Does that means it doesnt still happen?
Sunnis and Shias
- Thread starter Dans
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Does that means it doesnt still happen?
Wrong again. Women in India have equal legal rights.
Nice of you to pick the adultery example (which was selectively used to punish women by the Taliban) instead of using something like the right to education, which was denied to women by the Taliban.
The same right which is given to them by Islam? You do know that men and women have equal right w.r.t education, right?
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jul/23/why-india-bad-for-women
Look at that equal legal right being practiced.
a poll of 370 gender specialists around the world that voted India the worst place to be a woman out of all the G20 countries. It stung – especially as Saudi Arabia was at the second-worst
"In India, women and girls continue to be sold as chattels, married off as young as 10, burned alive as a result of dowry-related disputes and young girls exploited and abused as domestic slave labour,
These line in particular stands out.
I'd safely say it's almost been entirely wiped out. You'll get the occasional case but that's bound to happen in a nation of 1 billion.
Come on, no one's denying Indian women are mistreated but comparing it to the Taliban? Women couldn't leave their homes under their regime!
The point I am trying to make by mentioning the backward areas of India where stuff like this happen is because thats exactly what the taliban is. Dont know why the original poster was talking about crimes commited by taliban as crimes commited by Pakistan. Most of us dont like the taliban and would rather see them eradicated.
Where do you think most of the suicide bombs explode? Not to mention the amount of damage they have done to our economy, reputation and our religion.
Don't you think not establishing a Jewish homeland might have helped?
I'm Muslim, so yeah I understand the rights that Islam gives women. These rights were not given to them by the Taliban though. Its ridiculous to argue otherwise.
And like I said, there is a big difference between women rights and crime against women. Just as an example, Saudi Arabia doesn't give equal rights to women, regardless of the crime rate against women.
Thats because taliaban arent muslims, no matter how they style themselves.
Since you yourself are a muslim, please show me where it says in the quran that killing of innocents is okay, that the reward for suicide is heaven. Taliban are a bunch of radicals who are using Islam to control their region and maintain power.
Taliban are Muslims by religion but they don't represent Islam.
I don't understand why you're getting so defensive. I don't believe that Taliban are anywhere close to being representatives or the actual face of Islam. As with Isis, Al Qaeda etc, they are just groups of people who have political ambitions and merely using religion as a convenient vehicle. As someone else said earlier in the thread, Muslims are the worst enemies of Muslims. Political greed continues to screw us over.
I wouldnt call them muslims when they dont follow the basic principles of Islam.
Am not defensive at all, I just got annoyed with the OP for assuming that taliban crimes are the same as pakistani crimes. We have enough faults already without people lumping us with the taliban.
I find this kind of speculation a bit pointless. Palestine would likely not have become the cause that it is; however it was and is hardly the only or even the primary issue driving conflict in the region. And to answer your question in zero-sum terms, it surely would not have helped those Jews lucky enough to have escaped Europe before 1939.
The fact is, by the end of the war most of the former Ottoman, Tsarist and Habsburg lands were up for grabs. The British found themselves in charge of an unprecedented situation in the Middle East, and forced to deal with a variety of competing nationalist movements naturally sided with the one they felt offered the most advantages. Their reasons included religious sentiment (many British officials felt the biblical appeal of Zionism), strategic calculations (a natural ally linking the African and South Asian empires), and old-school antisemitism (many British officials were convinced that Jews controlled both the Young Turk and Bolshevik revolutions and believed in establishing a Jewish state in order to win influence in Turkey and Russia). The Arabs had nothing comparable to offer that the British didn't think they could seize by force anyway.
One politically sophisticated national movement (the Zionists) looked around them and saw a dozen other groups scrambling to seize and hold on to what they could, and took advantage. Another less savvy (the Arabs) were completely unprepared for the break with the past represented by the end of the empire, and suffered as a consequence. In moral terms, not their fault at all, but history generally says "tough shit" - see the fate of the Ottoman Armenians or Iraqi Jews.
Fair enough.
Coming back to the original discussion about Sunni and Shia, my understanding is again that it was all a result of political ambitions again.
Yup agree with that, from what I have read the problem started with the followers of Hazrat Usman and Ali wanting power and creating a divide to achieve their goals.
If you think sati still happens in India then you really really need to do more research.
