The Baha'i Studies Listserv > Um.. because in spite of the direction the discussion has taken I > actually didn't want to rehash the entire history of Sunni-Shia > polemics on a Bahai list.
I just think that people should be able to read the words for themselves and be able to draw their own conclusions. I suppose it is arguably relevant since the > Bahais come out of the Shia side and obviously adopt many of their > positions. My main goal was to just point out that your initial > description of the Umayyads followed the Shia perspective, and I > wanted to give a contrasting view. Yes, it was from a Shi'ite perspective but also from a historical one. As you said, the Sunni position is not that these things didn't happen but that we should not judge Muawiyyih so harshly because he was a Companion. From my perspective this places a special responsibility on him, it doesn't give him greater license. > > In practice, at least in my experience, the term "Wahabi" isn't > limited to Hanbalis from Saudi Arabia. In practice "Wahabi" and > "Salafi" or "la-madhabi / without a madhab" tend to get conflated and > run into one another. Yes, I would agree with that. I had in mind specifically the movement coming from Ibn Abdu'l-Wahhab. which has its genesis in Egypt whereas the Salafi movement began in Egypt. I'm guessing that the movement Minhaj's relatives have embraced have more to do with Mawdudi's thought. If John Esposito's analysis is correct all these movements share a common genesis. By tracing the isnad of hadith scholars Esposito discovered that the Wahhabis, the Barelvis (whom the British mistakenly called Wahhabis) and even the founder of the Mahdi movement studied under the same scholars in Medina. These scholars were originally from India and had been exiled there by the Mughals for their opposition to Akbar's universalism. The terms tend to get applied to people who > claim to not "blindly" follow one of the four traditional Sunni > schools and instead follow the Quran and Sunnah "directly". That's one of the reasons they are usually associated with the Hanbali school. This school never accepted the premise that the gate of ijtihad was closed, and held that even the weakest hadith was preferable to the reasoning of the jurists. Wahhabists especially appreciate the thinking of Ibn Taymiyyah in this regard. But there are also liberal Sunnis who challenge the closing of the gate of interpretation. Muhammad Iqbal, for instance, who first articulated the idea of Pakistan was among them. > And the part which I don't think you are seeing is that a physical > /objective / dare-i-say-historical description of past events is > different from statements about their spiritual state or station. Granted, and as a historian one doesn't say that Umayyads are the Beast of Revelation because that is a theological and not a historical statement. However, the description I gave of what Muawiyyih did and its consequences *was* historical and fairly objective. > You make me wonder what Bahai funerals must be like: "Dearly beloved, > now that so-and-so is dead, this is what I REALLY thought about him" One generally doesn't give historical narratives at funerals. My point is that there is a statue of limitation when it comes to saying negative things about people. __________________________________________________ You are subscribed to Baha'i Studies as: mailto:[email protected] Unsubscribe: send a blank email to mailto:leave-534735-27401.54f46e81b66496c9909bcdc2f7987...@list.jccc.edu Subscribe: send subscribe bahai-st in the message body to [email protected] Or subscribe: http://list.jccc.edu:8080/read/all_forums/subscribe?name=bahai-st Baha'i Studies is available through the following: Mail - mailto:[email protected] Web - http://list.jccc.edu:8080/read/?forum=bahai-st News (on-campus only) - news://list.jccc.edu/bahai-st Old Public - http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] New Public - http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]
