Does Al Qaeda consider itself Sunni or Shiite?
The answer can be found here at ABC News’ Brian Ross and & the Investigative Team site, along with seven other questions that will test your knowledge of Islam.
Inspired by Congressional Quarterly’s Jeff Stein, the “two choice” quiz gets more difficult as you go along, but take it and post your results. I’m happy to say that I had the first seven questions correct but sadly botched the last one. (I honestly did not know the answer to that one. On the others I was fairly confident.)
Stein is of course the reporter who started asking high-level officials in Washington basic questions about Islam. After they failed miserably, Stein wrote about it. And now he’s writing a book on the subject:
“Members of the intelligence committee, mind you, are paid $165,200 a year to know more than basic facts about our foes in the Middle East,” commented Stein in his column, which was published on Congressional Quarterly’s Web site in December.
“If you are a manager of a baseball team … how can you manage the team if you didn’t know the difference between the pitcher and the catcher?” remarks Stein.
The book’s publisher, Hyperion editor Zareen Jaffery, noticed Stein’s first articles and now considers the ignorance he exposed a key contributor to the ongoing problems in Iraq. “These issues go to the very basis of why our country is still there. If you don’t put any effort into learning it, how do you expect us to get out?”
Although he is now well-known for his pop quizzes, Stein expects his second round of interviews to produce the same uninformed responses. “But now they’re going to prepare for the interview?” we asked him. “If my showing up at the door will make them learn, it would be a huge capstone of my career.”
I will be looking forward to this book, and we should all be grateful to reporters like Stein for asking questions that have huge implications for our nation. As Jimmy Carter said about the hostage-takers in Iran nearly 30 years ago, we can’t always control people bent on hurting America abroad. But reporters can at least start to help us understand them.
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Comments (29) |
February 15, 2007, at 5:22 pm
Eight for eight.
February 15, 2007, at 5:36 pm
Eight for eight. Not too hard if you pay close attention to news from Iraq or the Middle East.
February 15, 2007, at 5:57 pm
8 out of 8.
Call me cynical, but it seems that they are paid for getting elected and for running for re-election. Knowing something about what they’re doing—that’s optional.
February 15, 2007, at 6:55 pm
8/8. Can I have my $165,200 now?
February 15, 2007, at 6:59 pm
8 for 8. You know… sending the Get Religion readership over to the survey is probably going to skew the results a bit. I’m not sure the readership here is really representative of mainstreet America.
February 15, 2007, at 7:08 pm
I started to get all cocky about getting eight out of eight, until I saw that everybody else here had too.
February 15, 2007, at 7:54 pm
Seven out eight.
February 15, 2007, at 7:55 pm
Ditto for me. The questions weren’t terribly challenging for anyone with a nodding acquaintance with the Middle East.
February 15, 2007, at 8:57 pm
Eight for eight. Perhaps this blog and its readers collectively should be named as advisers to the committee.
February 15, 2007, at 9:50 pm
eight for eight…it’s all about relationships - right? hmmm….
February 15, 2007, at 10:03 pm
8/8 But here’s the sad thing — or the job security thing: I bet many of our readers would not do nearly as well. It’s a good reminder, btw, of places where it might be useful to drop as Sunni/Shia reference when we write. As in: “Saudi Arabia, overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim,…” where once just a “Muslim” ID would have been considered sufficient…
February 15, 2007, at 10:31 pm
[…] Well, here’s a quick quiz on that theme. Its pretty easy. Anyone who can’t get 8 out of 8 should certaintly not be working in counterterrorism, military intelligence or security. Or writing on anything remotedly related to Islam. Filed under News, Islam by Popovich at 1:30 pm EST (GMT+10) Permalink • Print • Email • Comment […]
February 15, 2007, at 11:36 pm
8/8
After all that time in Fubaristan, I would have been mightly ashamed to come in less than that. It ‘twern’t that hard.
The sad thing is, millions of Americans who can name all 5 (6?) (7?) of the potential daddies of Anna Nichole Smith’s Children wouldn’t get a pass on this… why can’t the media do a little more education and little less exploitation?
February 16, 2007, at 12:10 am
So like all of you smartypants, I got eight correct (although I had to make an educated guess on the last one.
If it makes non-perfect readers feel better, I have a friend who somehow got only one right and other friends whose scores were four and six.
February 16, 2007, at 12:53 am
8/8.
