meritocrat

What is the difference between Sunni Islam and Shi'ite Islam?

Is it analogous to the relationship between Catholicism and Protestantism?

Sarpedon

Not a muslim but:

The division between sunni and shia was originally a political one. When Muhammed conquered persia, he put his son in law ali in charge of it. The persians, being civilized, looked down on the arabs, so he put the likable ali in charge of bringing them into the fold. He did such a good job that the persians wanted him to be caliph after the prophet died. However, the arabs that surrounded muhammed thought that ali had sold out to the persians, by adopting some of their customs, and got one of their number the father of muhammed's youngest wife, made caliph in his place. This irritated the persians. Then the caliph died, and again ali was put forward, again, another relative of muhammed was chosen. Then some time after, the caliph had again died, and a descendant of ali and some persian notables were travelling to Mecca to press his claim, when they were massacred by a bunch of arabs. This is the occasion that shia men commemerate by cutting their heads with swords, and marks the official beginning to the separation of the sects. It was less than 100 years after the death of muhammed.

sphinx wui

The difference between Suni and Shia Islam started as political dispute which reached its climax by the killing of Hussein(the son of Mohamed’daughter Fatima and his cousin Ali)
When Mohamed died he didn’t appoint any one to follow him “this is from the suni point of view” and he left it up to the Muslims to choose their ruler and they chose Abu Bakr, one of the closest friends of Mohamed as the new leader ”Khalifa “ but some Muslims (who called themselves Ali Shia, meaning allies of Ali) claimed that the new ruler has to be from Mohamed dynasty and as Mohamed had no sons so it is Ali, Mohamed’s cousin who suppose to be the new leader but the majority didn’t agree with this cause there is no evidence in Quran or Hadith for such thing and they didn’t want to act like the other 2 Empires (Roman and Persian) and also Ali was very young(early twenties) comparing to Abu Bakr (early sixties) and Abu Bakr took over followed by Omar then Othman and finally they chose Ali as the fourth Khalif and Suni to this day call those four “the rightly guided Khalifs” . When Ali took over there were great troubles in the Muslim community cause the Khalif Othman was killed by a mob after they surrounded his house for weeks cause they accused him that he is in favor of his family and he appointed them as governors in the provinces of the Islamic state. Every body around Othman was thinking that they would never dare to attack him and they would go after they made their point so they didn’t bother to guard him but the mob did the unthinkable and killed Othman !!! When Ali took over, Othman family asked for the arrest of the murderers but Ali told them that nobody actually knew who killed him cause there were many people at the crime scene and he asked Othman family to give him a chance to arrange the house from inside first but they refused and accused Ali that he wasn’t interested to brought those people into justice. The head of Othman family was Moawia, the ruler of Syria, who declared that he doesn’t recognize Ali as Khalifa until he arrest those people and he used to go to the mosque on Fridays and show the people the shirt that Othman was wearing when he got killed covered with blood to inflame them (to this day there is a proverb “do not use it as Othman’s shirt”if someone tries to use a tragedy to justify his actions as GWB use 9/11 as Othman’s shirt !!!). after prolonged fighting and negotiations between Ali and Moawia, Ali agreed that Moawia has to be the next ruler after him to make a gesture for Othman’s family that he has nothing personally against them and after Moawia, Muslims have to choose their leader among themselves.

After Ali’s death, Moawia took over and instead of leaving the matter in the hands of Muslims upon his death, he appointed his son Yazid to be the next Khalifa to be the first dynastic rule in the history of Islam.

Hussein, the son of Ali and grandson of Mohamed refused this action and didn’t recognize Yazid as a new Khalifa.Moawia during his period transformed the relatively small Islamic state into a huge Empire which extended later on during the rule of his dynasty from Spain in the west to China and south Russia in the east (all those countries in south Russia that End in Stan were under the control of his dynasty) and the Islamic army became highly organized and well trained fighting force.

