Are The Terrorists Mostly Sunni or Shiite?

So Wahhabism is the Sunni extreme element. Is there a equivalent group on the Shiite side? Any thoughts on if they have separate mosques like, say, in the US and England. My eventual line of thought is to know if they will one day coalesce into one large grouping for political purposes eventually.

Well the interesting thing about the Shiites is that up until 1979, they weren't involved in terrorism in any big way. But once they took over Iran (and took our guys hostage), it seems like Shiites all over the Middle East just erupted. To me it seems like Iran is the source of all Shiite extremism - before the Iranian Revolution, they were a pretty quiet bunch.

As far as differences between mosques, my sense is that it depends on the imaum or mullah in that particular mosque. I think it's a lot more individualized: there's not a "Radical Mosques Union" or "United Assembly of Radicalism" or anything like that, there are just individual imaums who are radicals.

Unfortunately, there seem to be rather a lot of them, as we saw in London 10 days ago.

- ThreeTracks

It isn't the stock, it is more deeply historical than that. The different dominant nations come in at different periods, as historical "waves". First the Arabs conquer the near east under Omar, the great captain of the piece. Muhammad took only weak and disorganized Arabia in his lifetime - he was the lawgiver. Omar was the great general, defeating both Byzantium and Sassanid Persia. The capital was Damascus, Syria, and the ruling class and army were Arab.

The Shia-Sunni split dates to that time. The Shia wanted a hereditary monarchy in the line of descendents of Muhammad. Their particular prince was named Ali. The word Shia means "sect"; they are the sectarians of Ali. Sunnis had an elective monarchy of sorts instead - elders choose a successor to the previous ruler (called "caliphs", which means "successors" to the prophet). In practice there were power struggles and assassinations, with the royal line resting in the hands of the most powerful families. The Shia revolt failed and Ali was killed. The monarchy remained in the hands of the Ummayid family in Damascus.

The Arab ruling class grew soft. They had already conquered Persia and they were fighting as far afield as northwest Africa and central Asia, but the rulers themselves preferred a pension-roll life in Damascus. Initially the entire body of Muslims had been Arab soldiers, now there were many civilians, merchants, and idle nobles among them. The army in central Asia in particular became dependent on hardier men recruited from the edge of the steppe. The single most important district was Khorasan, in what is now northeastern Iran. That is where good cavalry came from, and soon a third of the army were Persians and some of the leading generals were Persian.

Succession crises were endemic - they had never really solved the political problem of peaceful transfer from one ruler to the next. One caliph divided the empire among his sons. They went to war the moment he died, and the one he had given Khorasan easily won the resulting civil war. The capital moved to Baghdad, to be midway between Damascus, the Arab capital, and Khorasan, the power base of the Persian component of the army. The caliphs divided to rule, balancing Persians and Arabs. This was the golden age of Islam in political unity and in learning.

It did not last. To deal with rivalries between the two nations, caliphs resorted to slave soldiers from the steppe beyond Persia - that is how Turks first came in. Turks were the "Germans" of Islamic civilization - the warlike barbarians over the frontier, looked down upon but always gaining through prowess and discipline. It took a century or so after Turkish soldiers were used to prop up the caliphs and make them independent of the Arab and Persian nobilities, before the Turkish soldiers were selling the empire to the highest bidder, Praetorian Guard fashion. The generals, "Sultans", became more important than the "king", the caliph (rather like Shoguns and Emperors in Japan, or "Mayors of the Palace" or prime ministers and kings in Europe).

This led to changes in governors that were not viewed as legitimate in the rest of the empire. Some figurehead caliph is sitting in Baghdad, a kept man of a Turkish warlord. Why would a Muslim in Spain or Egypt take orders from him? If it were a matter of Islamic legitimacy, clearly the slave-general-warlord had none. If it were a matter of raw military or political power, the local leader in Spain or Egypt had more of it locally, than the distant Turkish general could bring to bear against him. So the empire broke apart. Political revolutions in the center did not bring the periphery along. They went their own ways.

In Egypt, a Shia dynasty took power around this time, with their own notions of Islamic legitimacy. It was useful to a ruler trying to break away from Baghdad to shift to a different sect and a different form of religious legitimacy than the line of caliphs. A tradition developed about a kind of messiah they called the hidden Imam (leader). Shias revere authorities and had formed as the sect of a monarchic idea. Strange things happen when you lack all worldly power but believe in monarchy. These new ones claimed a line of rulers descended from the time of Ali, each of which had been an infallible guide and exemplar, but unrecognized by the world. Now the twelfeth Imam, the last one they claimed, had been taken up to heaven until the end-times, when he would return as a messiah. No more worldly Imams until the end times, therefore. In the meantime, follow exemplars, ayatollahs, "bishops". So called "Twelver Shia" founded the Fatamid dynasty in Egypt, as a break away state.

