It's not been a easy time to be a moderate Muslim, especially one who's either accommodating to local secular rulers or who's not part of the normal Sunni-Shia paradigm. Sufis have taken it in the neck twice recently. The most recent one happened in southern Russia, in the Dagestan area near the Caspian Sea. There, a female autoboomer took out a Sufi leader, Sheikh Said Afandi.
The other one happened in Libya,
On Friday, a Sufi mosque and adjoining library were vandalized in Zliten. The mosque's dome collapsed and hundreds of books were destroyed.
And, on Saturday, in broad daylight, Salafist activists brought in a bulldozer to flatten the Sidi Al-Sha'ab shrine, which was centuries old and contained 50 graves considered sacred by Sufi Muslims.
The Sufis are among the more mystic-oriented of Islam's flavors, making the attractive to spiritual seekers from the West, something of a halfway house between Catholic monasticism and Eastern meditative thought; theistic but without the Christian doctrine that intellectuals often run from.
The shrine bulldozed was in the capital, Tripoli. The nearest Christian analogy I could think of would be militant Baptists storming downtown Houston and demolishing Joel Osteen's stadium-church for preaching a false gospel. Sufi=Pentecostal isn't a great fit here, especially when the Sufis go back a millennium and the Pentecostals are just getting a second century going in their modern form, but they both lean towards the experiential and are often seen as theological outliers by the more textual-oriented folks in their faith.
The fact that a fledgling Libyan government had to essentially stand back and let the mob have its way is not a good sign for other new democracies in the area, especially Egypt and their good-sized Coptic community.
The bombing in Dagestan is a part of a ongoing string of attacks on traditional religious leaders in the ethnically-Muslim areas of southern Russia; Tartarstan was the previous site of anti-establishment violence in the far domestic (since they call their old USSR neighbors "the near abroad", that would fit those minority sections of Russia). That's been a problem since the USSR broke up, and won't be stopping anytime soon; this might be one main reason why the Russians veto stuff on Syria; they don't want any of these scuffles becoming UN material in the future.
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