A reader asks:
I often hear the Sunni/Shia conflict analogized to the Catholic/Protestant conflict, esp as manifested in Northern Ireland. Would you say this is valid or not? Why? I honestly don’t understand these intramural conflicts very well, so this is a genuine request for clarification.
This is a common issue that crops up. First, I would suggest that all reading Chris’ post on analogical reasoning. The main issue I have with the analogy is that it gives you information about the situation which you already have unless you’re ignorant in the first place. That is, there is a sectarian conflict which is common in the Muslim world based on religious divisions, that between Shia and Sunni being the primary one. But, this analogy is very coarse and tends to break down when you move toward a more fine grained model. During the 1980s when revolutionary Iran was in full flower Shiism was the Protestantism of Islam, taking on a corrupt and calcified Sunni order. Today, the Shia are the Catholics of their Islam because of their emphasis on clerical guidance and leadership. But there’s another fundamental problem: people don’t really know much about Catholicism and Protestantism and religious history in general, so they have no basis on which to project inferences based upon an analogy in the first place.
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