Are The Terrorists Mostly Sunni or Shiite?

Vanity

[Maceman]

In Iraq, they're Sunni.

In Iran, they're shiite.

[Born to Conserve]

Most Moslems are Sunni (85%?), so therefore, most terrorists are Sunni.

In Islam, you are a Moslem, or you are an animal.

One of their principle rules is that it is not permitted to take a life, unless it is in retribution for taking a life, or in retribution for "creating disorder in the land".

Nice loophole, eh? Pretty much allows them to slaughter anyone of any other faith or of no faith.

That religion is intolerant to the core, and if other religions are to survive their overt AND THEIR INSIDIOUS aggression, it must itself not be tolerated.

[UnbelievingScumOnTheOtherSide]

So Wahhabism is the Sunni extreme element. Is there a equivalent group on the Shiite side?

The Shiites didn't need any help.

[lizma]

Sunni. About 85 percent of Muslims are part of the Sunni sect. I've yet to come across what caused the deep divide other than politics.

But it does seem mosques even in the US are very segregated. I'll do some googling.

[JOE6PAK]

I took a good SHIITE when I got up today. My wife thought I was a Terrorist.

Please don't squeeze the Charmin.

[buwaya]

Philippines and Indonesia are Sunni.

There really are few large Shiite communities and only a few countries with Shiite majorities.

Around the world Shiites very rarely share mosques with Sunnis. I suppose they could if both are present only in small numbers.

The chasm is not just in prophets and leadership but in the nature of religious law, which is all-important for Muslims.

Shiites are also not monolithic, there being many flavors of Shiite belief, many grossly incompatible with each other.

Sunni beliefs are basically compatible, its pretty much a range of severity and permitted variety.

[Tampa Caver]

Many years ago, I read some history about the Muslim religion. The schism started very shortly after Mohhammed (sp?) died, like a grandson or nephew that claimed inheritance to the title. A family feud so to speak. Don't the Wahabbis consider all other Muslims to be infidels too? How can they tolerate the other sects and not try to wipe them out like the Christians and Jews? I also understand that Mohhammed lived in a Jewish-dominated town before his rise to religious power and this is why there is a considerable amount of Hebrew background in Islam today. He probably disliked them from the start and that is now reflected in modern Islamist thought. If anyone knows otherwise, please comment.

[prisoner6]

A very good friend of mine - over 20 eyars - is a sunni from Afghanistan. His father - a doctor and member of the royakl family - was killed by the Soviets. He's now a naturalized citizen of the USA, and I wouldn't be afraid to trust him with my life.

He always maintained that in Afghanistan the Shiites were the terrorists, the sunni's were fairly peacful. The big problem as he saw it is that no matter which persuasion they are, they're all back in the stone age. Most outside of the cities just don't have the ability to grasp the Modern World.

Hence a lot of religious wackos on both sides.

FWIW.

prisoner6

[ChicagoHebrew]

Sunnis are the majority pretty much everywhere except Iraq and Iran. Except for Iran, the major non-Arab Muslim populations -- such as Pakistan, India, and Indonesia are mostly Sunni.

[Lessismore]

I saw a book review of a book on suicide bombers. My recollection is that there have been no Iranian Shiite suicide bombers. There may have been Arab Shiite suicide bombers in Israel -- I'm not sure. The vast majority appear to be either Arab Sunnis influenced by the Wahhabi branch of Islam or Pakistani suicide bomber influenced by the Deobandist branch of Islam.

Suicide bombers are not all Muslims. The suicide vest was first used by the woman who killed Rajiv Ghandi in '91. She was a Tamil Tiger and a Hindu. The Tamil Tigers originated and perfected the technique, and they have launched more suicide bomb attacks than any other group.

[Lessismore]

I saw a book review of a book on suicide bombers. My recollection is that there have been no Iranian Shiite suicide bombers. There may have been Arab Shiite suicide bombers in Israel -- I'm not sure. The vast majority appear to be either Arab Sunnis influenced by the Wahhabi branch of Islam or Pakistani suicide bomber influenced by the Deobandist branch of Islam.

