I love it too.
It’s probably too good to actually be true, but I prefer to believe it to be so, because it makes the world a better place.
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It’s really, really complicated. Bring in the Druse and the Ba’Hai and it gets nearly indescribably tangled.
In general - from 50,000 feet up - the Shia Muslims are what you as a liberal westerner might term the good guys, and the Sunnis are the fundamentalists. (This should really not surprise anyone who knows which sects the US government adores.)
But that 50K view is just terribly wrong, at ground level. Sure, the Salafis are Sunni, and the Nizari (Assassins) are Shi’ite. But here’s a trick question, that you should know the answer to without looking it up - what about the Sufis? Are the Sufis Sunni or Shia? If you have to look that up, you haven’t yet got enough background to begin to understand the intricate complexities… and that’s actually quite pertinent to Iran, since the Safaviyya were a Kurdish Sufi group that spawned the Safavid empire, re-igniting the Shia/Sunni conflict that had been extinguished by Ghengis Khan and re-establishing the Iranian cultural identity lost in the Islamic conquest.
What, that black on black violence is a thing? That Christians don’t fly planes into buildings? #BlueLivesMatter? I’ve forgotten which particular bigoted dog whistle he was tootling on now. 
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Can’t say as I remember those (not saying they couldn’t have come up). But to the extent there could be a “dog whistle,” perhaps it is more of a “medievalist” whistle since you seem to hear it the loudest 
No, it’s not too good to be true.
OT but years ago someone was leading a school party post A-level in North Wales (not me), and they went into a pub where, as so often happens, everybody switched to Welsh the moment the “English” walked in.
So the school party switched to Latin…and when everybody had decided what they wanted, the teacher went up to the bar. And ordered. In Welsh. He said that the reaction of all the locals as they realised was a moment that would stick with him forever. I have been told that Welsh is a much more “usable” language than, say, Irish - even though it’s now the third language in Wales after Polish.
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Absolutely. Regret cannot upvote more than once. Recently in the UK we’ve been waking up to the fact that violence against women is much worse than previously thought and, while not state sanctioned, has been extensively ignored by politicians and police forces. We - and that includes white male middle class people like myself - need to stop telling and facilitate listening.
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Exactly the problem! It’s so complex, and so little applicable to the lives of people like you and me, that it’s like trying to remember a million recipes for dishes you don’t ever cook.
I study theology and history a bit, and I can’t keep track of the details of Islamic interactions with Middle-Eastern cultures either.
Well, you can pop on over to Stormfront or any other violent racist skinhead forum and you’re likely to hear it a whole lot. It’s an in-group reference to Muhammad marrying the Mother of the Believers, Aisha bint Ali Bakr, at the age of six. The prophet made a point of not consummating this marriage until Aisha had reached sexual maturity and (by the standards of his time) he was a considerate and loving husband to her. This behavior stands in marked contrast to the behavior of Europeans and Christians of the same time period, and also to that of the Catholic Priesthood today, because of the respect and recognition accorded to all the prophet’s wives, and particularly to Aisha herself, who is an important religious author today.
Generally speaking, the next thing you hear from the mouth of someone who calls Mohammed a “child rapist” is something about Jews controlling world banking, or 9-11 being a hoax… I would not expect any such thing from @LDoBe, though. I think this is just a case of him not knowing that phrase is super popular with the swastika set.
EDIT: the answer to “are the Sufis Shi’ites or Sunnis?” is yes. It’s totally a trick question. They are never both, just one or the other. Most Sufi schools are Sunni, and most of the other Sunni are ashamed of that, they often consider Sufis disreputable, like Christians feel about snake-handlers. ISIS hates them! But historically, every time the Sunnis have tried to exterminate the Sufis it’s turned out quite badly for the aggressors. Many of the greatest generals of Islam were Sufi.
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Absent evidence, I think it is pretty over the top to link LDoBe to Stormfront. If I recall correctly, Muhammad waited until she was nine, when she supposedly reached puberty. It can be a mistake to compare and judge the morals of ancient peoples relative to our own, but it is not a mistake to do so when those ancient morals are being promulgated as the ultimate standard of morality for now and for all time. So, I’d say pointing out the marriages, and ages of consummation of those marriages, of Muhammad are relevant to Islam today.
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Look, if I say #AllLivesMatter people will make assumptions. I thought I was giving @LdoBe a somewhat snarky, humorous warning that he’d tread into poisoned waters, presumably without meaning to do so. Calling a historical event that was clearly legal consensual sex by the name of “rape” is a hallmark of anti-Islamic hate speech.
Well, then you are going to run into the same problems we had before. There is no irrefutable historical record of Aisha’s age at the time. Historical claims range from six to twelve, and of course modern claims are even more variant. And again the time period’s standards were not today’s.
But if you want to hold Muhammad’s behavior towards Aisha up as a standard of morality for all time (which would be a Sunni or Salafi type of claim, and not necessarily endorsed by other sects) you could do a lot worse. He initially objected to marrying a child to whom he was nearly an uncle, and had to be persuaded that it would be good for the ummah. Then he refused to have a sexual relationship with her, or remove her from the house of her parents, until she had reached a level of both physical and intellectual maturity that he felt was sufficient for engaged consent. Every indication is that she was happy and loved her husband and was well treated by him.
Consider the use of arbitrary age limits, as opposed to what happened to Aisha - is it OK for an 18 year old who is not physically or emotionally mature to be considered an “adult” under the law? Is it OK for such a person to be given in marriage, even if s/he is not capable of understanding what that means? We could do a lot worse than follow the example of the founder of Islam, and recognize that individuals matter more than laws that say old men can legally have sex with children. I certainly don’t condone underage sexual activity, but today’s laws that permanently stigmatize two underage children who experiment sexually are a whole lot worse than what Aisha did with the prophet.
