If you were brave enough to click on this thread after the purposefully boring title, congratulations. To me, it means you actually want to know what's going on instead of taking CNN or ABC or Fox's word for it. This piece on the pilgrimmage to Karbala this weekend caught my interest: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,84604,00.html There'll be a lot of this kind of ambivillance (sp?) over the months to come. Particularly confusing is all the pronouncements from various "Imam's" or "Ayatollahs" or even "Muftis". Islam can be confusing because there is no Muslim Pope, no top guy, no final authority. The reason for this is complex but if bols down the the view that for Muslims, governement and Islam are the same thing. Mohammed and his successors were in charge of every facet of life. How you prayed, who you went to war with, what your taxes were going to be and who Allah is. The Shiites took it a step further; they rejected the Sunni opinion of who the Imam was. To them, the first Imam was Ali, who was Muhammed's son-in-law and the guy who's buried in that shrine in Karbala. To the Sunnis, he was fourth. His son, Muhammed's grandson, was Hussein (also Husayn) who is in the OTHER shrine, the one in Narjaf, who succeeded him. He was killed in a (to us) ridiculous battle at Narjaf where he fought 10,000 guys with 72. He lost. Anyway, while to the Sunnis the Imam's continued down the ages, essentially until the Turks abolished the Caliphate in the 1920's, to the Shiites there were only 12. What's more, the 12th, who disappeared as a child, is considered merely in hiding, and will return when something or other happens. In the meantime he communicates his wishes through various Imams. They are not appointed by anybody, but rather identified by popular acceptance. (Khomeini was one of the youngest ever - 35 or so. Most are at least 50 before they are so recognized) The Shi'a are required to pick one of these guys as their own persoanl guide to the desires of the hidden Imam. No choice. Some of them have hundreds of thousands, even millions, of followers. Others have a few hundred. So it's confusing when one of them issues a fatwa or declares jihad against someone or something, while another says the opposite and a third says to ignore it. So you have scenes like last weekend when an Ayatollah (same thing) in Iran told his people to demonstrate against the US demanding that they leave immediately, which they did, while at the same time ANOTHER Imam in Iran was telling the US Marines they should take a more active role in internal security. The press, being completely and willfully ignorant, prints up a banner headline about how such-and-such "issued a jihad against the US" or some such silliness because it would be too much trouble to really understand it. So my advice is to not get too excited about any of these. The US, as the article says, is trying very hard to stay out of their way and be accomodating. The scenario of a couple million Shiites on a holy pilgrimmage (for some Shiites a hilier trek than the one to Mecca) which had been banned for 20 years complaining about the people who made it possible, bitching that they should go home while wolfing down the food we supply them along the way drives us up a wall. Just remember that, to them, Islam has just been humiliated by the US. People who hated Saddam still are embarassed that he went down so easily. It makes Islam look puny and weak, and they are very prideful people. So they're gonna say mean sounding stuff. We're OK as long as we keep a low profile and get the hell out of there. We're not looking for them to start loving us, we're just hoping for a fairly neutral-to-even-a-little-hostile government that doesn't support terrorists and keep a couple vials of botulism around. Anything more would be asking too much.