something.
I wonder if our descendants will look back and see this decade as a precursor of the Islamic Protestant Reformation.
Wait. Strike that thought. The Roman Catholic domination of European Christianity lasted hundreds of years. Islam only had a legitimate Caliphate whilst Mohammed was still alive. The insurrections surrounding his death are what begat all of this current insanity; nearly 1400 years ago!
Still, barring the utter disintegration of religious belief amongst our species' members, this renewal of sectarian violence on such a scale is perhaps a harbinger of a truly democratic Islam.
I know that's long stretch but, maybe, just maybe, a few 100,000 muslims every decade, over the next century or two, will begin see that New Hampshire's "Live Free or Die" totally trumps Submit.
Hi,
ReplyDeleteThat would be nice... but if Europe's any indication,it'll be a LONG time before this becomes democracy. Similar internecine religious feuds burned across Europe in the 14th-15th C, but democracy didn't step out of the shadows in any meaningful way until the American colonies were born 2 centuries later (and even then only partly).
Sunnis and Shiites are only doing what they've done sporadically for, as you noted, 1400 yrs -- killing each other. The fact that the rest of the world depends on them for oil now, however, makes this a global problem only made worse by our gov't arrogance and corruption in approaching them.