Every 'great' world religion--and there are basically five of them: Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam (in chronological order)--has been around long enough to have lost its initial simplicity. Over the centuries, due to historical factors of many kinds, each great religion has grown both numerically and in complexity. Like a tree, each religion develops distinct and separate branches that, while still part of the basic religion, take on particular and unique characteristics.
Take Christianity as an example. Over time, Christianity split geographically into an eastern and western branch that we now call Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. Then, 500 years later, the Protestant Reformation split off of Roman Catholicism in the 16th Century. Protestantism in turn, over the next 500 years, split into a number of clearly distinct branches and limbs, such as Lutheran, Calvinist, Baptist, Anglican, Wesleyan, Unitarian, etc., each of which has in turn split into hundreds of sub-branches. To say one is a Christian does not necessarily identify oneself very clearly, because to be a Baptist is quite different (to put it mildly) from being a Russian Orthodox or Roman Catholic.
The same thing is true of Islam. Quite early on, Islam split into three major branches, which are called Sunni, Shia, and Sufi (click here for more information on these branches). More recently, a 'fundamentalist' branch developed in Saudi Arabia called Wahabism (out of which Osama bin Laden and most of the 9/11 terrorists come, for example). Like the branches of Christianity, each branch of Islam has its own distinct way of interpreting the holy scriptures, its own doctrinal formulation, its own ways of worship, its distinct ethical code, and, quite importantly, its own way of relating to the political order. Like the example of Baptist and Russian Orthodox above, a Sufi thinks quite differently about Islamic matters than does a Shiite. Indeed, one of the basic sources of conflict and civil war in Iraq, for example, has been between the majority Shia and the minority Sunni.
So, it's not enough to simply identify a person as a Muslim and therefore think you know much about them. A Saudi Arabian Wahabist Muslim is quite different from an Iranian Shiite Muslim or an Indonesian Sunni Muslim or an American Sufi Muslim (like the Imam wanting to build the Islamic community center near the World Trade Center). Their views on many religious and political issues would not be compatible, let alone identical. (Likewise, an Italian Roman Catholic, a British Quaker, a South Korean Pentecostal, and an American Southern Baptist would all be, broadly speaking, Christian, but ohhh so different from each other!)
So you can begin to see how foolish it becomes to try to apply the term 'Muslim' or 'Christian' to someone and think that you are actually defining a person's religious or political beliefs.
Shalom/Salam/Eirene/Pax/Peace. (To be continued)
No comments:
Post a Comment