Suicide bombers are not all Muslims. The suicide vest was first used by the woman who killed Rajiv Ghandi in '91. She was a Tamil Tiger and a Hindu. The Tamil Tigers originated and perfected the technique, and they have launched more suicide bomb attacks than any other group.

[JasonC]

Most Muslims are Sunni, the Shia are a minority and especially so outside Iran. Most Muslim terrorists are from various "literalist" sects. The Wahhabis of Saudia Arabia are one such, and have extensive financing abroad. Followers of the medieval theologian Ibn Tayymia are a somewhat broader group (that includes Wahhabis). There is a traditional literalist group in Islamic law that is broader still, who follow legal decisions of Hanbal, one of the four traditional schools of Islamic law and the most literalist one. All of those are what we'd think of as Sunni fundamentalists, not all of them are terrorists (though Ibn Tayymia was a pretty ferocious bigot in his writings, and following him is a sign of treating Islam as a fundamental political identity).

Shia believe in authority rather than in literalism. That is, the highest appeal to a literalist is to the text of the Koran. The highest appeal to a Shia is to a particular living man regarded as their leader and learned authority. This has been compared to having bishops (theirs are "ayatollahs") compared to every individual with his Koran being his own decision maker. As such, Shia and Sunni fundamentalists have a serious political disagreement over how questions of what is Islamic are decided. But in practice, if a given Shia leader stays close to the text of the Koran in his own rulings and orders, they will both agree on many things. Shia aren't monolithic, though - they follow different exemplars who have different political tacks.

Sistani is an Iraqi moderate for instance, and in power basically, while the lesser Sadr is a young extremist, followed only by a small sect. Montazeri in Iran is for reforms and a freer and more secular state, has excellent Islamic "credentials" and seniority, but little power and is under house arrest, while Khameni is the effective ruler of the country and an extremist. The Iranian extremists support Hezbollah in Lebanon, basically their Shiite terrorist army against Israel. Khomeni was an extremist and ran the Iranian revolution. So there are certainly Shiite terrorists, including ones operating outside of their own countries.

The mainline of Islamic radicalism dates back to the Muslim brotherhood in Egypt in the 1920s. They were Sunnis and fundamentalists, but not Wahhabis. Wahhabis took over Arabia around that time, and founded the House of Saud, displacing the Sunni but not Wahhabi descendents of the Sherifs of Mecca. Fundamentalist Islamicists fought with modernizing, secular Arab nationalists (those who speak the Arab language, as distinct from e.g. Turks or Persians) for leadership of anti-western resistence movements through the WW II period and the early cold war. Some of them frankly communist, some of them varieties of fascist in political orientation. The PLO came out of secular terrorist organizations, for example, funded by the Soviet Union. While Hamas is a fundamentalist Islamic terrorist organization.

So there were Arab terrorists who weren't particularly religious, and Muslim terrorists who weren't Arab or Sunni, but Persian and Shia (in the Iranian revolution e.g.). Political extremism and terrorist violence was used by all of them, it was not restricted to Sunni fundamentalists. Nevertheless, the fundamentalist Sunnis have been gaining in influence over time. They have strong ideological cards - literalism as a source of Islamic identity "plays well" - and funding, coming from oil money and protection rackets. Bin Laden is a Sunni fundamentalist.

In Iraq today, there are terrorist opponents from all of these groups. There are foreign Sunni fundamentalists coming to fight us as part of Bin Laden's jihad. There are domestic secularist Baaths who are basically godless fascists and mere gangsters, from the former ruling party - particularly common among the Sunni minority in the middle of the country, but not particularly religious. That is just the ethnic group Saddam was from and that he favored, made the ruling class in his tyranny. Most of the Shia majority follow Sistani or other moderates and want democracy, because it is putting them in control of the country. Some Shia radicals like Sadr, who is supported by Iran, want to fight the US anyway and don't want a democracy but a theocracy under Shia authority figures, as in Iran.

