We need to shed the arrogance that other traditions are inferior to ours, or ours is superior to others. To God, we are all the same, and he has given us the free will to figure living in harmony.
If we can learn to respect the otherness of others,without having to agree with others, then
conflicts fade and solutions emerge.
At least start the process this month, please visit every mosque, and learn to see the differences in a positive way, grow your heart as God has given you. If you are stuck in the idea that others are definitely wrong because your tradition is right, get out of that mindset, it breed arrogance in you, and arrogance is the root cause of all conflicts and evils in the society and God's wisdom is against it.
Ramadan is suppose to imbue a sense of humility in us, and Taqwa is all about conflictlessness, to be like God, and to be just, merciful and kind.
At least start the process this month, please visit every mosque, and learn to see the differences in a positive way, grow your heart as God has given you. If you are stuck in the idea that others are definitely wrong because your tradition is right, get out of that mindset, it breed arrogance in you, and arrogance is the root cause of all conflicts and evils in the society and God's wisdom is against it.
Ramadan is suppose to imbue a sense of humility in us, and Taqwa is all about conflictlessness, to be like God, and to be just, merciful and kind.
Test your prejudice, and if you wish to be free, make an effort to see the otherness of other. Visit a mosque a day, here is my experience if the last three years http://ramadanexclusive.blogspot.com/
The sword and the word
In the struggle between the two strands of Islam, the Sunnis are on the risehttp://www.economist.com/node/21554513?story_id=21554513&fsrc=sky|INews
Courtesy of the Economis
IT
SEEMED historic. Muslim scholars, 170 in number and representing nine schools of
legal thought (including four main Sunni ones and two Shia), gathered in Amman
and declared that, whatever their differences, they accepted the others'
authority over their respective flocks. Implicitly, at least, they were
renouncing the idea that their counterparts were heretics. Some called that
meeting in Jordan in 2005 the biggest convergence since 969, when a Shia dynasty
took over Egypt.
Many
of the globe-trotting greybeards who met there, and at a similar gathering in
Qatar in 2007, remain actively and optimistically engaged. But seen from the
outside, feuds between Sunnis, who make up roughly 80% of the world's Muslims,
and the Shia minority (most of the rest), remain savage and are, in some ways,
worsening.
In
conservative Sunni monarchies (especially those with restless Shia populations)
dislike and suspicion of Iran, the Shia bastion, is running higher than ever.
Theology intertwines with geopolitics—and an incipient strategic-arms race. Far
beyond the Gulf or Middle East, from western Europe to North America, Sunni
agitation (often Saudi-sponsored) is intensifying against the supposed heresies
contained in Shia teaching.
Belgian
police are investigating the firebombing of Belgium's biggest Shia mosque in
March, which killed the imam. The suspect they arrested claims to be a Salafist
(hardline Sunni) protesting against Shia backing for the Syrian regime. Grieving
worshippers chanted Shia slogans at the scene, eerily echoing far bloodier
incidents in places such as Pakistan (recent examples include a murderous
grenade assault on a Sunni demonstration in April and an attack on a bus in
February that killed 18 Shia passengers).
European
Shia-Sunni acrimony is part of a many-sided contest over the future of the
continent's tens of millions of Muslims, says Jonathan Laurence, a scholar at
Boston College. The religious authorities in migrant-sending countries like
Turkey and Morocco struggle to keep their people loyal to their own varieties of
Sunni practice: they see Shia Islam and hardline Sunni groups like the Salafists
as equally dangerous and insidious temptations for their sons and daughters in
Europe.
Strife
even reaches places like South-East Asia where few Shias live. Malaysia has
presented itself to the world as a tolerant Muslim-majority state. But it bans
the preaching of Shia Islam, with particular ferocity since December 2010, when
dozens of Shias were arrested. They say they were merely practising their faith
(which is legally allowed), not preaching it.
Yusuf
al-Qaradawi, a Qatar-based preacher often described as the de facto spiritual
guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, has recently kept up a barrage of verbal
attacks on the Shias. He is president of the International Union for Muslim
Scholars, a loose Brotherhood-inspired body designed to pronounce on issues of
common concern to Muslims. Founded in the friendlier climate of 2004, its top
ranks also include Shia clergy.
