Shiite Muslims Quietly establish a foothold in U.S.

This article was really great to read I thought and fit in well since we have recently been talking about Muslims a lot in class and we were not sure fully how to explain the sunnis vs. the shiites. This article did a great job at explaining the difference to me and even put in terms of protestant vs. catholics so that christians could understand the difference easier by being able to relate it to to their own religion. The article also focused on how the shiite muslims are discriminated against in the middle east but in America since both Muslim groups have been the minority so they just went to the same masques and prayed together, despite their different views of their religion because they would rather identify with one another as Muslim and have each other than both be weaker by being separate. As time has been going on though, the shiites in the United States have been growing both in numbers and in financial stability and are starting to branch off by themselves and build their own masques. As they grow, they now face difficulties not only with some conservative sunnis, but also among other shiites who do not agree with certain aspects of how they are wanting to divide and how some are upset with how the strength they started with is now starting to deteriorate. I liked though, how in the United States, unlike in the Islamic east, some of these Muslims do see each other as the Catholics and Protestants see each other :humans with different but similar religious beliefs. In America we are able to identify these differences and deal with them in a civil way unlike it appears to be in the east, which I think is positive and safer for these Muslims in the U.S. It will be interesting to see what will happen in the future and how people continue to deal with each other and each others beliefs when so many are coming from what seems like a completely different world. Written by Michele Dobbs http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/shiite-muslims-quietly-establish-a-foothold-in-us/2012/10/02/f21dc568-0cd6-11e2-ba6c-07bd866eb71a_singlePage.html?tid=obnetwork