Shia-Sunni Split Many religions have different denominations and Islam is not an exception in this regard. The two primary denominations of Islam are Sunni Islam and Shia Islam. The majority of Muslims across the globe are Sunni, estimated to be roughly 85% to 90% of the Muslim population. The remaining smaller number of Muslims, say about 15%, are Shia. Further demarcations indicate that most Shias belong to the tradition known as Twelver with the rest of the Shia identifying with other traditions.

Twelver refers to the number of descendants of Muhammad that this sect of the Shia recognize. Another group is referred to as the Seveners, since they recognize only seven descendants who were official caliphs of Islam. This is further complicated by the concept of Occultation, which refers to a messianic figure, or Mahdi, who is born but goes into hiding (referred to as disappearing) in order to be safe. Criticism of the concept of Occultation as a pious fraud which promotes the idea of waiting faithfully for a messiah who will renovate the world by eradicating evil and restoring full good. Moreover, a period of Occultation permits an elaborate system of communication between believers and agent of the Mahdi who has disappeared, as only certain privileged individuals can conduct the sacred duty of contacting the Mahdi on behalf of the believers. In this scenario, the Mahdi is said to be physically present, but in hiding. In other scenarios, no one presides over the Shia faithful, who all await the Mahdi. An objective scholar can see the possibilities for controlling situations or believers without the authentic authority to do so.

In any given Muslim community, Sunnis tend to be in the majority: this is true for Muslim communities in most of the Arab world and in Africa, China, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. Globally, the largest number of practicing adherents of the Sunni tradition reside in Indonesia. The Shia, on the other hand, are in the majority of Muslim populations in Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Lebanon, Iran, and Iraq. The largest population of Shia Muslims are in Iran. Pakistan is uniquely positioned as the country with both the second-largest Sunni population and the second-largest Shia Muslim population in the world.

The Historic Denominational Split

The death of a religious leader is a vulnerable time for believers and for the religion as an entity. When Muhammad, the prophet of Islam died in 632, the response of believers was chaotic as a caliph for all of Islam had not been identified to become the successor to Muhammad. That Muhammad was a prophet, possessing special knowledge about the Quran and professing communion with God (Allah) made Muhammad fundamentally irreplaceable. Muslim believers stood on a precipice as it became clear that their beloved Muhammad was dying. Muslim elders in Medina agree to designate Abu Bakr as caliph thereby addressing the urgent need to selecting a successor to Muhammad. Abu Bakr was the father-in-law of the prophet Muhammad. By selecting Abu Bakr, the elders established a precedent that caliphs who were successors of Muhammad would be members of the Quraysh tribe. But a minority of the elders favored a man named Ali, calling themselves Shiat Ali, or the partisans of Ali. In 656, following the assassination of his predecessor, Ali becomes the fourth caliph; there is subsequent rebellion against him among some Muslims.

A growing dispute escalated into the Battle of Siffin, a conflict pivotal to the shift from argument and disagreement to full-scale violence. What soon followed was the even larger Battle of Karbala in 680, in which Hussein ibn Ali, the son of Ali, marched against the caliph's army in Iraq, Hussein's army is massacred, he is and his entire household is killed at the hands of the ruler Umayyad Caliph Yazid I. The divide between the Shiites and the Sunnis deepened.

What began as an ideological schism and a scramble for power deteriorated into revenge seeking and an irreparable breech between the Sunni and the Shia. As the two denominations continued to mature separately from one another, differences in beliefs, customs, traditions, and religious practices emerged. While all Muslim groups believe the Quran is divine, issues about jurisprudence and the hadith have created strong separations among the denominations of Islam. Hadith is the process of attribution that accompanies secondary interpretations of a divine book, which necessarily follows as believers strive to align what they understand of the Quran with what they know Muhammad said, and what they believe he said, tacitly approved, or sanctioned.

Check and Check Mate

Over many hundreds of...

Sectarian violence is term for the conflict and strife that is inspired by differences in ideology or religion associated with different sects within a larger community or nation. Sectarian violence is a particularly apt term for the conflict that persists between Sunni and Shia throughout the Middle East. A series of epic power struggles and international conflicts have intensified sectarian violence among Islamic sects.
Prior to World War I, the Shiite clerics practiced a time of Quietism in which they tolerated the rule of monarchs as long as religious law was not violated, and as long as the Shiites community was preserved and protected. A perfect Islamic state was considered pie-in-the-sky. In the 1920s, both Shite and Sunni Arabs revolted against British control of Iraq, and shortly after, Kemal Ataturk abolished the Ottoman sultanate along with the Turkish Sunnis caliphate. Still, the Shiite clerics held the line until 1925 when Reza Pahlavi, a Persian military officer conducted a coup, seized power, and declared himself shah. Persia officially became Iran, and a secular government was established, which essentially shut out the Shiite clergy. After Pahlavi rubbed shoulders with Nazi Germany during much of the 1930s, he sufficiently burned bridges with the Allies, such that early in World War II, Britain and the Soviet Union seized part of Iran and made the shah abdicate the throne. Shortly before World War II, in 1932, Iraq became an independent nation governed by King Faisal, who was a Sunni Arab. By 1941, British and Soviet military forces had occupied Iran. A joint CIA/British intelligence operation in Iran worked to keep the shah on the throne and in power by outing nationalist Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh.

By 1953, the political instability in Iran forced the new shah to flee, until a cooperative coup devised by the CIA and the British returned him to power. Those experiences caused considerable distrust and shah established a body of secret police that mercilessly destroyed anyone who challenged the shah's rule. But the shah's long arm did not extend to the mosques, which provided a venue and cover for dissidents, including the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. As an instigator of widespread protests and unrest in Iran, the Ayatollah was arrested and exiled to Najaf in Iraq in 1963. His exile provided time and space for the Ayatollah to conceptualize a Shite Islamic state that would be controlled by the clergy. The Ayatollah's rationale was that only clerics had true knowledge of Islamic law and so were the only people qualified to be the political leaders of the state. A primary reason why this new concept of religious government did not have quick uptake by the Shiite clerics in Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon was that wide acceptance of the eventual return of the Twelfth Imam (the hidden Imam of the 9th century) when God determined it was time to bring justice to earth. In 1978, the cities in Iran were overrun by protesters calling for the overthrow of the shah. A full-blown revolution followed that was characterized by a roiling conflation of ideologies: Anti-imperialism, communism, secular pluralism, and a supreme religious leader for the new Islamic state.

The Shiites were emboldened by their accomplishments and tilted ever more toward activism -- a characteristic that is still in evidence. Kohmeini sought a unified revolution with the Sunnis fully onboard. Many Sunni activists rejected the Iranian revolution out-of-hand, and Sunni governments began to respond more aggressively. Indeed, the Saudis began to strengthen Sunni fundamentalist movements. Saddam Hussein went into a full aggressive state in 1980 with the invasion of Iran, a move intended to overtake the Iranian oil fields. In 1990, Saddam set his sights on Kuwait oil fields, which brought the U.S. military into the fray 1991 to drive the Iraqi army from Kuwait. This year saw the Shiites of southern Iraq stage their own rebellion against Saddam, but they were brutally crushed with thousands of Shiites killed by Saddam's military.

Economic sanctions were placed on Iraq from 1991 through 2003 due to suspicions of nuclear development within the country, which further prompted U.N. weapons inspectors to move to destroy biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons in Iraq. In 2001, the Sunni Muslim fundamentalist group known as Al-Qaida conducted several attacks on the U.S. mainland killing 3,000 people. In response, the U.S. military invaded Afghanistan to oust the Sunni Taliban government. The U.S. military invaded…