First, curse the darkness
In this case, the ignorance of these socalled leaders of the War on Terror:
My curiosity about our policymakers? grasp of Islam?s two major branches was piqued in 2005, when Jon Stewart and other TV comedians made hash out of depositions, taken in a whistleblower case, in which top F.B.I. officials drew blanks when asked basic questions about Islam. One of the bemused officials was Gary Bald, then the bureau?s counterterrorism chief. Such expertise, Mr. Bald maintained, wasn?t as important as being a good manager.
A few months later, I asked the F.B.I.?s spokesman, John Miller, about Mr. Bald?s comments. ?A leader needs to drive the organization forward,? Mr. Miller told me. ?If he is the executive in a counterterrorism operation in the post-9/11 world, he does not need to memorize the collected statements of Osama bin Laden, or be able to read Urdu to be effective. … Playing ?Islamic Trivial Pursuit? was a cheap shot for the lawyers and a cheaper shot for the journalist. It?s just a gimmick.?
At this point the territorial dispute got very, very ugly. ‘Ali’s followers, who were to become the Shi’a, saw Abu Bakr’s followers as the murderers of the Prophet’s entire bloodline. They fought, but they also went their own way, and some of them told stories about a grandson who’d escaped, a little boy who went into hiding to nurse his status as Imam and one day return. They found new ways to work out who was an Imam and thus worth following. There are various factions based on who worked this out in what way, most of them quite small.
Meanwhile, Abu Bakr’s crew, the eventual Sunnis, saw the Shi’a as cultish and obsessed with splinter theology and willing to give human beings divine authority even after the Last Prophet–which borders on the greatest Muslim sin of associating things which are not God with God and sets up flesh-and-blood people in dangerous positions. They went their own way, too, and happened to win out in a lot of ways in terms of temporal power and conversion, and far outnumber all of the Shi’a factions combined, today.
With the light being provided by Making Light commenter “Little Light”, fittingly enough. Be sure to read the entire comment as well as the thread it appears in and be illuminated.