Reza Aslan: prediction

Transcript context

…What do you think of the common criticism that Shi’a Islam ends up too obsessed with personalities? You have all these Imams. They’re made of light rather than dust. They command so much attention. It’s maybe a tension with the monotheistic emphasis of Islam. What’s your take on that? I think that’s an absolutely correct interpretation of Shi’a Islam. Sunni Islam, which is the majority version of Islam — about 80 percent of the world’s nearly 2 billion Muslims would call themselves some form of Sunni Islam. Sunni Islam tends to be focused on text and interpretation. The Quran and the so-called Sunnah, which is this vast body . . . I think Jews will know what I’m talking about. There’s the Scripture, and then there are tens of thousands of pages of interpretation on that Scripture. For most Sunnis, that is the sum and total of where authority lies, but not so with Shi’ism. You’re absolutely right. Shi’ism has had, first, a series of so-called Imams, and depending on what kind of Shi’a you are, you recognize a different number of Imams. Some recognize 6, some recognize 7, some recognize 12. Iran is what’s called Twelver Shi’ism, so they recognize 12 Imams. You said it right — these are different. They’re not like the rest of us. They’re infallible, they get divine authority. They have access to knowledge from a divine source that the rest of us don’t have access to. Now, of course, there are no more Imams left. They’re all gone now at this point. What that does is, I think, twofold. Number one, you’re right, it does become a religion about charisma and a religion about personality. You can very easily see how that can lead to someone like Ayatollah Khomeini taking over an entire country because he taps into that notion of a charismatic personality with access to some kind of divine knowledge that you need to follow. The flip side, however, is that Shi’ism can be much more innovative than Sunni Islam. It’s open to experimentation and reinterpretation because it’s not all about trying to figure out new ways of interpreting static text like Sunni Islam is. That’s all you’ve got, is text. That’s it, and people can interpret it in their different ways. Here, you have different sources of emulation, different people who have authority to interpret and reinterpret, sometimes in fairly radical and innovative ways. Khomeini — that’s what he did. We can talk about that later. That allows for all kinds of new ways of thinking about this religion. It’s much more malleable, let’s say. There are, I’d say, positives and negatives to that kind of religion. If there’s more innovation overall in Shi’ism, why do Sufi traditions seem so strongly tied to Sunni Islam? Because that’s an innovation, right?…

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