Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Professor Carole Hillenbrand: List of Publications
- Preface
- 1 The Origin of Key Shi‘ite Thought Patterns in Islamic History
- 2 Additions to The New Islamic Dynasties
- 3 Al-Tha‘alibi's Adab al-muluk, a Local Mirror for Princes
- 4 Religious Identity, Dissimulation and Assimilation: the Ismaili Experience
- 5 Saladin's Pious Foundations in Damascus: Some New Hypotheses
- 6 The Coming of Islam to Bukhara
- 7 A Barmecide Feast: the Downfall of the Barmakids in Popular Imagination
- 8 The History of the Patriarchs of the Egyptian Church as a Source for the History of the Seljuks of Anatolia
- 9 Genealogy and Exemplary Rulership in the Tarikh-i Chingiz Khan
- 10 Vikings and Rus in Arabic Sources
- 11 Qashani and Rashid al-Din on the Seljuqs of Iran
- 12 Exile and Return: Diasporas of the Secular and Sacred Mind
- 13 Clerical Perceptions of Sufi Practices in Late Seventeenth-Century Persia, II: Al-Hurr al-‘Amili (d. 1693) and the Debate on the Permissibility of Ghina
- 14 On Sunni Sectarianism
- 15 The Violence of the Abbasid Revolution
- 16 Nationalist Poetry, Conflict and Meta-linguistic Discourse
- Bibliography
- List of Contributors
- Index
14 - On Sunni Sectarianism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Professor Carole Hillenbrand: List of Publications
- Preface
- 1 The Origin of Key Shi‘ite Thought Patterns in Islamic History
- 2 Additions to The New Islamic Dynasties
- 3 Al-Tha‘alibi's Adab al-muluk, a Local Mirror for Princes
- 4 Religious Identity, Dissimulation and Assimilation: the Ismaili Experience
- 5 Saladin's Pious Foundations in Damascus: Some New Hypotheses
- 6 The Coming of Islam to Bukhara
- 7 A Barmecide Feast: the Downfall of the Barmakids in Popular Imagination
- 8 The History of the Patriarchs of the Egyptian Church as a Source for the History of the Seljuks of Anatolia
- 9 Genealogy and Exemplary Rulership in the Tarikh-i Chingiz Khan
- 10 Vikings and Rus in Arabic Sources
- 11 Qashani and Rashid al-Din on the Seljuqs of Iran
- 12 Exile and Return: Diasporas of the Secular and Sacred Mind
- 13 Clerical Perceptions of Sufi Practices in Late Seventeenth-Century Persia, II: Al-Hurr al-‘Amili (d. 1693) and the Debate on the Permissibility of Ghina
- 14 On Sunni Sectarianism
- 15 The Violence of the Abbasid Revolution
- 16 Nationalist Poetry, Conflict and Meta-linguistic Discourse
- Bibliography
- List of Contributors
- Index
Summary
At best, the term Sunnī is confusing, for it has been used, from the beginning, in special ways by those who wanted to use it exclusively for their own brand of orthodoxy. Some used it for those devoted purely to the use of hadith-reports (sunnah), without speculative discussion (kalām). It was used later, among those who were willing to accept kalām discussions at all, for the Ash‘arī or Māturīdī schools of kalām as against the Mu‘tazilī; it was used by sharī ah-minded zealots to distinguish sharī ah-minded people from the Ṣūfī mystics, and generally as the equivalent of the English ‘orthodox’
… (Hodgson 1974: 1, 278)The Problem
Forty years after Hodgson wrote these words, Islamic studies scholars still use the term Sunni often (1) to mean whatever is not Shi‘i (or worse, whatever is not ‘Alid); and (2) to mean something like ‘orthodoxy’, that is, ‘mainstream’ Islam.
Other forms of Islam are hyphenated Islams – Shi‘i-Islam, Sufi-Islam, and so on. Aside from the unscholarly taking sides that this usage represents, using Sunnism as a default term for Islam, and Islam to mean Sunnism, not only hides the diversity of Islam but it obscures the fact that Sunnism too has a history that does not merely coincide with the history of ‘Islam’. Sunnism is a religious movement and, as such, it has a history within more general Islamic religious history.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Living Islamic HistoryStudies in Honour of Professor Carole Hillenbrand, pp. 209 - 225Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2010