(01-22-2017, 07:32 AM)727Sky Wrote: short video on why the Muslims split into two major factions and have been killing each other ever since.
While it's a cute little video, it has a fatal flaw. She is saying the Sunni - Shiite conflict is more about politics and power than it is about "religion" - which, while true in the western sense of what "religion" entails, it is NOT true in the Islamic sense of what religion actually is.
There is no difference in Islam between politics and religion - they are in fact one and the same, no matter what sect you subscribe to. Islam as a religion, dictates every aspect of life, from self to family to community to state - there is no aspect of life Islam does not control.
There are different ways to conduct yourself depending upon whether Muslims are the majority or the minority of any given nation but this doesn't make Islam any less of a political entity. The goal is always spread Islam (da'wah), convert non believers to Islam and then once a majority is reached run the nation according to Islamic principles and tenants, but until that is done, there are rules on how to live as the minority of whatever nation your in.
Factions (Sunni/Shia etc) disagree on reasonably minor things from the western standpoint, but in the end, Islam being a political entity as much as a religious entity barrs it from being able to be understood as a "religious" institution in the western sense of the word.
Islam (all factions) are more like Catholicism 1,000 years ago - fighting over who gets to be pope and rule the world. It took a major war over the course of a few hundred years and a LOT of dead bodies to extricate ourselves from a religion that was completely intertwined with politics.
What caused the war as it were to go in favor of a religion which was separated from politics was the Bible itself. Once people could read the Bible in a language they could understand they could see clearly that Christianity was never meant to be a political entity - but rather was a thing wholly spiritual in nature (those who misunderstand the writings notwithstanding)
That is a transition that Islam will never go through, because there is no reading and no way of reading Islamic texts which show Islam as anything but a religion that is inseparable from politics.
That by itself wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, but what Islam did was took the distinct "nation" and "political" concepts of Judaism then coupled it with the distinct proselytizing and spiritual aspects of Christianity and made a new perverted religion with the intent of ruling the earth - and it can't be removed because of simple misunderstanding, it's integral to Islam itself.