By Kevin Barrett, for Al-Andalus Tribune

Happy Islamic New Year! Today is the first of Muharram and the beginning of 1448 Hijri.*

The tenth of Muharram, falling on June 26 or 27, will mark the holiday of Ashura. For Shia Muslims Ashura is a festival of mourning, marking the martyrdom of Hussein at Karbala, while for Sunnis it is a complex amalgamation of mostly-celebratory activities and commemorations. The stark contrast between Shia mourning and Sunni celebration makes Ashura the one calendar date when the two interpretations of Islam seem to radically diverge.**

But Ashura’s mourning/celebrating opposition actually overstates the difference. Sunnis, like Shias, mourn the death of Hussein at Karbala, and revile his killer, Yazid. But most Sunnis don’t ritually commemorate that tragedy on Ashura like the Shia do. (Actually, some Sunnis, especially Sufis, have made mourning for Hussein a part of their Ashura observance, but it’s not done much nowadays.)

Here in Morocco, people sometimes throw water on each other as a playful way of celebrating Ashura. They call it رش (splash) and imagine themselves blessing each other with holy Zamzam water from Mecca. The custom may also be linked to the Biblical/Quranic story of Moses parting the Red Sea, commemorated on Ashura—though in that case it was the bad guy, Pharaoh, who got splashed.

Ashura illustrates how Sunni-Shia differences, viewed superficially, can look huge: One celebrates, the other mourns. But beneath the surface, the two traditions are not so far apart, since all Muslims interpret the story of Hussein’s tragic martyrdom in roughly the same way, with the main difference being the degree of intensity of feeling.

Since we’ve just entered the ten days leading up to Ashura, it seems a propitious time to reconsider the Sunni-Shia binary. I get asked about this topic constantly, but don’t really have time to do justice to it even once, much less repeatedly. So I thought I’d write something short and hopefully sweet to which I can refer people when they ask me about Shia-Sunni issues. And since naturally I’m leaving a lot out, feel free to drop questions in the comments section.

Everybody’s heard about Shia Muslims versus Sunni Muslims. Why? Because it’s in the news.

And why does the media hype the Sunni-Shia divide? It didn’t used to. After 9/11, the media screamed that “radical Islam” was the problem. That was the big Zionist talking point, designed to capitalize on the 9/11 Zio–PR stunt. Back then, nobody was talking about Sunnis and Shias. Instead, the “two kinds of Muslims” were the good Muslims—the ones who didn’t mind being invaded and occupied and looted and genocided—and the bad Muslims who did mind. The latter group was “radical Islam.”

Even Islamic Studies experts didn’t talk that much about Sunnis and Shias. When I taught Islam 101 courses at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Edgewood College of Madison in the early-to-mid 2000s, my students could be divided into two groups: 1) non-Muslims who knew next to nothing about the subject, and 2) a smattering of foreign Muslims who knew a lot. But nobody in the room—myself included—knew much about Shia Islam. As far as I could tell, all of my Muslim students came from Sunni backgrounds. And I too had gotten a Sunni-centric Islamic education, both from my Moroccan and American coreligionists and from the Islamic Studies curriculum.

Back then, most normal Muslims didn’t much care who was Sunni and who was Shia. That was especially true in the US, where mosques in university towns like Madison featured Muslims representing dozens of schools of thought, including all five of the major madhhabs or law schools, four of which are Sunni and one of which is Shia. (All five view each other as fully legitimate.) The fact that my friend from Saudi Arabia followed the Jafari law school, meaning he was Shia, was of no more importance than the fact that our mutual friend from Kashmir followed the Hanafi school, making him Sunni. Back then, the only people who much cared about Sunni-vs.-Shia were a smattering of religious scholars and fanatics.

Bush Jr.’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 set the stage for today’s media-hyped Sunni-vs.-Shia thing. Iraq’s population was a little less than two-thirds nominally Shia, one-third nominally Sunni, and the rest Christian. (The Jews had been driven out and herded to Israel by Zionist terrorists.)

