Does Rudy Know Islam?

Well Jim Geraghty, someone who blogs for the National Review under the heading “The Hillary Spot”, has a different take than I had on how well Giuliani handled Sunni-Shia differences during last Thursday’s Republican presidential debate:

watching him try to explain the difference between Shia and Sunni was as painful as watching Joe Theismann have his leg broken by Lawrence Taylor back in the 1980s. Rudy’s better than this performance; the question will be whether this really hurt him.

After taking some heat from readers for bad-mouthing Giuliani’s response, Geraghty adds this to his blog:

Rudy had two options - he could give a history/textbook answer, or he could try to put it in very plain terms that would make sense to the average American. He ended up with neither, kind of a jumble. It looked like a brain freeze. . .

I figure the ideal answer . . . would be something like, "Sunni Islam is about 80 percent of the Muslim world, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Pakistan. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda are Sunni. The Shia are a breakaway sect going back to a dispute over who was the leader after Muhammed, and they are primarily in Iran and southern Iraq."

By no means does this answer ruin Giuliani, and I'm told that MSNBC folks said after the debate that Rudy answered it correctly.

Note that MSNBC had to tell Geraghty that Giuliani answered correctly; Geraghty couldn't figure that out on his own.

Why don’t you decide for yourself whether Giuliani grasps Islamic history? Here’s Giuliani’s actual answer:

MR. VANDEHEI: Mayor Giuliani, this question comes from Eric Taylor (sp) from California. He wants to know, what is the difference between a Sunni and a Shi’a Muslim?

MR. GIULIANI: The difference is the descendant of Mohammed. The Sunnis believe that Mohammed’s — the caliphate should be selected, and the Shi’ites believe that it should be by descent. And then, of course, there was a slaughter of Shi’ites in the early part of the history of Islam, and it has infected a lot of the history of Islam, which is really very unfortunate.