Sati has been banned in India since the 19th century (the 1880s). According to the law, women and men in India are equal. Women enjoy the same rights as men. They've had the right to vote since the start along with men. Can the same be said of rights enjoyed by women under the Taliban in Afghanistan till as recent as 2001?
It's hardly wild speculation, it's caused untold trouble in the ME. It's hard to think of any solution that could have been worse for the region.
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Shia say a lot of absurd things, Have you seen 'brother' tawhidis tweets? He is a real lunatic.
Really? You don't need a particularly creative imagination, you just need to have a look around the region to see that plenty of comparable or even worse stuff was going down in the same era, from the ethnic cleansing of the Muslims from the Caucasus and Balkans, the mass killings of the Armenians, the Greek-Turkish 'population exchange', never mind the various 'solutions' to the problem of ethnic nationalism that played out in Europe between 1914-1945, or going further back the fate of native Americans, Australian aborigines, etc.
Yes there were plenty colonial atrocities and geo-political tinderboxes but you don't need to artificially engineer a new one do you?
This is from a well reputed pakistani newspaper.
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'Artificial' doesn't really mean anything in a context in which everything is up for grabs, and in a region which had been ruled by foreigners for most of the previous thousand years. The very fact that the Ottoman Empire survived the 19th century at all was a product of what you would call 'artificial' European (British and French) intervention, otherwise much of the Middle East would have been part of the Russian Empire by 1914. What's your vision of a 'natural' Middle East?
As for the Zionists, they decided to be active players rather than passive bystanders, it was no more an 'artificial' or 'invented' movement than every other nationalist movement of the time. It was certainly unfortunate for the Palestinian Arabs to have to suffer the consequences (and it's perfectly natural/understandable that they've resisted it) but as the examples I've already cited show, their suffering and the subsequent conflict was hardly unique in the wider region.
The principles of self-determination post-WWI lead to a Palestinian state with about a 10% Jewish population, not a homeland. It's not a land grab.
"Principles" - that's all they were. In the real world, there was probably no time in history of greater population shifts than 1914-1948. And what we'd today call 'ethnic cleansing' was back then often considered the most moral solution to various problems raised by the dispersion of ethnic national groups, so much so that a Norwegian, Fridtjot Nansen, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for orchestrating the Greek-Turkish population exchange (that's about 1.5 million Anatolian Christians going one way, and a few hundred thousand Greek Muslims going the other, so modern Turkey and Greece would be vastly different - probably unworkable - places today). The principles of self-determination, applied perfectly, would have left a bizarre patchwork of states all over Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Unfortunately, the logical reaction/solution was a kind of ethnic/national 'sorting out' in which there were winners and losers. It's just a bit bizarre to me to zero in on one particular case and identify it as the main source of problems in the region, when I consider that conflict a symptom, not a cause, of much greater problems stemming from the impact of the modern political order in general.
To try and bring this thread back on topic, here's a facebook post I came across today which illustrates the absurdity of signalling out the I/P conflict over everything else:
There is nothing absurd about calling a Jewish homeland out as a unnecessary, artificial enterprise, which unlike some attempts at fixing the practical difficulties of self-determination, did not need to have been undertaken and has caused and continues to cause problems. Not even Kerry thinks it's the only issue in the ME but to suggest as you do that it's not a particularly big deal is what's absurd.
I haven't suggested that at all. I'm as interested in seeing a resolution there as anyone else (not that I'm in any way optimistic about the prospects).
I'm just giving some historical perspective/context. Other "attempts at fixing the practical difficulties of self-determination" at the time, as I've shown, were no less 'artificial' or unnecessary. Many were executed with much greater death and destruction. And like the I/P conflict, many have caused and continue to cause problems.
Couldn't you say the same about America or Australia?
I think you've just been diverging the argument and have been seeking to minimise the artificiality of the construction of a homeland, downplaying the continuing problems, ignoring self-determination as the key principle and not dealing with Israel as an egregious symbolic and practical example of post-imperial meddling in the ME.
It's so sad isn't it? Groups in the region appear to want nothing more than to not live with or share land with any other group. It's been like this forever it would seem. Unless each group gets it's own territory, I guess they'll be killing each other forever on the basis that you are not like me.