But if you want a harder test about Islam, then I’ll ask a question that was in the news today - in what state is there an issue with Muslims using the Quran to take the oath before testifying?
Many web sites have the answer to the state question but here’s one: http://www.aclu.org/religion/tencomm/28002prs20070116.html
February 16, 2007, at 1:09 am
8/8. The PoliSci B.A. in me heaves a sigh of relief.
February 16, 2007, at 4:38 am
8/8 (or rather 7/7 plus 1/1)
However, this quiz does not test knowledge of Islam but simply the ability to correctly identify something as Sunni or Shia. And the Saudi-Arabia question is actually a bit dodgy, but why hesistate when you can paint something black and white.
February 16, 2007, at 5:53 am
4/8. Looks like I’m the only one here qualified to work for the intelligence committee…
February 16, 2007, at 9:19 am
I’m in Eli’s league — and the rest of Congress. Actually, once I made my first mistake, it shook my confidence and I started second guessing myself. The old advice about going with your first answer is right…
Good quiz.
February 16, 2007, at 2:16 pm
8/8 Either I’m a world-historical genius or I read the papers.
February 16, 2007, at 2:20 pm
8 right.
The quiz actually skews ITSELF a bit. Sadr, the subject of one quesion, is mentioned in the response to an earlier question. And on THAT one I made an “informed guess” based on which division pays more attention to the CONCEPT of the Mahdi.
Notes that if it was simply assigning random Moslem countries as either/or, “Sunni” would be the safe guess every time.
And, oh, I feel uncomfortable about calling a Shia a “Shiite”. It’s like the Trotskyists and the Trotskyites. If you want me to defend this, I will say that unlike the Mutazilites and Zaidites and Ithnasharites, it is not a translation of “Shiiyya”—- at least I have never countered such a word.
February 16, 2007, at 3:05 pm
What challenges the intelligence committee, and the intelligence of all of us, is the similarity, to the untrained ear, between “Shiite” and “Sunni.” It wouldn’t be so hard if Shiite and Sunni didn’t both start with S.
February 16, 2007, at 3:06 pm
7 of 8. I got the question about Hezbollah wrong. I have no background in foreign relations or the study of Islam. I did study history in college; my focus was E. Europe/USSR, though, and I never took any courses on Islamic history.
If I can get 7 of 8 correct, surely our foreign relations and intelligence “experts” ought to be able to do the same.
It’s one thing to not have a good understanding of the theological differences between the Sunni/Shia branches of Islam (obviously the lack of knowledge here does cause differences), but it’s inexcusable that our foreign relations “experts” don’t even know which organizations or countries belong to which branch.
February 17, 2007, at 2:20 pm
3/8…but im Canadian and im not subjected to daily CNN injections of fear-oganda.
February 18, 2007, at 9:26 am
I got 7 of 8 correct - bunged up “Al Mahdi Army”.
Spoilers:
If you know a few facts, you can derive the correct answers: Iran is Shiite, most other countries are Sunni, Bin Laden came from Saudi, Iran sponsors most of the terrorist groups.
February 19, 2007, at 8:54 am
LINK is a primer for those who need to know the difference.
February 19, 2007, at 9:22 am
[…] GetReligionBlog, which is by a professional journalist who covers the press and it’s problems with religious coverage, has had an ongoing series about the failure of the press to cover the Sunni Shiite divide in Isalm. […]
February 20, 2007, at 10:59 pm
8 for 8, but then again Dad being Pakistani prolly gives me an unfair advantage
February 20, 2007, at 11:17 pm
Will, the term “Shi’ite” is an Anglicization of Arabic shi’i, “Of the faction/party”. The faction referred to is the Shi’at ‘Ali, or Faction of ‘Ali, the segment of the ‘Ummah who favored the Prophet’s nephew ‘Ali to succeed him over his loyal companion Abu Bakr.
This disagreement came about because of differing opinions on how to interpret the term ahlul-bayt, or People of the House (of the Prophet).
Those who took ahlul-bayt to refer to the Prophet’s blood kin supported ‘Ali as successor. These are the Shi’i.
Those who interpreted ahlul-bayt as referring to the Prophet’s close companions (called the Sahaba) supported Abu Bakr as successor to the Prophet, and formed the Sunni branch of Islam.
Why the hell fight over a difference like that? I guess since I’m not a religious fanatic of any sort, I’ll just never get it.