The Shia'a religion is a minority within the Islam, and has a secret esoteric nucleus, the Twelvers. The concept does not end there, they maintain an even more secret belief in the Infallibles. Basically it is an apocalyptical - end of the universe - belief, similar to many others, like the one that distributed poisoned Cool-Aid in Guyana. As far it is known, Jews are not present in their imagination. The Ayatollahs of Iran may believe they are of those select individuals, yet their actions are of regular clerical dictatorships, like territorial and spiritual conquest. Since I started thinking on these things, I am always surprised how the West (Iran is the West too) never takes into account the Chinese, as if they were not the largest and most advanced portion of the human race. They are far away, but not anymore.
My family comes from the shia tradition in Azerbaijan (we have some jewish ancestry too, from Azeri mountain jews). Feel free to ask me anything if you have some questions.
ReplyDeleteSunni/shia division is historical and today has little significance. The iranians consider themselves garden-variety muslims and participate in other global muslim organizations, rubbing shoulders with Africans, Indonesians and Turks, almost all of them from sunni schools of jurisprudence.
As for what the historical differences were, the sunni were supporters and citizens of the caliphate. He could be any influential and prominent person. The shia believe in the twelve imams, they are not alive today, you are mistaken in that.
The imams were the line descended from Muhammed through his daughter Fatima, and her husband Ali (Cognate with the name Eli) ,who was his cousin. The twelfth guy went into hiding around the twelfth century. They believed he will come out soon, and as a direct descendant of Abraham, will bring God's fire on earth.
Tbh, this is of little consequence to anyone, even pious people probably don't give a shit about this anymore.
You are referring to people in the shuk, who is uninterested in theology. But the ayatollahs and their Sunni counterparts are passionately involved in religious disputes, after all that is their vocation and trade. There is a faction of ayatollahs that feel that governing Iran pollutes the purity of their religion and wants a secular government.
DeleteThose ayatollahs you are referring to are very obscure, maybe their channels on youtube get a few tens of thousands of views, tops.
DeleteThe hotshots, like Khamenei, are involved in politics above all. They say not a word about theology, they participate in some uniquely shia rituals, like commemorating the martyrdom of Hassan and Hussein, the sons of Ali, but the only people who find issue with that are some extremely marginal fanatics.
The government of Iran is pretty weird in general, they are culturally very conservative and religious, but support and participate in old school leftist politics. I don't think there is anything like it in the world, aside from maybe some Catholic Marxists in Latin America.
The government of Iran is pretty weird, yes. They may be conservative and religious, but the people - at least in the cities - is just as secular and "leftist" as any in Europe. They failed to impose religious habits on the population and the government stopped imposing them. The clerical ruling caste is a historical exception and will soon disappear. Persia is historically a friend of Judea.
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