Muslims - Sunni v Shia explained

Ever since 9-11 the world has been subject to a sickening trail of violence carried out by Muslims. No matter what your race or faith and no matter where you live, these brutal attacks have created a pervading sense of fear, confusion and depression amongst us all.

The ‘Charlie Hebdo’ murders in Paris have been dominating the European headlines, but this week also saw approximately 2000 people in Nigeria murdered by the Islamic organisation Boko Haram. 2000 murdered by Boko Haram

Clearly Muslim violence is not confined merely to Westerners or white people, the fear of terrorism is not just for Jews and Christians; these horrors are impacting upon everyone, everywhere.

Islamic terror is often depicted as a manifestation of 'The Clash of Civilisations', the global antagonism between Islam and the rest of the world, and to some extent we can comprehend the attacks that have occurred since 2001 in New York, London and Paris when viewed through that prism. 

These attacks are acts of war, carried out by devout Muslims who believe it is their duty to fight for the implementation of an Islamic world, a caliphate where Sharia Law will govern every element of life. The people and institutions who were attacked in those Western cities were mostly clear and present enemies to that cause. 

But a very real confusion confronts us when we see pictures of Muslim children lying bloodied in their Pakistan school yard having been deliberately killed by other Muslims. How do we explain the horror of that? How do we comprehend Muslim against Muslim brutality in Syria? Just what is going on? So much of it seems to make no sense whatsoever. 

It's not just you and me that are puzzled. The leaders of the Western world also seem to have very little grasp on the nuances of Islamic politics. The ridiculous diplomatic leapfrogging that we have seen over the past 30 years is testament to this. “We like the Taliban, we hate the Taliban, we are friends with Saddam, we must destroy Saddam; Iran is the most dangerous nation in the world, Iran is someone we can do business with.” The stupidity of this and the difficulty we have when trying to understand just what it is that we are confronting comes down to the fact that hardly any of us in the West have any idea about Islam, other than it seems pretty scary, pretty authoritarian and has an unhealthy predilection towards violence.

In this article I will try to put Islam into some sort of historical and cultural context and a good place to start is by pointing out that this sort of thing is nothing new nor is it the sole preserve of Muslims.

In the early 17^th Century Europe was ravaged by the 30 Year War. Protestant and Catholic Christians fought cruelly against each other in order to see whether the rites and rules of the Holy Cee in Rome would continue to control our continent or if the future identity and culture of Europe would reflect a more independent Protestant Christianity. The outcome would be crucial to everybody's future. Looking at the current worldwide epidemic of Muslim violence, it can be very helpful to use this template of the Thirty Years War in order to make sense of these nonsensical times.

Muslims are mainly divided up between the majority Sunni Muslims and the minority Shia Muslims, in just the same way that Christians in the 17^th Century were divided up between Roman Catholics and Protestants.

Nearly all Muslims throughout the world are Sunni Muslims, The Shia Muslim community accounts for only 13% of the world’s Muslim population.

No matter what country they live in, the Shia Muslims are nearly always the minority population. An exception to this occurs in both Iran and Iraq where they constitute the majority population and where they also control the Government.

In Syria, though the majority population is Sunni, the Government is culturally Shia, however politically they are to some extent a secular Socialist-cum-Fascist administration, led by the Ba’ath Socialist Party. The ongoing civil war in that country is a struggle between devout Sunni Muslims and the Shia supporters of the Ba’ath administration.

The island of Bahrain presents us with a complete mirror image of Syria. In that small nation the population is majority Shia, though the undemocratic Monarchy that control the country are all Sunni.

Across the world many Sunni Muslims see Shia Muslims as pure infidels and not Muslim at all.

A branch of Sunni Islam is the Wahhabi movement. Strongest in Saudi Arabia, but hugely influential across the globe, this is a very strict and devout form of the Sunni faith and is broadly the chosen strand of Islam for most of the ‘terrorist’ Muslim organisations, including Al Qaida and ISIS.

The majority of Muslim upon Muslim attacks that occur, whether big or small, can be traced to this Sunni against Shia divide.

The most devout Sunni Muslims, those that follow Wahhabism, are totally committed through ‘Jihad' (holy war) to building a Sunni Islamic world and in their eyes Shia Muslims are a major obstacle to them achieving this aim; in exactly the same way that the capitalist West and the democratic states of Israel and India are also their implacable enemies.

In very general terms, where they do not control the Government, Shia Muslims tend to form the poorest and most disadvantaged sections within any Muslim nation and perhaps as a consequence, their political organisations often lean towards a variance of Islamic Socialist-Fascism.

For instance, the nation of Azerbaijan is majority Shia Muslim, but its Government is predominantly secular and its population not overly strict in their adherence to Islam’s religious tenants.

In Palestine, which is made up of a mostly Sunni population, there is a split between the Hamas organisation which is Sunni and Hezbollah which is Shia. Due to its Shia Muslim character, Hezbollah has a revolutionary Islamic Socialist-Fascist approach to its politics similar to that of the Syrian and Iranian Governments, both of which it is very close to.    

Most of the attacks that have happened in the West have been perpetrated by organisations that are from the Sunni side of Islam.  The horrors that we see happening in Iraq, Pakistan and elsewhere within the Muslim world tend to be Sunni upon Shia or Shia upon Sunni attacks.