Hi JD,

Quote Originally Posted by JD View Post
One last question while I think of it. Why does the concept of a civil war in Islam raise hysteria against all Muslims? I would have thought it would allow the general population to better differentiate the potential enemy from potential freinds and develop empahty for those opposed to radical Islam?
Sorry about the delay - I started to answer this morning, but had to run out for a choir practice.

I think the reason why using the concept of a "civil war" is so dangerous is that, as with any civil war, it is hard to tell who the players are. It is even more difficult when we are speaking about a civil war inside a religion rather than amongst an ethnic group. Differentiation amongst populations is hard unless there are some prhotypical or linguistic characteristics that can be used to differentiate, and they just aren't in existence here.

This war inside Islam, and, yes, it is a civil war, is not really along hard and fast lines which have had time to differentiate as, for example, the Sunni Shia split. So, while we can name and identify the broad schools of thought, Wahabi, Safali, etc., there aren't recognizable orthopraxic differences that would allow us to say "a Safali would do X and will not do Y", where Y is part of any fundamentalist (in the non-pejorative sense) Muslim's belief.

My fear with labeling it a civil war is that 99.9% of the non-Muslim population will not be able to identify an allies from an opponent and will, as a result, say "a pox on all their houses".

Marc