The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future by Vali Nasr

Author:Vali Nasr [Nasr, Vali]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2007-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

THE BATTLE OF ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISMS

I vividly remember a 1989 research meeting with a prominent Sunni religious leader in Faisalabad, Pakistan—a city that would become a hotbed of anti-Shia extremism in the 1990s. My purpose was to conduct a scholarly interview concerning the history of Islamic politics in Pakistan. Once my host realized that I was of Iranian extraction, he began wagging his finger and accusing Khomeini of sowing discord (fitna) among Muslims and falsely seeking to undermine the authority of the Sunni ruling clan in Saudi Arabia, the Islamic religious heartland. My protestations of academic objectivity were of no avail. My host saw only a Persian, whom he associated with Khomeini and Shiism. This was a golden opportunity to give his “adversary” an earful, and he could not let it slip by. He ended his finger-wagging by citing a rather minatory-sounding passage from Chapter 105 of the Quran, entitled “The Elephant”:

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