When friends Taqee Khaled and Hasan Hyder kick back at Coffman Union between University of Minnesota classes, they have plenty to talk about: classes, mutual friends, Muslim Student Association activities, life. Khaled, 25, a graduate student in epidemiology, and Hyder, 21, a senior majoring in economics, also frequently pray together. For the record, Khaled, who grew up in Minneapolis, is of Bangladesh Sunni heritage, and Hyder, who was born in India and moved to the United States several years ago, is Shiite.
Daily, the two are dismayed at the news from the Middle East, where Sunni-vs.-Shiite tensions have exploded into bloodbaths in Iraq and Lebanon, spawned incendiary talk in some Arab-language publications and turned Baghdad into a no-man's-land of dangerous, divided neighborhoods. This week has been especially bloody, with 340 Iraqis dying, most of them Shiite pilgrims on their way to a shrine in Karbala, south of Baghdad.
Such strife, Khaled and Hyder say, is the result not of ancient theological differences but rather of political and economic instability -- and of war. Vandalism at Shiite mosques and businesses in Dearborn, Mich., after Shiite Muslims celebrated Saddam Hussein's execution, led to fears that the strife in Iraq had crossed the ocean.
But no similar incidents have been reported in Minnesota, which has a much smaller Muslim population. "I grew up with Sunni and Shiite friends," Khaled said. "If the difference ever came up at all, it was most likely me asking, 'Oh, you're Shiite?
So what does that even mean?' " Hyder said that because Shiites are a minority -- 15 percent of the world's 1.3 billion and Minnesota's estimated 150,000 Muslims -- they are more conscious of the identifier.
"But I have lots of Sunni friends," he said. "Once in a while, we'll talk about the theological differences, but we pretty much conclude that they're not worth fighting about." "Shiites and Sunnis have almost everything in common," said Shah Khan, communications director for the Islamic Center of Minnesota.
"They believe in the oneness of Allah, pray five times a day, read the Qur'an and honor Mohammed. They're like twins raised by the same parents, a lot alike but still with some differences." Dozens of countries are largely Muslim, and in almost all of them, Sunnis greatly outnumber Shiites.
The exceptions: Iraq, Iran, Oman, Azerbaijan and Bahrain. Affiliations have shifted over time, so the lines are by no means clear, said Nahid Khan, a doctoral student in journalism at the University of Minnesota. The theological difference is about "who should legally fill the shoes" of Mohammed, who died 1,400 years ago, said Iraj Bashiri, professor of Central Asian studies at the U.
"Shiites believe that leaders with the dispensation to do various things have received special knowledge from Allah in the same way [Mohammed] was inspired," he said. "Sunnis say that after the prophet passed on, his legacy in the form of his words and deeds and the Qur'an should be sufficient." Muslims can go for generations without feeling the need to call themselves Sunni or Shiite, "but when political or social unrest and inequities arise, divisions form," Bashiri said.
In America, education and political stability ratchet down religious and ethnic differences, said Shah Khan. "People can get along here so much more easily," he said. "If American Muslims disagree about religion, it's certainly no more than what Christians might.
" Odeh Muhawesh, a Shiite imam and scholar from Plymouth, said that although he has heard of no debates in Minnesota erupting into fights, "discussions between Sunnis and Shiites are never easy."The situation in Iraq has made these talks more contentious," said Muhawesh, a software-company president who came to the United States from Jordan 30 years ago. "There's a lot of debate going on in cyberspace and in restaurants.
They might start out as theological, but very quickly they turn to politics, and people bring in Iraq, Iran, Lebanon. For instance, people might argue about whether the Sunnis in Iraq have kept the Shiites downtrodden for too long." A recent cyberspace discussion grew so heated that the parties met to cool it down, he said.
"We agreed that we can't resolve all our differences, but that we should talk these things over face to face once in a while. We're all American Muslims -- we should be able to discuss these things." Nahid Khan said she learned she was Sunni on her eighth birthday, when she received a set of encyclopedias.
While reading the entry on "Mohammedism," she found a reference to Sunnis and Shiites and asked her mother which one she was. It hasn't come up much since. If it comes up in personal or e-mail discussions or public programs, "differences are usually glossed over, minimized or described as not worth fighting over," she said.
"That approach makes sense for community cohesion and peaceful relations. But it can limit our community's understanding of its religious history and ways to deal with it." Khan said she'd like to see more nonpartisan education about historical differences.
"Having said that, I think the early history of the Muslim community has no bearing on contemporary conflicts, any more than the history of the Reformation and Catholic-Protestant wars 500 years ago has for understanding the Catholic-Protestant conflict in Ireland today," she said. Murad Mohammad, an Iraqi-born, U.S.
-raised student at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, said, "Honestly, until last year, I never thought about or was asked about this."The only people having heated debates about these are those on the extremes, and they're a tiny minority," said Mohammad.
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