05-18-2004, 01:49 AM
Salaam Alaikum!
Unlike the Sunnis, who base their understanding of Islam almost solely on the Qur'an and the oral traditions (and the legal precedents offered by the various schools of law), Shias believe in Living Law."
The “the oral traditions,” in conjunction with some non-Muslim sources, are where I derive my understanding of the Quran (not to mention, my personal translation). I reject the example (Shia) that you postulated because it founds itself upon dogmatic belief, not on history. Without the vehicle basis of Islamic tradition, we posses sententious information and interpretation on the Quran.
[To give an example, Jihad. The Anthropologist Talal Asad best elucidates my point:
To begin with, although the theory and practice of the crusade were closely connected with the rise of papal monarchy (and afterward, with the sacralization of territorially based kingship), there is no parallel story in the case of jihad. Because there is no centralized legal authority in the Islamic world, there is no consensus about the virtue of religious warfare. In the first two centuries of Islamic history jurists residing close to the sacred sites of Islam (in Mecca and Medina) held a different view from those who lived in Damascus and Baghdad, the successive imperial capitals. They maintained that jihad (being stationed at the frontier far from the original sites of Islam) was not an obligatory duty for all Muslims, that there was merely a requirement that some Muslims undertake the defense of Islamic territory, and that in any case other religious acts had greater merit. In later centuries the legal theory of jihad came to be articulated in the context of a distinction between dar ul-harb (the domain of war) and dar ul-Islam (the domain of Islam) making jihad appropriate to the former. But from very early on a third juridical category was established, called dar ul-'ahd (the domain of treaties), that allowed for peaceful trade and social intercourse between Muslim and non-Muslim territories. In colonial times a further reformulation of the doctrine of jihad took place: Muslims living under a non-Muslim government (and therefore technically in dar ul-harb) were not to undertake jihad as long as they were able to practice Islam and allowed to maintain its central institutions. It is true that Muslim rebels sometimes invoked jihad, but they were rarely supported in this by most Muslim jurists (as in the recent attempt by Osama bin Laden to appropriate the ideology of jihad in his war against America). For the legal preconditions of jihad--it has been repeatedly pointed out--must include both the presence of a genuine threat to Islam as well as the likelihood of success in opposing it. ]
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I am not a sunni, I am not a shia. I know something of the beliefs of both, and when people ask what ISLAM is, the answer should be comprehensive, and they SHOULD appreciate that Muslims do not all believe the same things.