All of the above fight us and occasionally each other, and several of them (Baathists, external Sunni fundamentalists working for Bin Laden) are trying to foment civil war between the other factions, to make the country ungovernable. Because all they actually agree on is (1) wanting us gone and (2) not wanting a democracy led by moderate Shia in charge of the place. If those failed and power were lying in the street, they'd soon be at each other's throats over who got the "spoils".

The main group trying to internationalize the conflict and attack the west are the Sunni fundamentalists. They do so for internal consumption within the Islamic world, more than for the sake of any effect it might have on us or on our policies. They are trying to look tougher than the other factions, more willing to take on the big bad foreigners. They smear all the other factions as lackies of the west and of the Jews, lukewarm Muslims, and claim a right to lead the Islamic world based on their superior zeal, defiance, bravery, ruthlessness, and the supposed literalist purity of their version of Islam.

I hope that helps.

[Lessismore]

You leave out the Deobandi, who began in India as an Islamic anti-colonial, anti-Western force during the British Raj. Since the founding of Pakistan they have grown in strength and influence. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darul_Uloom_Deoband

Darul Uloom Deoband

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The Darul Uloom, an Islamic madrassa or seminary, located at Deoband, a town in Uttar Pradesh, India is self-described as a cornerstone of "Islamic sciences." It was founded in 1866. It teaches an Islamist version of the religion. Its students have gone on to found many other maddrassas across modern India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and farther afield. As its official website proclaims, 'the whole of Asia is redolent with the aroma of this prophetic garden.' Its only rival in influence has been the Jam'a-e Azhar, Cairo. The school of the Islamic religion promulgated here is often described as Deobandi, and has had great influence on the Taliban of Afghanistan. Deobandi thought has much in common with the Wahhabi movement that originated in Saudi Arabia.

Founded at a time when the handful of Islamic Madaris in India were dormant, the school awakened political consciousness. Many of the school's Ulema had taken active roles in the "Indian Mutiny" or "War of Independence of 1857". The founder, Hazrat Nanautavi, turned lack of official support into a virtue, establishing the principle that the religious schools be run with public contributions from "the poor masses alone."

A center of both the Shariah and the semi-secret Tariqa from the very day of its inception, Darul Uloom has been a force explicitly counter to rationalism and secularism, which are associated with Western culture. The syllabus set at the outset "has been in force generally for more or less a century in all the Arabic schools in the country" according to the official website. The current syllabus consists of four stages, three that take eight years to complete, and Mastery Post-graduate stage, in Tafsir, Islamic theology, Fiqh or Islamic law, and literature.

[JasonC]

Shariah just means Islamic law, there is nothing distinctive in it. As for "the semi-secret Tariqa", Tariqa just means "way" and is usually a preface to the name of some school of Sufism, the way of so-and-so or the way of whos-its. Sufist mysticism is certainly more prevalent in Islam in India, because it makes it easier to accomodate pre-existing metaphysical ideas and rival traditions. Most of the fundamentalists of the Wahhabi variety violently reject "syncretic" additions to Koranic, literalist Islam. Sufist groups tend to be all over the map politically speaking, some obscurantist and radical, others accomodating modern ways much more readily than literalism can.

While I don't doubt a center for the study of Islamic sciences in the traditional manner, would be an ideological force distinct from and counter to modernism, rationalism, westernization, secularism, etc, that in itself hardly amounts to Islamic fundamentalism. It is just Islam, which obviously isn't secularist etc. It may be the dominant tendency at that university or among its students is one that "politicizes" Islam, along the lines of Ibn Tayymia. I wouldn't be surprised. But there have also been modernizing and moderate developments in Islam coming from the subcontinent, notably the philosopher Muhammad Iqbal in the first half of the 20th century, and the scholar Fazlur Rahman (first cultural minister of independent Pakistan, he tried to reform education there without much success) in the second half.

