Why sunni islam is wrong

The war between Iran and Iraq that took place soon after and lasted from to highlighted some of the differences between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. In many Middle East states, Islamic movements are the main opposition force, and there has been increased activity by Islamic revolutionary groups. In Lebanon, militant Shiites supported by Iran took an active part in the country's civil war, and engaged in spectacular acts of violence, including taking a number of western citizens hostage.

Radical Sunni Muslim movements in countries such as Egypt and Algeria have also engaged in violence against government and western targets. This article will furnish background information on Sunni and Shiite Islam, highlighting their historical, religious, and ideological differences, and pointing out what both have in common as well as what divides them.

It will also outline some of the reasons for the recent strength of Islamic political movements. All Muslims believe that Allah chose a man named Muhammad as the Prophet of Islam, and that, with Allah's blessings and continuous revelations, Muhammad guided the Muslims to lead life according to the Koran, a collection of divine revelations, and the "Hadith" the sayings, teachings, and practices of the Prophet Muhammad, which serve as a supplement to the Koran.

In a short period of 22 years, from to A. All Muslims believe that piety, righteous observance of the principles of the Koran, and striving for goodness in daily life are the greatest virtues of human beings. Both Sunni and Shiite Muslims agree on the need for a strong ethical and moral code to regulate human behavior in all its manifestations.

Social justice is also believed to be a fundamental right. Sunnis and Shiites share the belief that there are five pillars of Islam: 1 the unity of Allah and the prophethood of Muhammad, 2 the five obligatory prayers, 3 fasting, 4 charity, and 5 the pilgrimage to Mecca. Both groups also believe that the Koran has a Divine source, and that Allah's prophetic missions concluded with Muhammad. On Muhammad's death in A. Abu Bakr was one of the close companions of Muhammad, and the father of Muhammad's second wife.

This action by the assembly indicated that leaders were to be selected by Muslims on the basis of their piety and merit, and ruled out the idea of a bloodline succession to the Prophet in the religious and political governance of Islam. Most Muslims accepted the selection of Abu Bakr as the first legitimate Caliph, who would rule according to the practices established by the Prophet.

On major worldly issues concerning which there was no direct reference in the Koran, the Prophet had taken advice from the assembly of advisors, so it seemed the appropriate body to decide the issue of the succession. The first Shiites were a small group of Muslims who opposed the selection of Abu Bakr as the first Caliph.

They rallied around the person of Ali, the Prophet's cousin and son-in-law, who had married the Prophet's daughter, Fatima. They supported Ali and the concept of a legitimate bloodline succession to the Prophet Muhammad in both religious and temporal matters. Ali had, in fact, been one of the prominent members of the consulting body which selected Abu Bakr as the first Caliph of Islam.

But given the tribal traditions of the Arabian Peninsula, the selection of Abu Bakr was regarded by some Muslims as denying the right of Ali to succeed the Prophet and serve as a leader or Imam in religious and political matters.

Who Is a Shiite? The schism led to the creation of two major branches of Islam, the Sunnis and the Shiites. The supporters of Ali were called Shiites. Distinguished authorities on the Arabic language define the word "Shiite" as meaning a group of people that develops consensus on an issue. Etymologically, the word's meaning is confined to the helpers, supporters, and partisans of a person but, by and large, the word is applied to the followers of Ali and his eleven male descendants.

The word "Sunni," which means "orthodox," is applied to Muslims who are part of the main branch of Islam and belong to one of the four schools of jurisprudence, Hanafi, Hanbali, Maliki, and Shaf'i. Although Ali is highly regarded by Sunni Muslims, they reject the Shiite conception of the succession to Muhammad. After the selection of Abu Bakr as the first Caliph, the Shiites grew in number and became a political group supporting Ali as the successor of the Prophet. They vehemently rejected the Caliphate, and instead advocated the concept of the "Imamate,"3 a religious and political ideology based on guidance by Imams.

Etymologically, the word "Imam" means "he who stands before," a guide and a leader. It is used to describe men of religion today, as well as to refer to the Twelve Imams who followed Muhammad. The Imamate concept reflects a belief that humanity is at all time in need of a divinely ordained leader, an authoritative teacher in all religious matters, who is endowed with full immunity from sin and error. The predominant trend in Shiism is that described as "Twelver Shiism,"4 which is centered in Iran and is the principal form of Shiism in Iraq, Lebanon, and Bahrain.

