Can you explain Sunni and Shia to me?

This is an interesting write up about the two Muslim sects.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shi'a%E2%80%93Sunni_relations

They were a sixties pop combo responsible for hits such as “Baby Don’t Go” and “I Got You Babe”, but whose move into television in the 1970s heralded a public and rancourous divorce.

Sorry, couldn’t resist

You can think of the diffrence between Sunni and Shia roughly in terms of Catholosism and Protestantism, in that they are essentially down to matters of dogma and doctrine in the finer points of the religion. As often in this world, the closer two peoples are too each other, the more they can dislike each other.

Well, a Google search would give you a better answer, but one thing to keep in mind about many Muslims is they are more rigid about theology than Christians – sometimes to the point that almost anyone is a heretic. That might explain a lot of the conflict.

They are indistinguishable to Americans and they hate each other.

It’s like Protestants and Catholics in many areas, like Ireland. That’s where the conflict comes from.

In general, one group sees the proper line of imams as descending from Mohammad, and the other sees the line as being one more democratically or executively chosen. It’s like monarchy vs. elected or selected rule.

It’s a little bit like Protestants and Catholics, as people have pointed out, though not exactly.

The schism between Sunni and Shia came much earlier and involved who Muslims believed was the proper successor to the prophet Muhammad. (iirc, Shia thought it should be one of his cousins, but I’ve completely forgot the details—it’s about as exciting as memorizing lists of European kings.)

After the schism, the two sects evolved in theology. The Shia are more like Catholics in that they place religious authority in a more or less priestly structure, the system of imams. They believe that there were a succession of magic imams (sort of like the magic pope-man) who were chosen by God to lead the Muslims after Muhammad. They also believe that the 13th imam, a small child who appears to have died, is actually “in occultation” (magical hiding) and will return during the end times. In the meantime, a religious hierarchy of ayatollahs leads the Shia sect, notably Ayatollah Kheimeini in Iran.

The Sunni do not have such a strict theocratic hierarchy, so they are more like Protestants. There are four “schools” of Sunni theology, sort of similar to Lutherans/Episcapelians/Presbyterians in Christianity.

One subsect of the Sunni, which is not considered one of the four proper schools, is the Salafi/Wahhabi. They are sort of like fundamentalist Christians. These are the fun fellows who command broad authority in Saudi Arabia, they finance mosques all over the world, and their fundamentalist theology is a cousin to that of al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

The Sufis are also not really part of the Shia/Sunni divide (they might be grouped with Sunni, though). Sufism is a mystical Islamic tradition that focuses on one’s relationship with God rather than with politics so much. I’m not sure there’s a good comparison in Christian tradition.

@Qingu: perhaps gnosticism is a good comparison?

This is an interesting video:

http://dotsub.com/media/b5ee5ada-5b37-4b0b-9916-e0896337ec4b/e/m

@bolwerk, gnosticism is similar to Sufism in that they’re both mystic traditions, but the chronology is wrong. Gnosticism predates, strongly influenced, and was basically absorbed by early Christianity, and then established Christianity effectively squashed it. Sufism, on the other hand, post-dates early Islam and seems to have evolved out of an already established Islamic theology.

So I’m not sure there is a current Christian sect that is analogous to Sufism. (Maybe the best analogy would be Christian hippies a la _Jesus Christ Superstar…) But certainly there are fundamentalist Muslims who want to quash Sufism as the early Christians did quash Gnosticism.

So then who are the kurds?

Can’t say I know much about the Kurds, aside from what I’ve read in the news. I don’t think their identity is religious in nature. They seem to be an ethnic identity, like “Arabs” or “Pashtuns,” rather than a religious sect. Though Wikipedia says most Kurds are Sunnis.

@Qingu So then why do I always hear about the “Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites”, like they’re 3 different but comparative groups? We wouldn’t say “The Indonesian, Catholics and Protestants”.

Maybe it’s related to Iraq. During the worst of the after-war chaos (or the civil war, as it basically came to that), there was talk of splitting up the country into these three parts: Arabs (who are mostly Sunni), the Shia, and the Kurds.

During Hussein’s rule, the Arabs had control of the country, despite the fact that the Shia were the majority. Saddam Hussein was a Sunni Arab. But, his government didn’t seem to like the Kurds (even though they are also mostly Sunni), since they tried to commit ethnic cleansing on the Kurds during the 80’s.

After the death of Muhammad in 632 CE, his father-in-law and the most senior of his Sahabah (companions/disciples), Abu Bakr, became Caliph, the leader of the Islamic community. Sunni Muslims have no problem with this. Shia Muslims on the other hand believe that Ali ibn Abi Talib, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law was entitled to this authority instead. Furthermore, Shia muslims believe that certain descendants of Muhammad’s relatives (imams) possess divinely-granted authority and infallibility.

So, in contrast to the split between Catholics and Protestants, the seeds of this division were present from the very death of the prophet in question. The first Islamic civil war started in 656 CE, just 24 years after Muhammad’s death. The schism between the Roman and Eastern Orthodox churches took place in 1054, and Martin Luther didn’t post his 95 Theses to the door until 1517.

The Kurds are an indigenous ethnic minority in countries where the Kurdistan region is located.

So the Kurdish people are separated as an ethnicity – it’s a separate conflict from the Shi’ite/Sunni one.