"The Trostkyists of Islam"
Sunni, Shi’a and the “Trotskyists of Islam”The conflict now besetting the middle east is, like all major international conflicts, multidimensional. It involves not just one major axis of violence (Israel/Arabs, United States/terrorism, west/Iran) but several overlapping conflicts that draw states and armed movements into their arena. The major concern of strategists and analysts remains the polarisation between the US and its foes in Iraq and, increasingly, in Iran. But there is another important, ominous, conflict accompanying these that has little to do with the machinations of Washington or Israel, and is less likely to be contained by political compromise: the spread, in a way radically new for the middle east, of direct conflict between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims.
Many generalisations and simplifications accompany the whole issue of Sunni and Shi’a Islam. In the aftermath of the Iranian revolution, when Ayatollah Khomeini produced a radical, populist, third-world rhetoric that denounced the west and the “golden idols” or taghut who served imperialist interests in the region (among them the Shah of Iran, Anwar Sadat, Saddam Hussein, and the Gulf rulers), it was claimed by many that Shi’ism, the belief of around 10% of all Muslims, was inherently militant.
Unlike the Sunni, who had historically accepted the legitimacy of Islamic rulers, the caliphs, and who paid their clergy from state funds, thereby controlling them, the Shi’a refused to accept the Muslim credentials of their rulers and produced a clergy, paid for by the subscriptions of the faithful, that were closer to the people and so more radical.
I recall a conversation with Ibrahim Yazdi, the first foreign minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran (who after Ayatollah Khomeini’s death spent years under virtual house arrest in Tehran). As he sat under the enormous chandeliers of what had been the Shah’s foreign ministry, he exclaimed with pride: “We are the Trotskyists of Islam!”
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if thier is any opposing of islam do your research and thus when u have made up your mind on islam then go to the TV station pupose of life that explians things like islam, sports to news around the world say your opinions on islam infront of apannel og islamic scholars both muslims and non-muslims visit this website http://www.purposetv.tv thank u
Interesting quote there at the end, Pierre, since most members of the real Trotskyist party in Iran(a small but rapidly growing section of the Fourth International) were wiped out, like numerous other leftist groups, by Islamic state terror shortly after the revolution.
Kent
true trotskyites might prefer a matrilineal descent….”paid for by the subscriptions of the faithful, that were closer to the people” – sure, like megabucks donations to a church or political campaign are closer to the people.