This Shiism holds that Muhammad was succeeded by twelve divinely ordained Imams directly descended from him through Ali and his wife Fatima, and that rejection of and disobedience to any of the twelve Imams constitutes infidelity equal to rejection of the Prophet Muhammad Donaldson , Shiites consider Ali and his descendants the rightful successors of the Prophet, entitled to lead the Muslims by divine and infallible inspiration.

This issue is not, of course, simply a genealogical matter, because it raises the vital issue of knowing from which authority to obtain guidance as to the will of Allah and its exercise on earth. For much of the Middle East's modern history, the Sunni-Shia divide was just not that important for the region's politics. In the s and '60s, the leading political movement in the Middle East was Arab nationalism, for which Sunni-Shia distinctions were largely irrelevant.

And in the s, for example, the biggest conflict in the Middle East was between two Shia-majority countries — Iran and Iraq — with Sunni powers backing Iraq. Shia Iran has been a major supporter of Sunni Hamas though that has abated somewhat recently. And so on. Things first began to change in , when the United States led the invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein. Obviously, Iraqis were aware of Sunnism and Shiism before , and those distinctions were not totally irrelevant to Iraqi life.

But for much of Iraq's modern history, Sunni and Shia lived peacefully side by side in mixed neighborhoods and frequently intermarried. For decades after decolonization, Iraqis defined themselves first by their ethnicity as Arabs or Kurds or by their nationality as Iraqis. Religious distinctions were just not as important. The change came because of regional power politics, which the US-led invasion upset.

Saddam was hostile to both Iran and Saudi Arabia despite Saudi support for his s war against Iran , and those two countries saw him as a wild-eyed threat.

He held the Middle East in a precarious sort of balance among these three regional military powers. When the US toppled Saddam, it removed that balance, and opened a vacuum in Iraq that both Saudi Arabia and Iran attempted to fill so as to counter one another.

Because Iraq is mostly Shia Saddam had been Sunni , Iran tried to exploit sectarianism to its advantage, backing hard-line Shia groups that would promote Iranian interests and oppose Sunni powers like Saudi Arabia.

It also put pressure on the new Iraqi government to serve Iranian interests, which came to be equated with Shia interests. In this way, political maneuvering in post-Saddam Iraq that was not primarily about religion came to be expressed as about religion. It helped deepen the Sunni-Shia split there so severely that this divide today defines Iraq. That's just the story of Iraq, but the same story is playing out across the Middle East, and a lot of it has to do with that same Saudi-Iran rivalry.

It is true that Saudi Arabia is an officially Sunni theocracy and that Iran is an officially Shia theocracy. But they don't hate one another because of religious differences, and in fact both countries have in the past defined themselves as representing all Muslims. Yet they can't both be the true representative of all Muslims, and that's the thing to understand here: The two countries have mutually exclusive claims to leadership of the Muslim world.

The sectarian difference is largely coincidental. This conflict began in , when the Iranian revolution turned secular Iran into a hard-line Shia theocracy. My colleague Zack Beauchamp explains :. After Iran's Islamic Revolution toppled the pro-Western shah, the new Islamic Republic established an aggressive foreign policy of exporting the Iranian revolution, attempting to foment Iran-style theocratic uprisings around the Middle East.

That was a threat to Saudi Arabia's heavy influence in the Middle East, and perhaps to the Saudi monarchy itself. It "brought to power a man who had explicitly argued that Islam and hereditary kingship were incompatible, a threatening message, to say the least, in [the Saudi capital of] Riyadh.

It's important to understand that the Saudi monarchy is deeply insecure: It knows that its hold on power is tenuous, and its claim to legitimacy comes largely from religion.

The Islamic Republic of Iran, merely by existing, challenges this legitimacy — not because it is Shia but because its theocratic revolution was popular and anti-monarchist. He is not alone in that hopelessness. Sectarian lines have been drawn through mixed neighborhoods. Sunnis have responded with their own sectarian cleansing. A large portion of the mostly Sunni middle and upper classes has fled the country; Jordan and Syria together now have nearly 2 million Iraqi expatriates.

Inter-sect marriages have become less and less common. The people fighting may have no conception of any greater plan. The wider Muslim world, however, tends to focus on the big picture. So in most Arab capitals, the sectarian war in Iraq is increasingly blamed on Iran. But both sides are responsible for stoking tensions. Religious leaders of the Wahhabi sect, often backed and bankrolled by members of the Saudi royal family, contribute to the spread of sectarian violence by preaching a hard-line form of Sunni Islam that condemns all other strains as heresy.

In the latest attacks, three separate suicide bombings killed 21 during the Ashura rituals in January. In Lebanon, sectarian tensions have risen after years of relative calm. Sunni politicians stoke these anxieties in the hope that Arab pressure on the Iraqi government will force it to give Sunnis a greater share of power. Most Iraqis, caught up in their own terrors, have little time for the angst of the wider Islamic world.

And children do not get too many lessons in secularism at home. Ubaid lives with three brothers and their families. Will she stay that way?

If all goes according to plan, the Iraqi government will use the respite from violence to launch a massive economic program that will create jobs and improve civic services like electricity and water supply. Conceivably, all that might happen. As Operation Imposing Law got under way on Feb.

Al-Sadr has ordered his Mahdi Army to lie low and avoid direct confrontation with American troops. Al-Sadr himself and several of his top commanders are believed to have left for Iran. When people talk of the Sunni-Shia divide as an issue in international politics, they are generally alluding to the divide between Sunnis and Twelvers, since that is the divide that appears to have political significance today.

Other Shia groups, such as the Ismaili followers of the Agha Khan, tend to have little significance in the politics of most Muslim countries, while others, such as the Alawis of Syria who are an offshoot of the Twelvers or the Zaydis of Yemen who are not are only of political importance in the particular countries where they are located.

It is often forgotten that the Sunni-Shia divide only became explosive internationally from the s onwards. Before then, Twelvers had come to be accepted by many Sunnis almost as an additional law school alongside the four great law schools of Sunni Islam. Sunnis accept these four law schools, the Malikis, Hanafis, Shafi'is and Hanbalis, as equally valid in their teaching of the practice of the faith. Twelvers are sometimes described as followers of the Ja'fari law school, named after the sixth Imam, Ja'far al-Sadiq died It is worth noting in passing that, as well as being a Shia Imam, he was also hugely respected by Sunnis as a teacher of Muslim doctrine and practice.

None of this means that tensions between Sunnis and Shias had been absent. After the creation of the modern state of Iraq, for instance, there were bitter struggles over whether the Sunni or Shia interpretation of the early history of Islam should be taught in schools.

The majority Shia felt excluded from Iraq's predominantly Sunni elite although between and the overthrow of the Iraqi monarchy in there were four Shia prime ministers. Yet in many countries, including Iraq and Syria, secular politics based on nationalist and socialist ideas seemed to be the way forward. This made questions of sectarian identity among the Muslims there less important. When India was partitioned in , Pakistan was conceived as a homeland for a new nation that would have Islam as the cornerstone of its national identity.

Intra-Muslim sectarianism played no part in its creation. Frequently overlooked today and sometimes airbrushed from history is the fact that Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, was a Twelver Shia. So were the Bhutto family. Why has Sunni-Shia sectarianism become so toxic?

There are several reasons. The first is the tolerance of anti-Shia hate speech by the Saudi Arabian government, which, especially after it accrued massive oil revenues from onwards, has sought to export its brittle Wahhabi ideology. Saudi Arabia might see itself as promoting Muslim solidarity as a rallying point for conservatives against Arab nationalism, socialism and democracy, yet its founding ideology, Wahhabism, demonises the Shia and Sufis as idolaters.

The second reason is the Iranian revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini's ambition was to persuade all Muslims — Sunnis as well as Shias — to line up behind him.

That was his motive when issuing a death sentence on Salman Rushdie, for example. The spread of Iranian revolutionary ideas was seen as a threat by Saudi Arabia and all other western-aligned, conservative states with Muslim populations. As the decades passed, Saudi Arabia and Iran would both try to co-opt Sunni and Shia communities to their side in their struggle for regional power. Iran's greatest success was in the mobilisation of the Twelvers of Lebanon and the formation of the political and paramilitary organisation, Hezbollah.

It also did what it could to stir up trouble for Saudi Arabia among the Twelvers of the oil-rich eastern province of the kingdom, who were always looked down on with suspicion by the Saudi monarchy and suffered discrimination.