Meanwhile at the far end of the med in Spain, a dynasty called the Almohads instituted a form of "literalism for the people", with the court patronizing philosophy and learning, but strict Koranic literalism being required of everyone else, as a matter of law. Some literalists hold them up as a model, but they lasted less than 200 years, losing power after suffering several defeats at the hands of the Christians in Spain.

Meanwhile the Crusades took the holy land from the Muslims. A Kurdish-born general in the Turkish empire, Saladin, led an army from Damascus to reunify much of the near east, and then used that base of power to expel the Christians. In the process he destroyed the Twelvers in Egypt, leaving a new line on the throne, now Sunni. He also left a Turkish guard, the Mamelukes, which soon became the rulers.

Then the Mongols came and smashed most of the near east to atoms. Turkish warlords picked up the pieces in the aftermath. The Mongols did not take Egypt - the Mamelukes were able to stop them. The Turks who took power after them were no longer the Seljuk line from the previous centuries, now it was the turn of the Ottomans. The Ottomans arrived running from the Mongols and were at first given shelter by the Seljuk Turks, in Anatolia (now eastern Turkey). After the Mongol wave receded, the newcomers proved stronger than their hosts (a recurrent pattern in Islamic, and for that matter ancient history generally - noticed by the Islamic historian Khaldun).

The Seljuk Turks had been at war with Byzantium forever, doing well around the 11th century and not so well later. The Ottomans completed the conquest and took Constantinople in 1453, and made it their capital (Istanbul). They also took much of the near east. Egypt acknowledged their caliphs but was in practice independent. Egypt later became a protectorate of the French and British during the construction of the Suez canal in the 19th century, and by the end of the century was effectively a British colony.

In the 16th century a Persian general, Ismail, successfully broke Persia away from the Turkish empire and made Shia his state religion. The ruling line changed several times in fighting with Afghan warlords, but stabilized in the 18th century with the dynasty that lasted until just after WW I. Then a coup brought the Pahlavi family to the throne, where they remained until they were ousted in the revolution in 1979 (though occupied in WW II, facing attempted coups in the 1950s, etc).

The basic story is there has been no real political unity in the Islamic world in a thousand years. There have been occasional attempts to put together larger empires, that have sometimes held large areas at least nominally under one ruler. But locals find new theological tendencies to follow, new warlords rise, old tribes lose their military virtues, and the whole thing churns, tossing this or that religious sect, this or that ruling line, and this or that nation to the top.

This churning is the real cause of Muslim decline, coupled with growing hostility to rationalism and science from the late middle ages on. But to members of each particular sect, it looks like all the others are too concerned with worldly politics to band together as Muslims, and each is certain the fundamental cause of disunity is failure of all the others to agree with their particular sectarian formula for unified Islam. Bin Laden and company claim to explain all this history as due to religious slackness, insufficient literalism and discipline, and insufficient orientation toward external war as the mission.

Unify against the external threat, follow whichever leader takes the fight to the external unbelievers, purge all accomodators and compromisers and worldly people out of positions of power within Islam, and all will be glorious right and true again. That is the sales pitch. They've been losing because they haven't been doing what God asked, which is (1) to do whatever the Koran literally says and nothing else, and (2) to wage war against the unbelievers, while (3) deposing anyone who shows any sign of slacking on either score. If everyone would just listen to them, they could have one giant war with the west with God on their side, instead of all the petty infighting.

Naturally, what they actually get is more petty infighting, but with nastier weapons, no morals, brutal anti-civilian tactics, POed outsiders coming and messing with them in a major way, etc. Hardly a glorious success...

Wow, great info in a nutshell. Do you know the history of how Islam spread to SE Asia? Also, there's now a call to return the Taj Mahal to the Muslims since I guess it was a holy shrine to them at one time. From news reports, it seems every Islamic town has holy shrines. Is this under local control only or are all Muslims required to treat them as holy? Would some of them consider that the Temple area of Jerusalem predates Mohammed's visit there and why would they wrest away the site that is holy for another religion? What I'm saying is, hasn't there been an unbroken history of them taking over other religion's holy sites in the name of Allah? Is that in the Koran's teaching?

I'll address shrines and such rather than SE Asia. Into India I know the history, but farther east than that I know less about.

On shrines, most of them are the tombs of Muslims saints, typically sufis. (Sufi means "mystic", incidentally). Revering local holy men was a sufi tradition, and a way they made "syncretic" compromising with pre-Islamic religious traditions. Somewhat similar to the cult of saints in Catholicism, at least in some cases.

