Can Islamism make the jump that Christian Democracy did in Europe to accommodate its minorities?
I'm not going to lie, the Shia-Sunni division really confuses me. I know it all started over bickering over Muhammed's successor for caliph, a position which now hasn't existed for several years. Do they have any serious disagreements in ideology that justifies this stupid proxy war?
It's even weirder considering how decentralized and non-hierarchical Islam is anyway. The Catholic-Protestant split made far more sense because you had a very powerful pope who was a threat to the authority of Protestant kings and heads of state.
But yeah, any Forum Mohammedans or other informed parties care to explain this divide to we Infidels?
My admittedly very limited understanding of this is that it could be compared to the division between the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox - it wasn't
really so much about whether the Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son, that is just one issue that became a neat dividing line between people who had a complicated set of religious and political differences.