When people in Iraq heard that Hussein didn’t recognize Yazid as a new Khalifa, they contacted him telling him that they support his just cause and they are ready to fight with him Yazid and his army and asked him to come to Iraq. Hussein believed them and took his family members and relatives including his wife ,sons and sisters (which were grand daughter of Mohamed) in a total number of 72 and left Madina (in Saudia Arabia now)
heading to Iraq against the advice of many Muslims to stay.

When Yazid heard of Hussein’s actions he sent his army to Iraq to meet Hussein and when people in Iraq saw the huge army coming from Syria they scared and withdrew their offer to Hussein but it was to late!!

When Hussein arrived in Iraq, in a place called Karbala, I think most of you are familiar now with this name! He found nobody waiting him but Yazid’s army. They offered him to withdraw in peace and go back to Madina but he refused and asked for Yazid to resign. Hussein thought that they will never dare to touch him or any of his family members cause his grandfather is Mohamed himself!!! And he started to arrange the few people with him as a fighting force but they were no match to the other side in number and weapons.

The battle lasted only one day and Hussein stood fast for the whole day but by the end of the day they overwhelmed him. Hussein was thinking that he is fighting a just war and the other side will play with the rules but the forces that he was fighting didn’t play with the rules that his grandfather himself put but instead they were defending the newly formed empire and rules were not there first priority.

To give you a clue about the way Hussein was thinking, in the middle of the battle he asked the other side to stop the assault cause his 2 years old son is thirsty and he asked them to give him water but they refused so Hussein took his son to a near by spring and started to bring water for him but the unthinkable happened again!!! they shot the 2 years old boy with an arrow to die in the hands of his father.
The day ended with killing of Hussein and his head got separated from his body and his female family members were taken to Damascus to meet Yazid the new Khalif.
They buried Hussein’s body in Karbala and when Yazid met what remained from Hussein’s family some of them asked to go back to Madina and some asked to go to Egypt (to this day, there are suburbs in old Cairo called Lady Zeinab, and Lady Nafisa who were grand daughters of Mohamed and sisters of Hussein and 2 mosques named after there names and another suburb called Hussein with a mosque called Hussein mosque in which Egyptians claimed that Hussein’s sisters buried his head in it but there is no such documentation of an event like this)

The killing of Hussein became the focus point of Shia, they form about 10% of Muslims, each year in the anniversary of his killing, they gather in Karbala to tell the story of his martyrdom and morn his death, they feel guilty that they let him down after they encouraged him to come to Iraq so they punish themselves in a brutal bloody way and I think most of you saw this shit allover the TV stations.for them the battle between Hussein and Yazid is the battle between good and evil, it is David against Goliath, Yazid became Belat, the Roman governor who killed Jesus, Shamar, the guy who killed Hussein became Juda, and Karbala became the Golgatha and actually you can draw many analogies between Shia and Christianity, both are about a guy got killed in a right cause and as Suni we use to call them the Christians of Islam!
most of them are in Iraq, Iran and south Lebanon with very little minorities in Pakistan, Aphghanistan, India.
They believe that the ruler has to come from Mohamed house hold but the Suni people took this right from them (Suna=way of Mohamed, and Suni is the person who follow the way of Mohamed) in our history, they used to be the minority and in many occasions they were persecuted and Suni look at them as crazy folk. They used to work under ground, which enforced their paranoia and cult. There are many groups of Shia and the main bulk of them follow a school of thought called “Imamya ithna ashriya” means the 12 Imams that are direct off springs of Mohamed starting from Ali- Hassan- Hussein-…..
And they are waiting for the coming of the absent Imam which is equal in their mind to the second coming of Jesus in Christianity but a fringe minorities of them went nuts about Ali and Hussein and started to think of them as they have divine parts in them which put them in confrontation with Suni who consider anybody to say something like that is not Muslim anymore.

