According to this BBC article, Muqtada Sadr is losing his thin veneer of religious legitimacy supplied by Ayatollah Haeri in Iran. Unlike Sistani, Haeri has been giving Muqtada support religiously for his activities. I’m not sure what to make of his about face, except perhaps to make it easier for him to be more active in Iraq, either directly or through other proxies. On the surface, this is an important development, because if every Ayatollah now denounces the attacks on US and UK troops, it theoretically becomes easier to isolate those Shi’ah, and to a certain extent Sunnis, who do carry out attacks. I’m hopeful that the attacks in Sadr city will settle down, and more importantly that the city itself will be less likely to serve as a launching ground for others in Iraq.
Related Posts
The Magic Bullet [Updated]
I believe that many of the issues facing the Muslim world revolve around questions of using intellect, and I believe intellect can only be exercised in an environment where knowledge is freely available and given. I believe education – not indoctrination passing itself off as the highest of human endeavors – is the basis for any level of positive discourse in the ummah. The Arab Human Development Report published last year came to similar conclusions, and the indication is that this year’s report will come to similar conclusions. If you look at what we call the “golden” periods of Islamic…
MLK Day
Many liberal bloggers I’ve been reading today have been talking about Martin Luther King Jr.’s anti-Vietnam War speech. While topical, I still think his “I have a dream” speech is the ideal we should be striving for. Everything else will follow from that. “Let freedom ring. And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring — when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children — black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics…
Panic Strikes – Lets Profile Muz-lums
Here we go again. Another terrorist bombing and another call to profile Muslims, or shall I say Moz-lums. Here is a great gem from NYC Councilmember Oddo: It is important to acknowledge that nearly every Jihadist who has engaged in terrorist attacks has been a young man who called himself Muslim – the common denominator among the recent bombings in London and Madrid, the 9/11 attacks, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the would-be millennium bombers, the destroyer Cole, the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Pan Am Flight 103, TWA Flight 847 and the bombing of the Marine barracks in…