I’ve been doing a little reading about Islam while I’ve been here. It’s been a little frustrating trying to learn about it in Yemen, nobody I talk to seems to have any more than a superficial understanding of their religion. Worse, they have zero experience with other religions, that makes it particularly difficult to converse or to find common ground.<\/p>\n
I was reduced to picking up a copy of “Islam for Dummies,” Don’t laugh, it’s a decent enough introduction. I’ve also bought some books on Sufis and another on the various sects and divisions. I’ve learned a few interesting things…<\/p>\n
Muslims see Jesus as a very important prophet, but not divine. This I knew and I though was one of the basic differences between Muslims and Christians. Muslims do believe in Jesus’ virgin birth, that caught me by surprise. They hold Mary in very high regard (she is supposedly one of the three “purest” women of history), that too surprised me a bit. Here’s the thing, with just a few questions about the virgin birth, things get pretty murky pretty fast.<\/p>\n
If you accept the idea of Jesus’ virgin birth, it leads to some tricky issues regarding His paternity. If Mary was a virgin, then who impregnated her? She couldn’t do it herself obviously, it must have been God. It doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch to then consider God as the father of Jesus, or to put it another way, that Jesus was the son of God. I’m not quite sure how muslims wriggle out of this, it would seem to me that you either believe that Mary was not a virgin or you believe that Jesus was the son of God. What other choices are there?<\/p>\n
I was also struck by the seeming silliness of the basic Sunni\/Shia divide. The Shia believe that only members of the prophet’s family should be Caliph, specifically, only descendants of the prophet’s nephew Ali should be Caliph. OK, fair enough, but there are two problems with this. First, Ali’s decedents died out 10 generations after Ali. Many Shia get around this by claiming the existence of a “hidden” imam. The story with 12ver shia that the 11th “correct” caliph had a son disappear when he was 4 years old. That son is still alive and will return at the end times. Seems to be a bit of a stretch and a bit of a cop out made just to keep the shia way of doing things relevant. I dunno, it sounds weird to me.<\/p>\n
The bigger problem with the Shia\/Sunni split is that there hasn’t been a caliphate since 1924, and even then it wasn’t regarded by many muslims as being a true caliphate. Since then, the muslim world has gone very far away from a unified view of things and the chances of a new caliphate coming along to unify things is zero. So why still fight over whether or not Ali and his decedents were the right caliph all those years ago? It’s puzzling to me, and I need to do some more reading to try to understand why this is still considered important long after the disputed title has faded into history. <\/p>\n
I plan on getting most of the way through my sects book on the flight to Doha, I hope to have a better idea of things and be able to do some more intelligent research this time around in Yemen.<\/p>\n
I’ve been doing a little reading about Islam while I’ve been here. It’s been a little frustrating trying to learn about it in Yemen, nobody I talk to seems to have any more than a superficial understanding of their religion. Worse, they have zero experience with other religions, that makes it particularly difficult to converse […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/my-yemen-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/my-yemen-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/my-yemen-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my-yemen-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my-yemen-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/my-yemen-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/my-yemen-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my-yemen-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my-yemen-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}