Takfiriyeen Bring Sunni-on-Sunni Violence

In the years when I put Christianity into suspended animation, I was attracted for a while by Sufism, an etherial, charitable arm of Sunni Islam noted for its spinning dancers. I now recognize it as a form of spiritual hypnotism, but at the time, the spiritual high seemed pretty darn real. In any case, they're about the nicest bunch of Muslims you'll ever meet.

Which is probably why Abu Musab Zarqawi targeted them Thursday night in a bombing that killed 10 Sufi worshippers. Sufis are Sunnis, Zarqawi is Sunni, but that's no longer enough. You'd better be Zarqawi's kind of Sunni -- Wahhabist -- or risk death.

In today's LATimes, this passage gets it right:

"It's Al Qaeda thinking that will destroy this country," said a Baghdad-based sheik of the Rifai Sufi order, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal.

The Sufi's blame the takfiriyeen, a phrase they use for radicalZarqawi-type Sunnis who declare all other forms of Islam but theirs kafir, or apostates.