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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
January 10, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
“What’s the Difference?” This is the first in a sermon series on differences between one historical, political, or spiritual perspective and another. In this installment, we’ll look at the difference between Sunni and Shiite Islam.
This text was created by talk to text, so any spelling incongruities, any sentences which contain ridiculous content are due to the fact that my telephone misunderstood the words I used. In addition to that, these are simply the notes for the sermon, not the sermon itself. Click the play button above to listen.
The sermon itself can be seen on the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin Facebook page. The podcast is also available on iTunes.
Sermon
Muhammad was born in what is now Saudi Arabia, in the town of Mecca, in 570 ce. His father died 6 months before he was born, and then his mother died when he was 6 years old. He lived with family, with an uncle, learning to be a merchant, and grew up as a member of that powerful merchant family. He married, had children, and used to go to the mountains to a cave on a solo retreat once a year. The angel Gabriel began talking to him on those retreats and the things Gabriel said, Mohamed memorized and told to a few people who started following him. The main thing that Gabriel had to say was that there was only one God. This was quite different from the culture surrounding Mohammad, where every rock, tree, and River has a spirit. Animism is the name of that religion. Sometimes people call it polytheism.
The first visit from Gabriel came in the year 610. Muhammad was 40. His followers began writing down the things he would tell them, and that is what became the Quran. After 3 years of quietly speaking to his followers, Muhammad began to preach in the town of Mecca in the year 613. He did not only preach that there was one God. That would have been fine with everyone, I guess. He preached that all the other gods and images of the gods were idols and should be destroyed. People did not receive this sweetly, and his followers began being killed. Muhammad would have been killed too, but he belonged to that prominent family and had privilege that kept him alive. In the year 622, Muhammad took his wife and children and fled to the town of Medina. This is known as the Hegira, and it is celebrated with rituals at the the first day of the Muslim year.
In Medina, Muhammad continued to preach and gained more of a following. Threats against the Muslims continued, but the new religion spread. Its is unclear how much of its spread was due to good ideas and how much was due to the followers of Muhammad behaving somewhat like an army, threatening and the lives of those who did not convert. All of the perspectives, I imagine, describe this process somewhat differently. The people of Mecca, losing prestige as Islam began to grow, launched an attack on Medina in 625, defeating the Muslims. 5 years later, Muhammad returned with an army of 10,000 followers conquering Mecca for good. By the time Muhammad died in 632, Islam had spread through the entire Arabian Peninsula.
Muhammad’s death created a terrible problem, he had not appointed a successor as leader of the Muslim world, which now numbered in tens of thousands of followers. Who was to teach the true meaning of the religion? Who was to hold the authority for the faith? He had been the father of many children, but only one, Fatima, had lived to adulthood.
The largest group of followers thought that the elite of the faith should choose the next leader, or caliph. This is the way the Pope is chosen and Roman Catholicism: the elite vote. This is what the majority envisioned, and they thought the best successor would be the father of one of Muhammad’s wives. This man’s name was Abu Bakr.
The second, smaller group thought that authority should be handed down through the family. They wanted Ali, Fatima’s husband, who was also a cousin of Muhammad’s. The bigger group won, so Abu became the caliph. Ali watched from the sidelines, and his supporters simmered. Abu got sick and died, and before he died he appointed another successor, who was the second caliph. The second one, also conquering more territory, including Persia, ruled for 10 years before he was assassinated by the Persians he had just conquered. Abu has not only appointed his successor, he had appointed his successor’s successor, who then took over as the third caliph, and ruled for 12 years before he was assassinated. So the first three caliphs, Abu and the two successors that he appointed, ruled for the first 25 or so years after the death of Muhammad.
After the assassination of the third caliph everybody agreed that Ali, the original choice of the people who thought it should stay in the family, should be caliph. . He ruled for five years, and everybody was reunited and it felt so good. Ali, the choice of the people who voted to stay in the family, appointed his son Hassan to be the fifth caliph. Unfortunately, he was soon overthrown by another person from the group that saw the elite should decide who ran the place. This split the group for good, and while the majority followed the rebel who had overthrown Hassan, the group that felt that the divine line should run through the family followed Hassan’s son, Hussein. Since they had wanted Ali from the beginning, they counted Ali as their first leader, and they called him an imam, Hassan was their second and hussein was their 3rd imam. The first three choices of the majority group had just been a delay.
The 7th Caliph of the majority group beheaded Hussein, and the minority group started following the son of Hussain. All of this happened in the seventh century, and this is at the root of the split today. The majority group are the Sunnis and the minority group are the Shiites. Both sides of this division are all over the world. The Shiites are running iran, In Iraq, Saddam Hussein was in the Bath party, which is a branch of the Sunni. The people who run Saudi Arabia are a fundamentalist sect of the Sunnis called Wahabi. ISIS is a Sunni group.
