Can someone explain the Sunni/ Shia split, with a focus on modern geo-politics. Which countries subscribe to which branch of the religion, and which branch is moderate/extreme
>>565657
The original reason for the Sunni/Shia split is almost as stupid as the Orthodox/Catholic split, and has about as much relevance for modern politics.
Irrespective of branches, the religion is more extremist in the theocracies and more moderate in the secular states. Like, duh.
Have a map.
>>565695
>Israel neutral in the middle of this clusterfuck.
Alright who are the Jews going to be siding with /pol/ tells me the Saudis but I want a second opinion
>>565726
Israel's foreign policy is to destabilize the Arabs as much as possible. They have a working relationship with Jordan though, and they're not completely hostile to Syria and Saudi Arabia even though they fuck with them as well.
>>565726
>/pol/ tells you Israel sides with the Saudis
>/pol/ is always right
No need for a second opinion anon
>>565729
>Wahhabis aren't Sunni
>They're Protestants
You're retarded.
>>565737
It's amazing that you haven't choked on your own saliva yet
>>565745
Yes I'm sure OP is wracked by white guilt from spending too much time on /pol/.
>>565751
Islam is a violent religion that tells its followers to kill unbelievers.
What else is there to say?
>>565739
It's like if back in the day Luther started saying he was the Pope or the Patriarch.
Did you think I literally claimed they're Protestant Christians?
>>565745
>being Muslim means you're a "shitskin"
>being Christian means you're "white"
Look, it's a le "I can't be racist toward Muslims because they're not a race treating them like they're a race.
>>>/r/4chan
>>>/b/
>>>godlikeproductions
>>565657
Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and most of Bahrain's population are generally seen as constituting the Shiite crescent, though Bashar Al Assad is an Alawite, which is a heterodox offshoot on Shiism.
Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, UAE, Jordan, and just about everyone else in the Middle East are Sunni majority and opposed to Iran.
Both branches have extreme variations. Sunnis have Wahhabiism and the associated Salafi movement while Shiites do not have anything comparable in terms of of historical import, though they do engage in vitriolic rhetoric.
>>565657
The kind of Sunni and Shi`i fighting that broke out after the American Empire's Terror Wars is a relatively recent phenomenon and is based entirely on American enforced geo-politics and only justified through religious differences, which are themselves relatively modern since the "split" is based on historical interpretations of succession (ie: politics) and not on doctrinal disagreement.
Read "The Shi'a Revival".
>>565808
More importantly, both Saudi Arabia and Iran stone adulterous women, hang homosexuals, condemn apostates to death etc.
from what i understand, the sunni are the sunny kind of muslims
the shiite are the shitty kind of muslims
>>565695
I know the basic outline of abu bakr vs ali, it always seemed like a petty reason but sometimes minor squabbles lead to profound philosophical differences.
If it's as simple as Theocracies vs Secular State then that makes this easy, but is there no correlation between which states are secular and their branch of Islam?
>>565733
>not completely hostile to Syria
Yeah they've only been occupying a chunk of their territory for nearly half a century.
>>565737
Translation: The world is complicated and reading is boring, so I choose to believe this information doesn't matter and Muslims r dum.
>>565760
I_read_one_verse_of_the_koran_and_now_Im_an_expert_on_islamic_jihad_in_a_contemporary_context.jpeg
>>565771
That's apples and oranges m8. Time to dust off those history books.
>>565808
>someone not from /pol/
truly a relief. Thank you for your informative post. The line about vitriolic rhetoric is kind of silly.
>>565820
It is true that the Americans have played a central if unwitting role in flaring up sectarian violence in Iraq, but it's only half the story.
>>565820
Will do, thanks man.
Its hard to gauge how much of these problems are the fault of western influence because of how opaque foreign policy is nowadays, but it intuitively seems like we've been the major cause of a lot of this.
>>565829
Mohammad himself did it. It is essential for islam.
>>565657
The extreme one is whoever the Americans managed to piss off this week. Daily reminder that ISIS would not had happened if Bremer didn't fire all those troops.
>>565882
I guess most muslim countries suck at this Islam thing then.
>>565926
Yeah. On 600+ years of ottoman history it was applied only once.
>>565861
>but it's only half the story.
I'd say at least 3/4s. It's not intentional (the Americans aren't that bright and their invasion was an embarrassing blunder from the very beginning) but without the invasion and the violence they brought there'd be no counter violence that evolves into ethnic conflicts. Most accounts by Iraqis before the invasion is that Sunnis and Shi'is were in most places very neighborly with each other. I think this changed when, after the invasion, al-Qayda was able to get into the country and (correctly) point out that America is trying to take over and use all kinds of conspiracy theory to turn Sunnis to terrorism (as opposed to insurgency), resulting in the cluster-fuck similar to what happened more recently in Syria.
>>565936
Tell me something I don't know and can't get from watching a Noam Chomsky lecture. (I like Noam Chmosky)
I heard a really good lecture in October 2014 about the expansion of ISIS into Iraq, which was delivered by an Islamic studies expert who acted as a consultant for the writing of the Iraqi Constitution after the 2003 invasion.
He agreed that the US should disengage the politics of the region and that it blundered terribly by not taking the grievances of Sunnis under the Maliki government seriously.
But overall he spoke little about the US invasion. His main grievance was with Sunni and Shiite clerics who have increasingly encouraged radical sectarianism in the post Sadam period. I would tell you more if I could but he was absolutely convinced that religious figures (he's Muslim) shouldered the majority of the blame for ISIS's arrival in western Iraq. He also does not think it's possible to resolve this conflict without these same leaders spear-heading a reconciliation effort.
>>565967
No disagreements there.