Purist Muslims and literalists in particular have a rather dim view of the cult of saints. It was a grass roots thing at the periphery of Islam. Ibn Tayymia in particular was an opponent of it, considered it a form of idolatry and what they called "associationism" - associating other figures with God, which they regarded as a heresy of the Christians in particular. Tayymia was an opposition figure in his own day, and it was his hatred of the cult of saints that got him thrown in jail for heresy. He objected to the ritual in the regular pilgrimage to Mecca that had the pilgrims pay their respects at Muhammad's tomb.

The Wahhabis took from Tayymia a loathing for the cult of saints in any form. The only allowed place of worship is a mosque, which must be devoid of any representational art (as idolatry - that is why they are all periodic tiles, no pictures - the only other allowed "decoration" is calligraphy, verses from the Koran written out in Arabic). This is not all that popular with sufi Muslims, but these days they tend to get their way.

They dislike the idea of any form of worship going on anywhere in which anything or anyone is associated with the worship, or with God, or is represented. This is not restricted to their own, but extends to anybody else's worship, too. Idolatry should just be stamped out wherever it exists, that is the belief of the Tayymia style literalists. Take over any pagan temple, cleanse it of images, make it a mosque - sure that is something they did a lot of in places they ruled.

As for the temple mount it is certainly a special case, as is the kabba in Mecca. Mecca was a pagan religious center in Muhammad's day, with hundreds of idols worshipped there, including the stone. He threw the pagans out and made it a center of Muslim worship. Before going to Medina, he had prayed toward Jerusalem. While in Medina he came into violent conflict with the Jews there, and changed the direction of prayer, toward Mecca.

Muhammad thought of himself initially as continuing a revelation first made to the Jews. He thought the religion of Abraham was the true religion and that he was bringing it to the pagans of Arabia. That Judaism as distinct from the religion of Abraham was a later development of it, that (he thought) had become encrusted with particular human additions related to one people, instead of being a monotheism addressed to all, as he took Abraham's religion to be.

He expected praise from the Jews who he initially thought of as a particularly pious people compared to the pagan Arabs around him. When instead they considered him a heretic he took offense, developed a strong dislike for the Jews he met in Medina, and persecuted them ruthlessly. The official line is that the Jews were given a true revelation but messed it up, interpreting it too particularly as making them special, yada yada. As for Christianity, Islam treats Jesus as a saint but a man, distorted by his followers who commit polytheism by associating a lesser figure with God.

All of which means Jerusalem is of course still extremely important to Muslims. But since Islam's take on them is less than charitable, they think they should be in charge of all the holy sites, and that the others' use of them contains impiety etc. In the late 7th and early 8th centuries the Muslim structures there were built, and all sorts of stories about the supposed importance of the sites were laid down. The dome of the rock is supposed to be the location of Muhammad's "night journey". But it was clearly meant as a challenge to Christians, and contains inscriptions exhorting Christians to forswear the idea of God having a Son and to worship only one God instead. Obviously it is also on the site of the former Jewish temple, destroyed by the Romans centuries earlier. The location of the al-Aqsa mosque is supposed to be the site of Abraham's near sacrifice of Isaac, a reference clearly meant to underscore Islam's claim to be descended from the religion of Abraham, with little historical basis.

So there is an element here that is clearly just aggressive, your religion is wrong, ours is right, the right one should be followed everywhere, especially in the places you think are important to be in your face about it and continually draw attention to our belief that you are wrong, etc. The same motive is doubtless also at work in things like fights over shrine locations in India. But there, there are two other motives. One, there are some sufis who actually care about their particular shrines in a religious sense. Two, there are other fundamentalists who hate that any so-called Muslims care about shrines, and about the too-religious sense they do care about them, and would rather they didn't. To the point of wanting them pulled down, in some cases.

I hope this clarifies things a bit. Please understand I am giving information here about what they think, not endorsing a line of it. Particularly the literalists, there is no reasoning with them, their minds are completely shut off. That isn't so with the less irrationalist of the sufis, with the more moderate of the Shia, with modernizers (thin on the ground but not zero), and even with traditionalist opponents of Tayymia style bigotry. Ghazali isn't Tayymia, Fazlur Rahman is not Sayyid Qutb. People who read and think like the first in each pair you could reason with; the second two, forget it.

Required reading. Thank you so much for your knowledge and insight. My hope is that the rest of the world, whether Christian or otherwise will wake up. Of course for me, it's all in God's plan.

The London bombings present a most interesting look at the problem. Here were 4 men, raised in London by families that had no connection to the terrorists nor ever supported any of the Islamic terrorists of recent years. These 4 somehow came under the influence of a few Islamic radicals in Pakistan and London and were in a very short time convinced that suicide bombing was a reasonable choice. It is very similar to many of the cults which were popular in the 1980s in the US, Jim Jones being the more extreme version. What is most troubling is the lack of outrage among mainstream muslims over what is being done in the name of their religion. The worst they can bring themselves to say is that given the persecution of Muslims around the world, this sort of behavior is understandable. With that attitude we are in for a protracted battle.