Just who is not a Kafir?

by Guest Mon Dec 03, 2012 9:20 pm

The broad Sunni-Shia division does not explain all of it

Most Sunnis adhere to the Hanafi school of jurisprudence. Only 5 per cent of the country’s population belongs to the Ahle Hadith sect or Wahabis.
The Sunnis are subdivided into the Barelvi and Deobandi schools of thought

The Deobandis and Wahabis consider the Barelvis as kafir, because they visit the shrines of saints, offer prayers, believe music, poetry and dance can lead to god
Barelvis constitute 60 per cent of the population. Deobandis and Wahabis together account for 20 per cent

Another 15 per cent are Shias, again considered kafir and subjected to repeated attacks
Since 2000, the Sunni-Shia conflict has claimed 5,000 lives

Others considered kafir are the religious minorities—Christians, Ismailis, Hindus, Sikhs, Parsis, Ahmadias, etc, who account for 5 per cent of the population
So, 20 per cent of the population effectively considers the remaining 80 per cent as kafir

http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?266157

Notice that the Outlook article (above) is not talking about India but about Pakistan. That is why the 20:80 ratio is mentioned.

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I decided to post the above after reading about Salman Rushdie's view on Islam which in my opinion springs from ignorance.

Of all the retrenchments and narrowings of viewpoint that are on display in Joseph Anton, the saddest, perhaps, is his altered attitude toward Islam. Throughout the fatwa, Rushdie carefully resisted the temptation to make Islam itself the enemy. “The thing called Islamism is not the same thing as Islam,” he told David Cronenberg in 1995. “This political thing which we call fundamentalism, everybody is scared stiff of it. It is not a religious movement, it’s a political fascist movement which happens to be using a certain kind of religious language.”2

But his tolerance for this sort of distinction has since waned. Now he regards any efforts to separate reactionary forms of Islam from Islam itself as dishonest and wrong. They are, he claims, embarrassing corollaries of the old attempts by Western Marxists to separate the “true” Marxist way from the horrors of Soviet communism. Islam is not after all a heterogeneous entity but a sickening, murderous monolith, and Western “respect” for the religion—to be placed, at all times, in scornful quotation marks—is only ever “Tartuffe-like hypocrisy.”

How are we to reconcile these sentiments with the gratitude that Rushdie expresses elsewhere in the book for Muslim writers who supported him during the fatwa? Or with his belief in the artist’s role as a promoter of human tolerance? The job of literature, he instructs us in the final pages of this memoir, is to encourage “understanding, sympathy and identification with people not like oneself…to make the world feel larger, wider than before.” Some readers may find, by the end of Joseph Anton, that the world feels rather smaller and grimmer than before. But they should not be unduly alarmed. The world is as large and as wide as it ever was; it’s just Rushdie who got small.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/dec/20/salman-rushdie-case/?pagination=false