Here's a really good (but long) article on the role of the Sunni-Shi'a dynamic in the politics of the region, it's well worth the full read if you've the time:
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/re...d sectarianism cold war gause/english pdf.pdf
The crucial points from the intro:
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/re...d sectarianism cold war gause/english pdf.pdf
The crucial points from the intro:
Brother Tawhidi... Wow. :-/. I swear, in his heretical mind Ali (RA) was Allah Himself, Nauthobillah!
EDIT - The irony of his name when I first saw it, led me to believe it was a troll account made by one of Yaser Al-Habib's goons, but incredulously, it's real!
It's crazy init, his name is tawhidi but he's doing loads of shirk.
Definitely. People like him just make things worse for everyone. The worst thing is, we can't say he's a product of Iran's Mad Mullahs, or Sectarian strife in the region, he was born and raised in Australia! I really do wonder what sort of life he led in Oz for him to turn out the way he did...
The Sectarian Apocalypse
are they gonna hit themselves on monday then?
This is a response to points raised in the Hajj stampede thread. I'm not sure about the time limit on reviving old threads, but it seemed more suitable to respond here. I Hope I'm not breaking any rules.
Sorry to respond so late, with the game and all that. I thought it would be better to bring the discussion here, rather than side-track the Hajj thread.
It is a very complicated issue, but we do agree that it's basically political. I'll try to give my thoughts point by point.
Sorry to respond so late, with the game and all that. I thought it would be better to bring the discussion here, rather than side-track the Hajj thread.
It is a very complicated issue, but we do agree that it's basically political. I'll try to give my thoughts point by point.
- You're right, it's not an equal back and forth, seeing as the Shia are a minority in most states in the middle east. It's not however about a peaceful minority who are persecuted for their religious beliefs.The Shia have actively sought power, fought battles, historically been on the giving and receiving end of atrocities. They may be persecuted minorities in the countries you mentioned, but so are Sunnis in Iran. My point is both are guilty of bigotry, there is nothing to indicate that if and where Shia are in power Sunnis would be treated any better. Two wrongs don't make a right and both sides need to respect the rights of minorities and accept diversity.
- The animosity pre-dates the rise of Saudi Arabia and Wahabi ideology by a centuries. They are just the most recent pedallers of the sentiment on the Sunni side.
- ISIS is a complicated issue and as you stated, it is multi-factorial, but it's core arose from Sunni extremists; the Syrian rebels fighting the Alawite regime in Damascus and Al Qaida fighting the regime in Iraq.
If you really want to know the history of the conflict you have to go back to the 1400s after Muhammad SAWS died, some like @Kaos saying it's a conflict based on current regimes in Iran and Saudi can't be more wrong, it's way older than that, and if you want to blame someone for the current state of the conflict Hezboullah takes A LOT of the blame.
What a horrible game that was
But anyway onto your points. Yes, you're right about the Shia not being an entirely peaceful sect, as the various crimes committed by sectarian militia in Iraq and Syria testament that, but I still think its a hugely lopsided conflict in terms of committing and being at the receiving end of atrocities. Sunni extremism has had more of a toxic effect on the region than their shia counterparts, and other minorities have suffered more ostensibly under the former group.
We've seen some Shia groups carry out horrific crimes against Sunnis in Iraq, but on the whole we don't have extremist groups forcing minorities to convert by the sword, or carrying out suicide bomb attacks in churches. Granted, its possible that if Shias were the dominant sect in the region we may be seeing more of a heinous side to them, but as things stand I dont think its particularly fair calling this an equal 'conflict'.
ISIS are interesting one, namely because a lot of people ignore one element that make up their core - Saddam's Ba'athi loyalists. These guys are very rarely discussed and people make the assumption that ISIS are simply just a ragtag bunch of radicalised Sunnis - they have a lot more military and political nous than people give them credit for. A lot of their successes on the battlefield are largely down to ex Ba'athi generals who've decided to assimilate into their ranks after the Iraq's entire military infrastructure was dissolved post-Gulf War II.
Except I never said that.
I stated the conflict in Syria had taken a sectarian turn because of Saudi and Iran's meddling, but prior to that its a centuries-old issue that traces back to the Prophet's death.
But it wasn't resolved back then though and by what you're saying your disregarding the sectarian leaderships that was formed which made it worse like Alawities ruling Syria, Hezboullah in Lebanon, Iran, Bahrain, etc etc.