One
God, many arguments
But
Mr Qaradawi now attacks Shias for compromising the oneness of God (about the
worst thing a Muslim can do) by ascribing semi-divine status to the people they
regard as Muhammad's legitimate successors. Another accusation is that Shias
poach souls in Sunni lands.
Time
was when Mr Qaradawi praised the feats of Hizbullah, the Iranian-backed Shia
militia in Lebanon, as fighters against Israel. But in recent punditry he has
stressed the gap between Sunni and Shia beliefs and passionately called for
regime change in Syria, where, among other things, a Sunni majority is rebelling
against a ruling elite whose Alawite belief (see table) is a Shia offshoot.
Senior Shia clergy have deplored his hardening line. Mr Qaradawi, whose
utterances command attention from Marseilles to the north Caucasus, also backs
Bahrain's Sunni rulers in their anti-Shia stance.
Paradoxically
enough, one reason for the worsening in intra-Muslim relations is the declining
role of the West. At the time of the Amman gathering in 2005, Iraq was in the
grip both of horrific Sunni-Shia violence and of American occupation. It was
possible to convince ordinary Muslims (however unfairly) that America was to
blame for stoking this tension; and that, for dignity's sake, followers of Islam
should stand together against the outsiders' game of divide-and-rule. Now the
American occupation of Iraq is over, and hatred between Sunnis and Shias there
has a ghastly momentum of its own: the Shia prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, has
accused a Sunni vice-president, Tariq al-Hashemi, of complicity in terrorism and
forced him to flee. On April 30th he was charged with multiple
murders.
But
perhaps the biggest change is that Sunnis think they are now winning the global
contest. Seven years ago it seemed that Shia Islam, whether in Iran, Iraq and
Lebanon, was on the march. Hot-headed Sunnis who yearned to see a government or
movement that would confront Israel in the name of Islam had to find role-models
across the sectarian divide, in Iran, or in the mullahs' Lebanese protégés in
Hizbullah.
These
days zealous Sunnis need no longer look to swashbuckling Shias for inspiration.
The real action is unfolding in their own homelands, at least in north Africa or
the Levant. Nor need they look abroad for political ideology: the Arab spring
has established the Sunni sort of political Islam as a powerful, domestically
based force that has emerged from the underground or from exile. Rachid
Ghannouchi, for example, Tunisia's best-known Islamist, has returned from London
to become probably the most powerful figure in the land. Vali Nasr, a professor
at the Fletcher School of Tufts University in America and a former adviser to
the Obama administration, says that—rightly or wrongly—Sunnis believe that
Western sanctions are weakening Iran, and that the combined efforts of Sunnis
and the West will also topple Iran's only Arab ally, Syria. From a Sunni
perspective, these impending victories outweigh the travails of their
co-religionists in majority-Shia Iraq.
Intra-Muslim
relations are not universally bleak. An Iraqi adaptation of “Romeo and Juliet”,
featuring star-crossed love across the Muslim sectarian divide (rather than the
clan loyalties of Verona), has won acclaim there, and was performed at the World
Shakespeare Festival in Stratford-upon-Avon. Egypt's handful of Shias, a nervous
bunch, have declared support for a Muslim Brotherhood (in other words, Sunni)
presidential candidate. In campaigns for freedom and justice in the Middle East,
Sunni-Shia distinctions can melt away. “We are all part of the same struggle,”
says Maryam al-Khawaja, an activist from Bahrain's aggrieved Shia majority. She
co-starred this week with Sunnis like Manal al-Sharif, a Saudi woman detained
for defying that country's ban on women driving, at the Oslo Freedom Forum, a
lively get-together for foes of state oppression.
Historic
compromises between ancient rivals are most likely either when both sides
acknowledge a stalemate, or else when some outsider forces them together. State
repression may do that sometimes—but it is a sad and slender hope for those who
yearn for intra-Muslim accord.