>>565726
>nations don't have friends, only interests
Israel has an interest in not being destroyed, which means not letting every other country in the region gang up on it, which means making strategic alliances with a few regional powers. I guess the Saudis were the obvious choice after Iran went all death-to-America mode. But this doesn't mean the two countries like each other; Israel would gladly watch SA crumble, provided they took Iran down with them.
>>565846
>is there no correlation between which states are secular and their branch of Islam?
Not as far as I can see, no.
>>565967
>I heard a really good lecture in October 2014 about the expansion of ISIS into Iraq, which was delivered by an Islamic studies expert who acted as a consultant for the writing of the Iraqi Constitution after the 2003 invasion
Is there a video, or did you watch in person?
Shia = mostly okay to be around, especially the offshoot sects like Alawites and Alevis
Sunni = allahu akbar terrorist tier that should be nuked
>>566067
That map is the stupidest thing I have ever seen in my life.
>>566071
How so?
>>566031
I went in person but I found a video version of it
https://vimeo.com/114574367
It's really good but they cut out some of it.
>>566081
Thanks man, appreciated
>>566067
>>566071
>>566078
The categories are idiotic.
Here. I have another more specific one than this but it's over the file size.
>>566078
For one thing it's extremely lazy to group black Africans as one giant monolithic culture when west Africans have literally nothing to do with say Zulus. Likewise for Islamic culture given that Kazakhs would have more in common with Russians than the Leonese. Or how Bosniaks would have more in common with other Yugoslavs than anyone else.
It's full of grouping cultures together when it shouldn't, and the cherry on top of this shit-sandwich is "Tibeto-Mongol culture". Which is based on an ass-backward assumption that because they're both Buddhist they must be part of a similar culture.
Also what the fuck is up with assuming Latin is the classical language of virtually everywhere that had anything to do with Europe. Cape African being the most glaringly awful example of this.
>>566107
*Sierra Leonese
>>565657
>Can someone explain the Sunni/ Shia split
Ancient political feud that developed theology over time
>with a focus on modern geo-politics.
They don't get along
>Which countries subscribe to which branch of the religion, and which branch is moderate/extreme
>Shia
Iran
Azerbaijan
Bahrain, though the govt is Sunni
Iraq
Southern Lebanon
And minorities scattered about the place.
>Sunnis
everywhere else. 90% of muslims are Sunni
In broad strokes Shi'ism is less extreme but that doesn't begin to get into the variations within both sects.
>>566103
How is this map different? It shows the same areas as Sunni and Shia.
>>566107
Also the distinction between Greeks and Romans is greater than the distiction between Romans and South Africans.
And Latin America is entirely it's own thing, for some reason, despite speaking a romance language?
>>566127
Well, Sunnis can be divided too.
A lot of them identify with their madhab over being Sunni, or even Muslim.
>>566137
>>566107
Not the same guy, but I'll try to make sense of it. I think the map was based on Huntington's civilizations.
He proposes a black African culture as well as Orthodox and Latin American civilizations being separate from the Western one.
However, Huntington only sees one Islamic civilizations (however, you could argue that the Western/Orthodox split has the same relevance as the Sunni/Shia split).
Buddhist civilization is another one of Huntington's civilizations. I don't know if there actually is a feeling of "belonging together", so I think I'd say Tibeto-Mongolian is the same try to group some leftover countries together as it is the case with black African.
Latin as a classical language might be because of the church or it being the language of science until the 18 or 19th century. I don't actually know it, but I could imagine it would be the same in the Cape colonies?
>>566067
>What is Hamas, Hezbollah and the Madhi Army?
>>566202
Hamas are Sunni freedom fighters.
Hezbollah are Shi'a freedom fighters.
"Mahdi Army" are questionable if the death squad allegations are true.
How is the weather in Tel Aviv this time of year?
>>566210
>Sunni are all fanatical terrorists
>except Hamas, they're freedom fighters
Hello, /pol/.
>>566202
>what is hezbollah
they'll tell you when they're marching through tel aviv f'am
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFK2LXxcW4E
>>566223
I don't agree with the poster you originally quoted with the map. I'm a Muslim.
Taliban are freedom fighters, too.
Daesh aren't Sunni, they're Wahhabi.
Al Qaeda are a mixture of Wahhabi and Qutbi.
>>565745
>Using the word "cuck" in an argument
>>566078
He's butthurt that Saudis are marked as Sunni there.
>>565726
Allying with the Saudis makes sense because:
- it's big
- muh oil
- they are the Greatest Ally™ of the US in the Middle East, after Israel ofc
- Wahhabism/Salafism is opposed to all other denomination of Islam, it's pretty much the most fundamentalist, and it's inseparable from the Saudis, so it's your go-to denomination to fuck with any and all other Muslim groups and countries (except ISIS but that's a new thing). Yes, they do follow the 6 collections of Hadith as the Sunni, but reject the interpretations of the four schools of Sunni Islam (Hanafi, Sha'fi, Hanbali, Maliki)
- The Great Mosque and holy cities of Islam are there
/pol/ is correct there
>>565726
Shiites are competent and technologically advanced enough to pose an actual threat.
>>565726
Israeli here, the answer is neither.
We have a higher tolerance towards Saudi Arabia because they are a friend of a friend and don't particularly target us with their nonsense, unlike Iran, but they're still Muslim zealots with a backwards culture and society. We would never ever help them out in a conflict beyond selling technology. [And even then, that would be incredibly restricted]
tl;dr enemy of my enemy, ally of my ally, but still not really my friend.
>>568747
also I should add, IF theoretically Iran makes some real progressive changes to its society and attitude after this deal, we could see the tide turning in 20, 30 years down the line. Remember that Israel and Iran had a good relation with us [as good as a muslim country can have, anyway] before they went full nutty in the revolution.