Saddam Hussein’s Baathist (Arab socialist) government resisted religious involvement in politics. It included secular types from all of the religious groups, with Shias somewhat underrepresented. When the US overthrew Iraq’s government in 2003 and pursued “de-Ba’athification”—banning anyone involved in the previous secular government from holding any kind of authority—the void was filled by competing groups, many of which drew on sectarian religious ideologies. That sectarian factionalism was then hyped by the occupiers as a divide-and-conquer strategy. Their agents carried out innumerable false flag attacks by posing as Shias attacking Sunnis and Sunnis attacking Shias.

The Zionist-occupied propaganda media gradually shifted from “good Muslim versus bad Muslim” to “Shia versus Sunni.” They did so because their destruction of Iraq strengthened Iran and its seemingly Shia-centric (but actually multiconfessional) Axis of Resistance. Since the overall Muslim population worldwide is more than 85% Sunni, the Zionists have been demonizing Shia Islam in hopes of brainwashing Sunnis against the Resistance.

But the Resistance is not just Shia. Hamas—supported by Iran as well as by most Sunni Muslims (and Palestinian Christians)—is a Sunni group. So is Islamic Jihad, another Palestinian group supported mainly by Iran. The Syrian Baathists, also allied with the Axis of Resistance, are secularists. The Houthis are technically fiver Shia, but their interpretation of Islam is at least as close to Sunni Islam as it is to Iranian twelver Shiism. And if and when a Christian anti-genocide Resistance group arises, hopefully soon, Iran will support them too.

Iran chooses its allies not on the basis of religion or ethnicity, but on the basis of whether they represent the forces of justice or injustice. They view themselves as fighting the global Epstein class. Iran believes in fighting for justice and supporting the mustad’afin, a Qur’anic term meaning victims of injustice or persecution. They support Hamas and its defense of Palestine without regard to the fact that Hamas is Sunni, because Palestinians are genocide victims.

Zionist propagandists work overtime to convince Sunnis that the Islamic Republic of Iran is run by sectarian Shias. That’s a gross distortion. Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, specifically called his revolution an Islamic (not Shia) revolution, and his republic an Islamic (not Shia) republic. Iran’s official ideology occupies a middle ground between nationalism and pan-Islamism. There are plenty of Sunnis in Iran, alongside the numerous other religious minorities. In other words, Iran is a Shia-majority country, but it is not a Shia state. Its wilayat al-fqih ideology happens to have grown out of Shia Islam, but could conceivably be applied, with minor adjustments, in Sunni countries as well.

NICK FUENTES CONVERTS TO SHIA ISLAM?

So What Is the Most Important Difference Between Sunni and Shia Islam, from a Current Events Perspective?

All interpretations of Islam, or any religion, evolve historically. The details are quite complex. Rather than try to do justice to them, I’ll summarize things in a necessarily oversimplified way with the aim of shedding light on current events.

Sunni and Shia traditions diverge mainly in their attitudes toward political power. While Islam, like classical philosophy, clearly calls for rule by the virtuous, Sunni tradition is willing to accept relatively less-virtuous leadership and still consider it legitimately Islamic. Shia tradition, for its part, insists on highly virtuous rule, condemning anything less as illegitimate.

During the initial, formative centuries of Islam, as Sunni and Shia identities were taking shape, movements critical of unjust or oppressive rule arose under the Shia banner. Sunni Islam evolved to be, in general, more establishment-friendly, while Shia Islam tended to be anti-establishment. Naturally, when the Shia won and established their own dynasties, including the Idrisids (788-985), the Alavids (864-928), and the Fatimids (909-1171), those official versions of Shia Islam became more establishment-friendly…or at least friendly to their own establishments.

Interestingly, the “Shia century,” roughly corresponding to the 10th century c.e., occurs immediately after the 12th and final Imam disappears, or, in Shia terminology, “goes into occultation.” The Imams, all descendants of the Prophet of Islam through his daughter Fatima, are considered by the Shia to be divinely-appointed successors whose rightful rule has been usurped by the various dynasties that Sunnis generally accept as legitimate.