[RightWhale]

The Moslems in the Phillipines or Tailand wouldn't be either Arab or Persian. Same with American Muslim, who some ME Moslems wouldn't consider to be Moslem at all.

[Lessismore]

The Deobandi are a fundamentalist offshoot of Sunni Islam. From http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/intro/islam-deobandi.htm

...

"The fundamentalist Deoband Dar-ul-Uloom brand of Islam inspired the Taliban movement and had widespread appeal for Muslim fundamentalists. Most of the Taliban leadership attended Deobandi-influenced seminaries in Pakistan. The Taliban was propped up initially by the civil government of Benazir Bhutto, then in coalition with the Deobandi Jama'at-ulema Islam (JUI) led by Maulana Fazlur Rehman [who by 2003 was the elected opposition leader at the Center in Islamabad and whose protégé is now the chief Minister in the NWFP]. Traditionally, Sunni Islam of the Hanafi school of jurisprudence was the dominant religion of Afganistan. The Taliban also adhered to the Hanafi school of Sunni Islam, making it the dominant religion in the country for most of 2001. For the last 200 years, Sunnis often have looked to the example of the Deoband madrassah (religious school) near Delhi, India. Most of the Taliban leadership attended Deobandi-influenced seminaries in Pakistan. The Deoband school has long sought to purify Islam by discarding supposedly un-Islamic accretions to the faith and reemphasizing the models established in the Koran and the customary practices of the Prophet Mohammed. Additionally, Deobandi scholars often have opposed what they perceive as Western influences. Much of the population adheres to Deobandi-influenced Hanafi Sunnism, but a sizable minority adheres to a more mystical version of Sunnism generally known as Sufism. Sufism centers on orders or brotherhoods that follow charismatic religious leaders. "

"Although the majority of the Islamic population (Sunni) in Afghanistan and Pakistan, belong to the Hanafi sect, the theologians who have pushed Pakistan towards Islamic Radicalism for decades, as well as the ones who were the founders of the Taliban, espoused Wahabi rhetoric and ideals. This sect took its inspiration from Saudi Hanbali theologians who immigrated there in the 18th century, to help their Indian Muslim brothers with Hanbali theological inspiration against the British colonialists. Propelled by oil-generated wealth, the Wahhabi worldview increasingly co-opted the Deobandi movement in South Asia."

[JasonC]

So the background is Hanafi (traditionalist but not fundamentalist) but they have been coopted by Wahhabis - that is perfectly plausible.

[JasonC]

Note that the Hanafi school simply as such is by no means fundamentalist. It is usually considered the most open minded and rationalist of the traditional Islamic schools of jurisprudence. Hanafi was willing to reject certain Hadiths (traditions from the time of Muhammad) because he distrusted some of the recorders. He considered a judge's own reason and sense of justice very important in legal decisions, was willing to adapt to times, disdained political power for judges, etc.

As for the Deobandi school, that seems to be where the politicalization is coming in, which is not there in Hanafi legalism as such. "The Deobandi interpretation holds that a Muslim's first loyalty is to his religion and only then to the country of which he is a citizen or a resident; secondly, that Muslims recognise only the religious frontiers of their Ummah and not the national frontiers; thirdly,that they have a sacred right and obligation to go to any country to wage jihad to protect the Muslims of that country." Those are Ibn Tayymia style doctrines, and would form a common ground with Wahhabis for example.

Hanafi sunnism is not as such fundamentalist or like the Taliban - one can be a hanafi sunni and not agree with the above propositions e.g. Sufism is even less like the Taliban.

[Tampa Caver]

This is excellent conversation. I and hopefully many others have a better understanding of the world political scene in regards to the various Muslim sects. I'm very surprised that the Shiites are not a larger percentage of Muslims in the world. Could this stem from them coming from Indo-European stock while the original Sunnis are predominately Arab or Semite? I now understand why the Pan Arab League has not accomplished anything and why the oil wealth of Saudi Arabia is footing the bill for many terrorist organizations. Thanks everyone and continue to comment if you wish.