{"id":6447,"date":"2011-10-07T12:11:04","date_gmt":"2011-10-07T12:11:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=6447"},"modified":"2011-10-07T12:11:29","modified_gmt":"2011-10-07T12:11:29","slug":"the-blind-leading-the-more-blind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/the-blind-leading-the-more-blind\/","title":{"rendered":"The blind leading the more blind"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael Totten<\/a> points to this piece<\/a> in The New Republic<\/i> which sheds some light on the cult of personality around the Assad family which has developed amongst the Alawites. Based on the piece Totten declares that the Alawites are definitively not Muslims. This is problematic on two levels. First, Totten is an atheist last I checked. Who is he to declare takfir<\/a>? For the unbelievers all organized superstitions are equally fallacious, and distinctions between kinds of fantasy should never be made into a precise science. Second, the argument that the Alawites are not Muslims is not as clear as Totten and his source make them out to be.<\/b> I actually lean toward the proposition that the Alawite alignment with orthodox Shia Islam is a political calculation, and that the sect does come out of the esoteric and syncretistic religious milieu which has long been submerged amongst the alpine fringes of the Near East. Some groups, such as the Druze and the Yezidis, have become definitely non-Muslim (the Druze in particular are post-Muslim, in that their Muslim origins are clear). Others, such as the Alawites, have shifted toward a more Muslim identity.<\/p>\n

But that’s neither here nor there. The New Republic<\/i> piece is littered with error or misleading assertions. You have to know something about the facts to catch those errors though, and most people simply don’t know facts, whether through laziness or stupidity. The author of the piece observes that “Yemen is a stronghold of the Sunnis.” This isn’t really true. Yemen has one of the highest fractions of Shia in the Muslim world, probably higher than Lebanon, and certainly higher than Syria. The current president of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh<\/a>, is by origin a Shia. Granted, the Shia of Yemen are peculiar in that their beliefs and practices verge closer to Sunni Islam than most Shia. They are the flip side of the quasi-Shia Alawites, being quasi-Sunni. But this subtly is totally elided. Then the author states that “It\u2019s very un-Islamic to read esoteric meanings into the Koran.” This is just not true!<\/b> From Wikipedia<\/a>:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

An esoteric interpretation of the Qur’an is an interpretation of the Qur\u2019an which includes attribution of esoteric or mystic meanings to the text by the interpreter. In this respect, its method is different from the conventional exegesis of the Qur\u2019an, called tafsir. Esoteric interpretations do not usually contradict the conventional (in this context called exoteric) interpretations; instead, they discuss the inner levels of meaning of the Qur’an. A hadith from Prophet Muhammad which states that the Qur\u2019an has an inner meaning, and that this inner meaning conceals a yet deeper inner meaning, and so on (up to seven levels of meaning), has sometimes been used in support of this view….<\/p>\n

Esoteric interpretations are found in Sufism and in the sayings (hadiths) of both Twelver and Ismaili Shi’a Imams.<\/b> In Arabic, batin refers to the inner or esoteric meaning of a sacred text, and zahir to the apparent or exoteric meaning.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Many of the generalizations people make about Islam qua Islam are actually about the non-mystical strands in Sunni Islam<\/i>. One can argue that this is the majority of the world’s Muslims (though the diffuse influence of Sufi strands softens this assertion), but very few deny that the Shia of Iran are Muslims. Esoteric readings of the Koran go back to the beginning of Islam, and as it happens the mainstream orthodox tradition turned away from it. But the tendency is preserved in marginal and minority Islam traditions…such as among the Alawites!<\/p>\n

The piece above attempts to give the reader a deeper and more textured window into Syria. I don’t have much issue here or there with their characterization of the Assad cult of personality. But a lot of the stuff I can double check, and which would be beyond the ability of the typical reader to notice, is shady.<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Totten points to this piece in The New Republic which sheds some light on the cult of personality around the Assad family which has developed amongst the Alawites. Based on the piece Totten declares that the Alawites are definitively … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[711],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6447"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6447"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6447\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6449,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6447\/revisions\/6449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}