So the Shia basically believe that the divinely-appointed virtuous rulers, starting with the Prophet (pbuh), the Prophet’s son-in-law Ali, and continuing through the twelve imams (or the five or seven imams if you’re a fiver or a sevener) were unjustly shunted aside by less-virtuous, power-hungry pretenders to leadership. For more than a thousand years, the Shia say, there has been no divinely-sanctioned legitimate rule on Earth. Instead, we’re all condemned to suffer various degrees of misrule as we pray for the return of the hidden imam, Imam al-Mahdi, who in the End Times will join forces with Jesus to defeat the Dajjal (Antichrist) and the forces of injustice, and establish peace and justice on Earth.

During the past thousand years, most Shia, the quiescent ones, have preferred to stay out of politics, which they viewed as hopelessly corrupt. Others have viewed it as their duty to inject as much virtue into public life as the times would allow. The most important Shia dynasty of the past millennium, the Persian Safavids (b. 1501) and their successors, pretended to a modicum of virtue while fostering quiescent Shiism among their court scholars.

From non-quiescent camp arose the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his 1979 Islamic Revolution. Appalled by the tyranny and injustice of the modern secular age, Khomeini developed a program for re-injecting religion into public life, with the aim of instituting more virtuous rule. (Having studied classical political philosophy as well as religion, Khomeini understood, as sociologist Emmanuel Todd has been stressing recently, that the decline of religion in public life corresponds to a gradual, steady decrease in virtue among both rulers and ruled.)

Today the followers of Khomeini, the activist Shia, spearhead Iran’s religiously-guarded government and make common cause with everyone demanding virtue and resisting vice, oppression and tyranny. But Shiism overall is not activist. The quiescent Shia are still the majority. Represented by the Grand Ayatollah Sistani in Najaf, Iraq, among others, they support virtue against vice, but don’t call for direct religious involvement in governance, which they see as inherently illegitimate…at least until Imam Mahdi and Jesus return.

Keeping in mind that the majority of Shia are quiescent, I would argue that the relevant distinction for those seeking to understand current events is not Shia vs. Sunni, but activist vs. quiescent. Activists (whether Sunni, Shia, Christian, Buddhist, secular, or what-have-you) put great stock in trying to increase virtue in public life, promoting justice and resisting oppression; whereas quiescent types put less energy and effort into those activities, but may support them on an hoc basis.

Islam, in its beginning, was activist. The first generation of Muslims called for virtue in public life, established the first Islamic state in Medina, and followed a model of rule-by-the-most-virtuous (namely the Prophet). All Muslims recognize this, but often differ on how to apply the model.

Sunnis have generally tried to inject virtue into public life through fostering consensus across religious notables and relatively secular rulers. (By “secular” I don’t mean irreligious—in Islam all law, authority, and virtue fall under the purview of religion—but rather that Sunni rulers may not themselves be accomplished religious scholars, but instead consult with the ulama’.)

Today, بال أسف , the world in general, and the Islamic world in particular, are so corrupt that the Sunni tendency to pragmatically compromise with power, and accept less than virtuous rule as an alternative to anarchy, isn’t working. Instead, the Shia Crescent, the heart of the Axis of Resistance to genocide, has become the brave and steadfast heart of the Islamic Ummah.

As the repercussions of Iran’s stirring victories over the genocidal Zionist dajjal continue to unfold, I hope that Sunni Muslims will come to understand that they,*** too, need to demand more virtuous leaders and societies.

*Though it’s Muharram 1 here in Morocco, it’s actually Muharram 2 in many other places, due to the vagaries of the lunar calendar.

**Sunni and Shia observances of other holidays and dates feature minor variations, but nothing remotely like the stark contrast between mourning and celebrating Ashura.

***Though an outsider would categorize me as Sunni, since I practice Islam mainly through Moroccan-Andalusi Maliki jurisprudence and Sufi theosophy, I consider myself part of the “neither Sunni nor Shia just Muslim” movement.