To give you an idea about those Shia minorities, the word Assassin in English came from an Arabic word “Hashashin” which means people who smoke Hashish!! The person who smoke Hashish we call him in Arabic Hashash and the pleural of it is Hashashin. This cult group used to live in Lebanon Mountains and their leader “Hassan Elsabah” used to brainwash them after he let them smoke Hashish and he convinced them to kill Suni rulers and sent them in this killing missions while they are under effect of Hashish and they tried twice to kill Saladin, the Suni Ruler who took Jeruslaem back from crusaders but failed and due to the cultural contact between the east and west during this time the word Hashashin found its way into the European languages and it became synonymous to a person who kills, Assassin!!

They have the same Quran, pray five times a day, fast Ramadan, do pilgrimage to Mecca but in their school of thought they developed in a different way from main stream Islam and in legal matters for example Suni consider marriage contract has no time limit, i.e you can’t marry a woman and to put in the contract that you will divorce her after such time but Shia think it is Ok to marry a woman for a limited time and divorce her later on and Suni consider this act illegal and like prostitution and they didn’t allow them to do it in areas controlled by Suni.

In Egypt, 10% are Christians and 90% are Muslims from whom 100% are Suni so I don’t have first hand experience with them until I grew up and traveled with my family and started to read about them. Some of them when they knew that I am Sunni start to tell me why I killed Hussein!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And they are speaking very seriously!!! But when you deal with educated Shia they are reasonable and you can have a dialogue with them.

I hope that I gave you an idea about this issue and my best wishes to Franklin Graham who went in a mission to convert them to Christianity ! he has a very long way to go and I actually expect to see him in the next years celebrating with them the Martyrdom of Hussein while cutting his flesh to regret his evil actions of letting Hussein down 1400 years ago!!!!!!!

Omar

p.s. regarding sarpedon post, when Mohamed died, persia wasn't under the control of Arabs and it didn't happen until the last days of Abu Bakr rule, with all respect your post has many historical mistakes and i don't have time now to discuss it in details.

lpetrich

sphinx wui on Shiite Muslims:
Some of them when they knew that I am Sunni start to tell me why I killed Hussein!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That's just like a long-time Christian accusation that Jews are Christ-killers.

hinduwoman

So religiously speaking there is no difference between the two?
Except of course that they cannot stand each other?

Sarpedon

Forgive me sphinx, You are probably right. However, I think that the ethnic and cultural differences between arabs and persians served to accentuate the conflict. In your lingo, the persians used hussein's death as an "othman's shirt" to assert their independance from arab dominance. Religious schisms almost always occur on ethnic lines.

sphinx wui

Dear Sarpedon

If you want to use the modern day terms, it was an inter Arab conflict between the royalists (Shia) and republicans (Suna) but later on took another dimension. I am not in Iran history but I know that Iran was a Suna nation until a family called Savavide family took over there in the 1700 century and implanted Shism in Iran.
Islam in the beginning started in Saudia Arabia and the two superpowers during this time were the Romans and the Persians whom felt threatened by the rising power of Islam which led to a prolonged confrontations between them.during Abu Bakr Khilafa he sent the army to recent day Iraq and Iran and within 18 month the Persian empire ceased to exist any more and after that he turned the army towards the Romans in Elsham (recent day Syria, Palestine, Lebanon and Jordon) and Omar came after him to declare the fall of the Romans in the whole middle east including Egypt and the whole African north coast.


In the following years some countries like Egypt convert to Islam and changed its language to Arabic and others converted but kept their language like Iran and later Turkey.during this time the nationalities of the members of the newly formed empire was not an issue as long as you are Muslim. For example Saladin was governor of Egypt but he was a Kurd and the governor at the time of Mongol invasion was Qotoz who came to Egypt from south Russia!!!! Both Egyptians and Iranians were not Arabs but they developed in a different way during their history.

Regarding Iran,there is no doubt that the religious schism enforced the already exist ethnic one and every now and then it surfaces again. In the last war between Iraq and Iran, Sadam used to call the Iranians “the magos” meaning fire worshipers and he called his war with them “the new Qadysia” which was the decisive battle between Muslims and Persians and for sure you know “the mother of all battles!!!!!!” he likes to call his wars names!! Do you know what he called his last victory over America !!! I bet you don’t know this one.

