Do you understand the difference between Sunni and Shia Islam? (1)
I have just started to read “Zone Of Crisis: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran And Iraq” by Amin Saikal, an Afghan-born scholar of international affairs who is Director of the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University. Afghanistan and Pakistan are predominately Sunni states, while Iraq and Iran have a Shia majority population (the only such countries in the world except for tiny Bahrain and secular Azerbaijan). But what is the difference between Sunni and Shia Islam?
As Saikal explains:
“The schism dates from a dispute over the leadership (khalifa) of the Muslim community (ummah) following the death of the Prophet Muhammad in AD 632.
Those who supported the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, Ali ibn Talib, as the rightful leader (caliph), became known as the Shi’atu ‘Ali (‘the party of ‘Ali’; later the Shi’a). The Shi’as held that only ‘Ali and his direct descendants (imams) could be the rightful leaders of the ummah.
The majority, on the other hand, who favoured the succession of the Prophet’s societal leadership by his four companions in order of seniority, with ‘Ali coming last, rejected the notion of birthright and insisted that the caliph be elected by the ummah itself. Those who held this opinion became known as the ‘people of the tradition’ (sunna) or Sunnis.”
Both sects have a large number of sub-groups So the Sunni world is divided into four dominant schools of thought: Hanafi, Hanbali, Maliki and Shafi’i. Shias are divided into three main schools: Twelver, Zaidi and Ismaili.
If this seems complicated, it is really little different that the split between Catholicism and Protestantism and the many further sub-divisions in the Christian faith. But, since even today religion dominates cultural and political life so much in the Islamic world, it is essential that one understands what branch of which sect is dominant in any particular nation or region to have any understand of that part of the world .