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Sunni Religious Groups Form Council Nyt

Juan Cole 12/26/2003

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Sunni Religious Groups form Council

The NYT is reporting that Sunni Arab religious groupings met on Thursday and are seeking to establish a Sunni Arab leadership that could match that of the Kurds and the Shiites. The Sunni religious groups involved included Sufis, Salafis, and the Muslim Brotherhood.

I’m not sure such a grouping has much in the way of staying power. Salafis are fundamentalists (sometimes inaccurately refered to as “Wahhabis” by the Western press and by Iraqi Shiites) who despise mystical Sufism (which is about saints and shrines and visions). The Muslim Brotherhood has never been good about sharing power, and in Iraq is tiny. And, many Sunni Arabs are nationalists and not particularly religious. If they are religious, they are not necessarily Salafis, Sufis or Muslim Brotherhood. This group seems to me therefore to represent only a narrow sliver of the Sunni Arabs and to be unlikely to avoid squabbling among themselves very long.

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About the Author

Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Follow him on Twitter at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page

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