Dear hinduwoman;

Why you are stalking me? I left the political section for you and came here to have a break but here we go !!
Religiously speaking there is no difference in the basics between Suna and main stream Shia but there are differences in minor issues like they add “we witness that Ali is alley of god” to their Azan “call for praying” to tease us! And their clergy play very important rule in their life and they pay their charity to them which gave them financial power while Suna doesn’t have any form of central authority and we pay our charity directly to the poor people without middle man.

Regarding Omar Elkhayam, here what I have

Omar Khayyam and the Skeptical Tradition Against Islam

In 1859, the year that saw the first edition of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, there appeared The Ruba’iyat of ‘Omar Khayyam, the Astronomer Poet of Persia, an anonymous translation of the quatrains of an obscure medieval Persian poet, who was better known as a mathematician. Unlike Darwin’s classic which was an immediate success(1), the first edition of Edward Fitzgerald’s inspired paraphrase went almost unnoticed and was remaindered. But it came to the attention of another skeptic, the poet Swinburne, and later the Pre-Raphaelite Rossetti, who between them launched The Ruba’iyat on its career of extraordinary popularity that remains unabated (2nd edn., revised and enlarged, 1868; 3rd edn., revised, 1872, 4th edn., revised, 1879, and with felicitous consequences for the history of English poetry.(2)
The first that the West heard of Omar Khayyam’s poetry, rather than his name, was probably in 1700 when Th. Hyde in his Veterum Persarum....religionis historia (Oxford) gave a Latin translation of one of Khayyam’s quatrains. In 1771, Sir William Jones in his A Grammar of The Persian Language quoted without attribution a complete quatrain (in Persian ruba’i, plural ruba’iyat)(3) and part of another, generally ascribed to Khayyam:

Hear how the crowing cock at early dawn
Loudly laments the rising of the sun
Has he perceived that of your precious life
Another night has passed, and you care not?
*
As spring arrived and winter passed away,
The pages of our life were folded back.(4)
Several Persian quatrains were published in a Persian grammar compiled by F. Dombay in Vienna in 1804.
Khayyam’s quatrains are independent epigrammatic stanzas -- in other words, short, spontaneous, self-contained poems. Each ruba’i stands on its own. Fitzgerald, however, makes them a continuous sequence: the stanzas "here selected are strung into something of an Eclogue."(5) Thus, far from being a close translation, Fitzgerald’s version is a paraphrase of "exceptional poetical merits."(6) One English scholar, E. Heron Allen, compared Fitzgerald’s version with the Persian text and established that 49 quatrains are faithful paraphrases of single ruba’i; 44 are traceable to more than one ruba’i; 2 are inspired by the ruba’i found only in one particular edition of the Persian text; 2 reflect the "whole spirit" of the original; 2 are traceable exclusively to Attar, the Persian mystic poet ( died c. 1220 ); 2 are inspired by Khayyam but influenced by Hafiz, the greatest Persian Iyric poet ( died 1390 ), and 3 Heron Allen was unable to identify.(7)
One scholar admirably sums up the qualities that caught the late Victorian imagination, and that have endeared Fitzgerald’s Omar to so many: "The Fitzgerald stanza, with its unrhymed, poised third line, is an admirable invention to carry the sceptical irony of the work and to accommodate the opposing impulses of enjoyment and regret. Fitzgerald’s poem has a kind of dramatic unity, starting with dawn and the desire to seize the enjoyment of the passing moment, moving through the day until, with the fall of evening, he laments the fading of youth and the approach of death. Several interests of the time, divine justice versus hedonism, science versus religion and the prevailing taste for eastern art and bric-a-brac, were united in the poem...."(8)
Edward Fitzgerald himself sums up the delightful nature of Omar and his philosophy very accurately:
"...Omar’s Epicurean Audacity of thought and Speech caused him to be regarded askance in his own time and country. He is said to have been especially hated and dreaded by the Sufis, whose practice he ridiculed, and whose faith amounts to little more than his own, when strips of the Mysticism and formal recognition of Islamism under which Omar would not hide. Their poets, including Hafiz, who are (with the exception of Firdausi) the most considerable in Persia, borrowed largely, indeed, of Omar’s material, but turning it to a mystical use more convenient to themselves and the people they addressed; a people quite as quick of doubt as of belief; as keen of bodily sense as of intellectual; and delighting in a cloudy composition of both, in which they could float luxuriously between heaven and earth, and this world and the next, on the wings of a poetical expression, that might serve indifferently for either. Omar was too honest of heart as well of head for this. Having failed (however mistakenly) of finding any providence but destiny, and any world but this, he set about making the most of it; preferring rather to soothe the soul through the senses into acquiescence with things as he saw them, than to perplex it with vain disquietude after what they might be. It has been seen, however, that this worldly ambition was not exorbitant; and he very likely takes a humorous or perverse pleasure in exalting the gratification of sense above that of the intellect, in which he must have taken great delight, although it failed to answer the questions in which he, in common with all men, was most vitally interested."(9)
Fitzgerald will have no truck with those squeamish or puritanical scholars, like the Frenchman Nicolas, who pretend to see something spiritual in Omar’s verses, and who interpret every appearance of the word "wine" mystically.(10) Fitzgerald approvingly quotes Von Hammer who wrote of Omar as a "freethinker, and a great opponent of Sufism." For Fitzgerald the burden of Omar’s Song, if not "let us eat," is assuredly "Let us drink, for tomorrow we die!" Some may see Omar as a Sufi, but "on the other hand, as there is far more historical certainty of his being a philosopher, of scientific insight and ability far beyond that of the age and country he lived in, of such moderate worldly ambition as becomes a philosopher, and such moderate wants as rarely satisfy a debauchee; other readers may be content to believe with me that while the wine Omar celebrates is simply the juice of the grape, he bragg’d more than he drank of it, in very defiance perhaps of that spiritual wine which left its votaries sunk in hypocrisy or disgust."(11)
Here are some examples of Fitzgerald’s paraphrase of Omar [From the 1st Edn.]:

