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Looking at Refugees: Part 1 Clearing Up The Confusion Whether countries should allow Syrian refugees into their borders is something that will come down to each person’s opinion. However, a valid, respectable opinion on this issue needs to include multiple factors, one of which is a knowledge of why so many people are immigrating in the first place and what their belief system is once they arrive. One of the reasons people don’t talk about what’s happening with ISIS or Syrian refugees meaningfully is that it’s very, very difficult to concisely explain. For example: Let’s Actually Break This Down: Sunni and Shia • There is a split dating back 1,400+ years between Sunni and Shia Muslims. Although both sects of Muslims agree on many aspects of Islam, there is still some considerable disagreement. • Mohammed died without appointing a successor, leading to a split in the religion over whether its next leader should be chosen democratically or whether the Prophet’s blood relatives should reign. • The Sunnis believed the Prophet Mohammed’s friend and advisor Abu Bakr was the rightful leader of Muslims, while Shias thought that his cousin and son-in-law Ali was chosen by Allah (God) to rule. • Abu Bakr held the title first until his death, while Ali was crowned caliph fourth after two previous rulers were assassinated. • But the split became more entrenched between Sunnis and Shias over who came next: Sunni Muslims argue their interpretation of Islam follows the ways of Mohammed (the Sunnah), Shias claim Ali was the rightful first caliph and only his descendants could claim to be the true leaders of Muslims. The majority of Muslims across the world are Sunni – making up almost 85 per cent of Islam’s followers, while Shia Muslims remain confined to the Middle East. The Cycle Continues When Iraq was ruled by Saddam Hussein – who was a Sunni Muslim – for more than 20 years, he savagely oppressed Shia Muslims. After the 2003 war and fall of Saddam Hussein, Shia Muslims stepped into power, targeting Sunni Muslims through government death squads and torture. Sharia Law • Sharia law is Islam's legal system. It is derived from both the Koran, Islam's central text, and fatwas the rulings of Islamic scholars. • Sharia literally means "the clear, well-trodden path to water". • Sharia law acts as a code for living that all Muslims should adhere to, including prayers, fasting and donations to the poor. • It aims to help Muslims understand how they should lead every aspect of their lives according to God's wishes. • Sharia Law is a constantly changing and evolving process designed to try and ensure society lived intelligently and ethically. It was not written down in a legislative statebased form like today’s law, giving it the freedom to be able to be constantly revised and improved upon. This may be why there are many different forms of it in the world. Sharia Law • Sharia can inform every aspect of daily life for a Muslim. For example, a Muslim wondering what to do if their colleagues invite them to the pub after work may turn to a Sharia scholar for advice to ensure they act within the legal framework of their religion. Other areas of daily life where Muslims may turn to Sharia for guidance include family law, finance and business. • Sharia law divides offences into two general categories: "hadd" offences, which are serious crimes with set penalties, and "tazir" crimes, where the punishment is left to the discretion of the judge. • Hadd offences include theft, which can be punishable by amputating the offender's hand, and adultery, which can carry the penalty of death by stoning. • Some Islamic organisations have argued that there are many safeguards and a high burden of proof in the application of hadd penalties. Not all Muslim countries adopt or enforce such punishments for hadd offences, and polling suggests attitudes of Muslims to harsh penalties for such offences vary widely. Sharia Law • Depending on where you are in the world, “Sharia Law” could mean something very, very different. This is because Sharia Law emphasizes the importance of obeying the laws of whatever country you’re in. If you’re a Muslim in a country with a corrupt and/or cruel leadership, this may result in people associating Sharia Law with cruelty, even though the two don’t necessarily have anything to do with each other. • No national Muslim organization has ever called for Sharia to overtake the ruling of a North American court. It’s completely beside the point of Sharia and it’s not something American Muslims want. • And yet, during the run-up to the 2012 election, efforts to ban Sharia law popped up in at least two dozen states across the country ― a development that Gingrich, then a presidential hopeful, helped spur on. Many claim the initiative was a response to an imagined threat that was more about promoting anti-Muslim sentiment than about preserving American law. Sharia and Colonisation When the British the Dutch started entering India and Indonesia in the late 16th and 17th Centuries, they introduced the idea of codifying (translating and writing down) laws. The colonisers viewed Islam as a threat to the western system and civilisation they understood, and began thoroughly remodelling Islamic legal systems. The colonisers took out the interpretive core and fluidity (i.e. ability to change based on the circumstances present) that Sharia law depended on. What’s more, this process actually wound back progressive aspects of Islamic law to conservative Western standards. Sharia and Islamic law had bestowed women with rights and privileges that were advanced and equalising; when the laws were translated into colonising languages, those nuances were removed and the male-centric colonising culture prevailed, writing the rights women had enjoyed under Sharia out of the system entirely. The “Sharia” notion that a man is the head of the family to be obeyed without question was a post-colonial inclusion that completely changed the original intention of the Islamic ruling, and the western colonisers felt like Islamic law allowed criminals to escape punishment too easily, complaining that Sharia was “founded on the most lenient principles and on an abhorrence of bloodshed”. Bengal Warren Hastings, the man who changed Sharia Law forever Remember this? Now that we’re warmed up, let’s break it down: • Up until the mid-20th century, large parts of The Middle East were imperially ruled by the British, French, and Ottoman empires. Once they left, Arab leaders failed to establish anything like stable democratic societies. Instead, they imposed unpopular and brutal military dictatorships that prevented any real sense of national unity developing and squandered the region's economic potential. • The Middle East's progressive and democratic parties failed, due to a combination of incompetence and interference, to put together a viable alternative to the military regimes. • This created a large population of people in the Middle East who were disenfranchised and looking for a new form of politics. During and after the Cold War (roughly from the 1980s and on), an extreme version of Islam rose to fill that void: It appealed to an identity and a set of values that many in the Middle East shared and understood. Parts of it were based on Islam, but it also had the power to overthrow the military government that was oppressing them. Some governments — like Saudi Arabia's sometimes shaky leadership — had an interest in helping spreading this fairly hard-line, more brutal version of Islam, since a clear set of values made them seem more legitimate. Radical Islamism also got a boost from the populace’s general dislike of foreign powers such as the US and Russia. Not long before this the US had supported Iran's brutal leaders, and the Russian/Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had created understandable resentment in middle easterners. Leaders of this radical Islam movement were eager to support resentment towards other world powers if it meant more power for their movement. More recently, the 2003 US invasion of Iraq and the Arab Spring (democratic uprisings that arose independently and spread across the Arab world in 2011) threw the Middle East's normal sense of order into chaos, creating a vacuum in which different groups/sects tried to fill the void with varying degrees of violence. ISIS flourished in this kind of religiously polarized chaos (the most brutal group is likely to get the most attention), bringing us to the point we're at today. Understandably, not everybody is on board with this level of danger and instability, so many people (particularly in Syria) are trying to get out of the country and to safety.