It seems to me that the main point of the split is the question of where authority resides Is authority conferred by the vote of the group or is it conferred by God through making the next leader be born to the current leader? This may seem petty but when you are searching for answers to questions like how to pray, how to eat, how to die, what to forgive, but not to forgive, how to keep your society in line, it becomes very important that your answers have the weight of authority. If you don’t believe that your leaders have been chosen the correct way, their decisions do not have that weight and society disintegrates.
This whole story is a lot longer, but I’m going to stop here for a moment and bring the focus to us. The Sunnis and the Shiites are living in a polarized world. Is there any polarisation in our world? The latest studies show that 33% of Democrats would be horrified if their children were to marry Republicans. It is 49% on the Republican side. What is that all about? Why does it sound odd when someone stands in the middle between the Republicans and the Democrats sees sensible policies on both sides? What does it sound strange when are Democratic politicians say that some of their dear friends at work are Republicans, and they are trying to work together? We are used to mocking one another, washing our hands of one another, imagining one another as misguided and foolish, and describing one another that way. We are not beheading each other though, which is good.
Most of us do like a simple framework from which to see the world and understand it. We grab on to one that works for us and we use it as a lens through which to interpret things that happen to us and other people. The lens tells us how the world should be, and how to get from here to there. For some people the way to get from here to there is to stamp out everybody who disagrees with our plan. This is seen by that group of people as a strong stance, unambiguous and pure. Other people think the way to get from here to there is to discuss, to compromise, to explore, maybe two use several different lenses through which to view things. Both ways can be helpful and both ways can be useless.
The philosopher Isaiah Berlin has a very famous essay called The Hedgehog and the Fox. He divides human beings into two groups. ( By the way I like people who say there are two kinds of people in the world, this is he divided people that have two kinds of people and those who don’t.) Anyway, Berlin says that there are hedgehogs, who stay in one place, and know one thing very well, and look at the world through that one decision they made, or that one over arching article of faith. For example, everything is about love. Or everything is about sex. Or everything is about power. That is a hedgehog view.. And there’s the Fox who knows many things and draws from many sources. It is not a bad thing to have one overarching truth. It is mainly limiting in that it can make you feel that other people need to get out of your way and let the truth be universally accepted. There are hedgehog people who go through the world understanding that the earth is the most important thing, and working on green issues is the most important thing. Everyone else should drop what they’re doing and work on that. If they don’t they are misguided. Other people say that welcoming the stranger is the most important thing and everything should be about that, or everything should be about getting rid of the racist structures of our society or everything should be about the class struggle. Mother Jones famously was against suffrage for women because she thought it detracted from the class struggle. Many of the women during times of the abolitionists were asked to let go of their work on suffrage because the work on abolition was more urgent.
There are hedgehog people and Fox people in all religions. Even within the Sunni and Shia groups, there are multiple varieties from fundamentalists to mystics to fairly secular folks. The problem is that the people with the guns, the people who are using their knives to behead other people are hedgehog people who think everybody who is not like them should be destroyed. Isis is a Suuni group. Sometimes when they stop a bus full of people they have questions that they ask to tell whether someone is Shiite or Sunni. You can sometimes tell by the names. If someone is named after Hassan or Hussein, it is likely that they are Shiite. Not always, though. Mohammed could be either. You ask them how they pray. Sunnis cross their arms over their bodies and the Shiites keep their arms more extended as they rest their hands on their thighs. You can ask where someone comes from, as there are Shiite regions and Sunni regions, Shiite towns and Sunni towns.
The reason Saudi Arabia supports Isis is that both are Sunni. This is why Iran, which is Shiite in its power structure, is helping the US, its enemy, fight Isis, because isis is Sunni. It’s really a war between Iran and Saudi Arabia that we are naively floundering around in the middle of. Because beheadings. And now our ally, our buddy, Saudi Arabia has just done a bunch of the beheadings of its own, horrifying us, but because they are our ally, we don’t say anything.
This is the start of a sermon series called what’s the difference? What’s the difference between Sunnis and Shiites? Now you know. Where does authority lie for us? Within the individual. It is the ring of truth that tells us what we follow and what we don’t. For Christians of most stripes, it is the Bible. For Roman Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Anglicans and Episcopalians, it is both the Bible and the church. Where the authority lies is not a trivial matter. Getting rid of the impurities, waging war against disagreement, this is not a trivial matter either, and we have trouble with it the same way everyone else does. We liberals have the same lust for certainty, the same intolerance of ambiguity, the same tendency to disrespect those with whom we disagree. Stay humble my friends. As I say often to you, that flush of self righteousness is the precursor to bad behavior. Start many sentences with the words “I could be wrong.”
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