II

Dreaming when Dawn’s Left Hand was in the Sky
I heard a Voice within the Tavern cry:
‘Awake, my Little ones, and fill the Cup
Before Life’s Liquor in its Cup be dry.’

III

And, as the Cock crew, those who stood before
The Tavern shouted: ‘Open then the Door!
You know how little we have to stay,
And, once departed, may return no more.’

XV

The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon
Turns Ashes -- or it prospers; and anon,
Like Snow upon the Desert’s dusty Face
Lighting a little hour or two is gone.

XX

Ah, Beloved, fill the Cup that clears
Today of past Regrets and future Fears --
Tomorrow? Why, Tomorrow I may be
Myself with Yesterday’s Sev’n Thousand Years.

XXI

Lo! some we loved, the loveliest and best
That Time and Fate of all their Vintage prest,
Have drunk their Cup a Round or two before,
And one by one crept silently to Rest.

XXII

And we, that now make merry in the Room
They left, and Summer dresses in new Bloom,
Ourselves must we beneath the Couch of Earth
Descend, ourselves to make a Couch -- for whom?

XXIII

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the Dust descend:
Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie,
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and sans End!

XXIV

Alike for those who for TO-DAY prepare,
And those that after a TOMORROW stare,
A Muezzin from the Tower of Darkness cries:
‘Fools! your Reward is neither Here nor There!’

XV

Why, all the Saints and Sages who discuss’d
Of the Two Worlds so learnedly, are thrust
Like foolish Prophets forth; their Words to Scorn
Are scatter’d, and their Mouths are stopt with Dust.

XVI

Oh, come with old Khayyam, and leave the Wise
To talk: one thing is certain, that Life flies;
One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies:
The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.

LII

And that inverted Bowl we call The Sky,
Whereunder crawling coop’t we live and die,
Lift not thy hands to It for help -- for It
Rolls impotently on as Thou or I.

From the 4th Edn:


XIII

Some for the Glories of This World; and some
Sigh for the Prophet’s Paradise to come;
Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go
Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum!