Shia vs. Sunni
I like to stay fairly informed about what’s going on in the world, even here in China, where information is controlled pretty tightly. In the past couple of years, that has meant lots of talk about Iraq, its people, and the usually terrible things that they’re doing to each other (and their “visitors”). Most of the violence and hatred, it seems, is happening between two groups of people … the Shia and the Sunni.
But if you’re anything like me, you really don’t know the fundamental differences between the two, let alone why they hate each other enough to do these terrible things. If that’s so, I suggest that you take a couple of minutes to read What’s the Difference: Shia vs. Sunni.
It’s a short and sweet breakdown on, well, the “breakdown” between these two warring factions … the religious history, the geographic details, and some of the current beefs that they have with each other. I actually find the comments below the article to be even more interesting, especially those with firsthand experience:
As a Shia, I too have no beef with Sunnis. We believe in the same stuff. Now just because we believe the successor was different doesn’t mean we should kill each other. Muslims embarrass me because instead of uniting like the other religions do, we are stuck kicking our own butts. Like a dog biting its own tail. Instead of trying to unite and take on Israel and the U.S.’s bully asses, we are still killing each other.
– Amir
As a practising Muslim myself I am ashamed at the politicizing of these issues. When you look at the common man, shia or sunni, they are all the same. Unless you are madly indoctrinated the common man doesn’t have a problem with sunni or shia. We are all humans, we all breathe air, drink water, and eat the same food.
The root cause of sunni shia fighting and unrest relates to a much bigger problem, the prevalence of fundamentalist elements motivated by power, money and weapons. This does not apply to Islam alone and we can see this in different forms in other religions too, though we muslims are condemned as fundamentalist and violence prone.
This is not helped in any way by the preponderance of violent radical imams and fundamentalis wahhabi strongholds preaching extremes and violence against everyone else. Unless we address this problem at the root, it is going to end in a very very bad way.
– Sulaiman