EDIT: Hey, I just remembered something! I’m from Delaware, in the USA. If, as you said earlier, Mohammad had sex with a 9-year-old when he himself was 53, that would have been totally legal in the state of Delaware until the mid 1960s. Why was Delaware’s age of consent set so low? To match that of England.
@Marktech & @Enkita have both corrected me on this - Delaware’s law was probably based on Canon law, or possibly Scottish law (see below) and not on English secular law.
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A very good point. And if any UK or Delaware resident married and had sex with a 9 year old, I might not be able to call them a statutory rapist under the laws applicable to them at the time, but I would utterly reject them as being examples of moral virtue, and still consider their acts repugnant.
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Well, that is kind of my entire point. The use of the dog whistle “child rapist”.
Reducing complex issues to catchphrases can often result in unsavory bedfellows. The way you said it, there is no such problem.
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Really? I got the impression from reading Corbin that the Sufis were well-represented in the Shi’ite sect (but as an “interested lay person” my reading wasn’t particularly close).
I’m going to tell a story and make a comment that will probably anger everyone here, but what the hell – it’s the Internet after all.
When i was in school there was a bit of a scandal when the high school band teacher knocked up one of his students (I believe on a band trip, no less).
As was normal for the time, the situation was resolved by… him marrying her. They built a life together, and for all I know (if he’s still alive) they’re still together.
Today the situation would be resolved by her being stigmatized as a victim of sexual predation, and he would have lost his job and been placed permanently on a sexual predator list. The child, well, would probably just have to do the best it could, with a high-school drop-out mother and no real means of support.
Was what the band teacher did wrong? Absolutely.
Did the way it was handled back then have a better outcome for all involved than it would today?
IMO, I imagine so.
I think by sheer numbers, and certainly by number of distinct separate Sufi establishments, the Sufis are mostly Sunni. Certainly they were in the 19th century.
However, there were and are some very historically important Shi’a Sufi groups, such as the Kurdish Safaviyya mentioned previously, and the Sufi group who allied with the Ismaili Shi’a during the Crusades, whose name I cannot remember. 
That is exactly the problem with contestants wearing a hijab. There could be three chess-playing midgets standing on on another’s shoulders.
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The problem is that anecdote is not the singular of data.
There may be situations like this that work out well, but there may be others where in a few years the wife finds she’s married to a violent husband, all kinds of other possible bad outcomes.
In a small society where everybody knows everybody else’s business very well, it may be that people will get together and arrive at the best solution. In a fragmented society where that doesn’t happen, it is much less likely - and for many people today society is highly fragmented with a lot of mobility.
I can offer the opposite scenario - someone I was at school with who got a 15 year old pregnant. She wasn’t very bright, to say the least, while he was expected to do an engineering degree. When she was 16 they got married. He was not able to go on to university and had to watch as his younger brother got a very highly paid job in the oil industry while he had to work as a builder. His father was immensely disappointed in him - he was a senior manager in a large company. I lost touch when the last of my family left the area, but it was pretty clear that although they stayed married he had a lot of regrets.
In a perfect society not driven by tabloid values we would probably handle these situations much better, but then perhaps they wouldn’t arise in the first place.
Wikipedia:
In 1275, the first age of consent was set in England, at age 12 (Westminster 1 statute).[4] In 1875, the Offences Against the Person Act raised the age to 13 in Great Britain and Ireland, and ten years later the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 raised it to 16.
One of you is wrong.
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Probably me. I’m repeating what I learned in school… lemme see if I can track down the source of the confusion… I’ll be right back.
OK I’m back! Here’s what I found. For starters,
- either my memory or my high school history teacher may have jumbled up the facts a bit; you are quite right that Delaware’s law is not directly based on the English age of consent.
- In Delaware the legal age of consent was ten until 1871.
- from 1871 to 1972 the age of consent was seven, but the penalty was death.
- in 1889 a separate additional law was created criminalizing the procurement of children under age 15 for sexual purposes, again superseded in 1972.
- Although England’s secular age of consent was apparently never codified as seven, Scotland’s was.
- Scotland’s law was probably based on Catholic Canon Law.
- at least one historian says age of consent in Delaware was based on the age at which an English child could become a squire (or, presumably, an apprentice? I dunno). This seems kind of doubtful.
That’s all I got. Well except I just noticed Pope Francis raised Vatican age of consent from 12 to 18.
I think they’d still happen even if we had stronger cultural norms, nonetheless I still agree with you!
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I’d say that, no, that isn’t the problem.
Anecdotes are data. Data is just information. The distinction you are trying to denote is not Anecdote vs. Data, but anecdotal information vs. reliable, representative information. And, no, “data” isn’t a good short hand for the latter. Your words, and those of Ambiguity, are, for example, literally data in the Discourse BBS database, but that has no bearing on whether they are true.
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From the link:
Until now Vatican City has had the lowest age of consent in Europe despite decades of child sex scandals within the church, while sex between people of the same sex has been legal in the city state since 1889.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the Vatican City populated with men who are sworn to lifelong celibacy? And who pontificate ( 
) that homosexual acts are a sin?
Rather interesting timeline on those laws.
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Heterosexual age of consent in England was 12 from 1275, raised to 13 in 1875 and to 16 ten years later, where it has remained. It was never 9, as far as Wikipedia knows.
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Yeah, either my memory sucks and/or my high school history teacher was wrong. I have edited my post to acknowledge your correction.
(BTW Delaware’s age of consent prior to 1972 was seven, not nine, see above.)
