Re: Religion Thread: That's Me In the Corner...
I knew that there reportedly are two main theological "schools" in Islam, Shia and Sunni, I did not know that Sunni also had multiple "schools", Sufi, Salafi, Wahhabi.
This isn't a criticism, just an attempt to clarify. My understanding (admittedly very limited) is that neither of those divisions are "schools." School actually refers to something precise in Islam.
Shia and Sunni are denominations, like Catholic and Protestant. They divided over the succession to caliph when Mohammed died, like any garden variety royal succession crisis. The split has persisted and has grown over time into a full-bore political schism. It's also ethnic and national, with Shia concentrated in ethnic and national Persia (Iran/Iraq) and Sunni basically everywhere else. It's important right now because the Saudi theocracy is Sunni and the Iranian theocracy is Shia, and they are rivals for regional dominance. The majority Sunni regard the minority Shia as a weird cult like the Mormons, and the Shia regard the Sunni as lax backsliders like the Unitarians. They are Not Friends.
Sufi / Salafi aren't schools either -- they are methodologies. Salafis are dogmatic literalists, like Christians who preach Biblical inerrancy. Sufis are mystics -- you participate in the divine by putting yourself into an altered state, by say fasting until you see things. I
think whirling Dervishes are Sufis -- the idea is you take yourself out of everyday mundane existence and reach a different plane where you tap directly into the godhead.
Wahhabiism is the closest to what we'd call a "school," since it has a specific origin and a specific teacher in the 18th century (a dude called, no surprise, Wahhab). It's crazy tunes conservative fundamentalist. They actually don't let themselves be called Wahhabi because they think that's a trivialization of their beliefs -- they claim to be Salafi but the Salafis treat them like they have B.O. They're like a weaponized WBC -- the other Baptists want no part of them.
The actual "schools" in Islam are
really neat, because they trace back many hundreds of years and revolve around scrupulously methodical and precise interpretations of the Koran. They are called: Maliki, Hanbali, Jafari, Hanafi, and Shafii. They're like a cross between Talmudic scholars and Shaolin kung fu schools. They each take every verse in the Koran and refer to a rigorous interpretation by their founder followed by a whole evolutionary history of exegesis on
that interpretation. They even have a formal calculus for figuring out what percentage of the force of divine law a given statement carries based on whether it descends in an unbroken line from Muhammad, or whether it's been "watered down" by secondary interpretations like a game of holy telephone tag along the way.
So, Muhammad explicitly in Verse 41,123 says don't steal a camel. A case comes before a Jafari justice involving your use of bandwidth of a smartphone plan that wasn't yours. Well, it
is stealing, but the thing stolen isn't exactly tangible or property, so how does it fit under the verse? Jaʿfar ibn Muḥammad al-Ṣādiq, the founder of the Jafari school, says in the 7th century that "if you steal a man's candle, you have stolen not the candle, which is unimportant, but the light that the man would have used." The case seems very similar to that, but is there anything closer? Well, in the 19th century a
Hanafi cleric interpreted the verse to apply to tapping into a telegraph line and using it without permission. This seems to be like that too, but the Hanafi, not being Jafari, only counts half as much as a direct lineal Jafari interpretation. Verdict: guilty. Sentence: only chop off your thumb and ring finger. Next case!
You basically get a PhD from one of the schools and that makes you able to teach anywhere in the Islamic world. Think of it as like the law schools in say Bologna, Paris, Heidelberg, Salamanca and Oxford in the 13th century but instead of secular law it's Islamic canon law, and instead of Latin it's Arabic.
I'm not sure but I *think* you can be either Sunni or Shia in any of the schools, since that split is more socio-political and the schools are strictly religious-judicial.
