Sunni & Shia - What is (really) the difference?

We often hear today about the divide between Sunnis and Shiites in media coverage of conflicts or political situations in the Middle East, one gives the impression of a perpetual war between two branches of Islam and often with very little nuance when explained. or these branches are explained. The war that experts or journalists talk about in videos here on YouTube often presents a simplified version of historical and contemporary

difference

s, often reducing them to an event that occurred after Muhammad's death, but as you would expect at this point , its alot. More complicated than this,

what

are the

difference

s between Shiites and Sunnis and how did they arise?

As you may have heard, the story possibly begins with the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 AD, this event sent shock waves throughout the world. community and this immediately started discussions about who should succeed him. There was a group in a camp who believed that their close friend Abu Bakr should be the first halifa or caliph, but not everyone agreed. There was another group who believed that their cousin and his son-in-law. law Ali was the rightful heir, the first group that favored Abu Bakr won this argument and became the first in a line of four so-called rightly guided caliphs, followed by Omar Othman and finally Ali himself, all chosen by a kind of caliph.

From the semi democratic process it could be said that this first group favored Abu Bakr, we could call them proto Sunni, it is this group that would later become Sunni, Ali's other favorite group was often called Shia Ali, which means the party from Ali and this That's where the word Shiite comes from. This is where the story usually ends for many people that this division is simply a difference in the succession of Muhammad and that it sort of ends there, but there is much more to this story over the next few decades. For centuries there would be great conflicts of authority over who should lead the Muslim community.

We can't

really

talk about a conflict between Sunnis and Shiites here because these two distinct groups hadn't even emerged yet, in that sense there were many proto-Sunni groups like the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties that you've probably heard of and many others that would compete for who He should be the legitimate leader. There were also the descendants of Muhammad and Ali the Shiites who favored or more or less their idea was the legitimate leader of the Muslims. the community should belong exclusively to the family of the prophet his descendants in the line of Ali down to the Shiites Ali was the first so-called imam, a worldly as well as spiritual successor to Muhammad who had been given the secrets to correctly understand and interpret the religion after Ali there Therefore, there is a line of mom who will succeed him as imams and leaders starting with his son Hasan and then Hussein.

Now Hussein started a sort of revolt against the previous Mayan dynasty and was very famously martyred and killed by the Umayyad forces in Karbala. a very important event for Shias and Muslims and is commemorated every year in a festival or called Ashura after he said that his son became the next Imam and then his son and then his son of him and so on. Most of these magnets favored a kind of tranquility. approach to generalize living some

what

isolated lives with a group of followers despite often being persecuted by the Umayyad and later Abbasid caliphs as a threat to their leadership. the other caleb called themselves imams, and did so with significant religious authority, as many of you know, these include the caliphs of the dynasty, as I mentioned, like the Umayyad and Abbasid empires now, because things insist on be always complicated, the so-called Shiite branch is not a homogeneous group, in fact they are already divided into many branches of their own by the fifth Imam or after the fourth a succession conflict appeared over who should be the next Imam.

There was a group that favored a guy called Isaiah it was Ali who turned into these improvised explosive devices, the Sayyidi Shiites or also known as the five are Shiites and these are still alive today in a significant portion of the population in Yemen and then, although another succession conflict later appeared in the first type of line in the fifth or sixth depends on whether you ask mom, jafar as-sadiq, there were some who favored his eldest son with a smile, even Jaffa, who He became known as the easy smile or seven or Shiites, which is the second largest group of modern-day Shiites, another faction rather saw his youngest son, Musa al-qasim, as the legitimate successor and these met. as if Natasha or the twelve Shiites, sometimes also called the Imam is Shiite and this is the largest group today, it is the twelve or the ancient Shiism that is dominant in Iran today and is the state religion of Iran, The smiley face, on the other hand, is also quite complicated.

They eventually established the Fatimid dynasty and developed further into more branches, the Nasrids and more tally is my lease, the first is the largest of them and is the only group of Shiites that still has a living Imam in Agha Khan. The fourth, this last group is represented by a group called Boris, which exists mainly in India today. My reason for retelling this general story is to point out that Shias are not a homogeneous group and neither are Sunnis. So we shouldn't see the story as this kind of clear dichotomy between these two Sunnis versus Shias in some kind of conflict because this divided them.

This group did not exist historically in the way we conceive of it today, well, historical facts aside, we must also recognize that since Sunnis and Shiites often had completely different ideas about the Authority, this of course affected their own kind of doctrines and ideas, it wasn't just this kind of early political division. It eventually also became philosophical, theological, and legalistic because Shiites and Sunnis viewed different companions of Muhammad as more or less trustworthy. This also greatly affected the transmission of hadiths, the stories about the prophet and his companions, so Sunnis and Shiites often used different collections. of hadiths among themselves, which is also the basis of much of Islamic law and rituals, not only that, but Shiites also view the hadiths of the Imams as authoritative and not just those of Muhammad, and these hadiths SAR are also frequently used in legal matters, as well as As time went by, theological differences appeared, in general, it can be said that the more rationalist theological school based on Lee, Motta's wing, which eventually became a minority in the Sunni world, was adopted to a much greater degree by the Shiites, especially by the twelve branches or branches of anxiety of that time.

Allah favored a more metaphorical and allegorical reading of the Scriptures and had a more transcendent vision of God without any anthropomorphic features. For example, the school of Allah was also quite popular from the beginning among the Sunnis, but soon after it lost its prominence in favor of another school. called Arshad ISM, a more literalist approach that remains mainstream today. The Smylys, in turn, went their own direction, strongly inspired by the new Platonic philosophy. Their theology is unique in this context, it has very different ideas about revelation and metaphysics, for example, and presents many esoteric aspects when it comes to thick questions or jurisprudence, here too there are differences, while the Sunnis eventually developed to rule out gradually things like the jurist's personal rational efforts in favor of the revealed sources like the hadiths and analogies of the Quran, etc., the Shiites.

The market has generally maintained the importance of something called jihad, which could be translated as personal interpretation or personal efforts to interpret, while they did not like things like analogy as much as the Sunnis did when talking about the Sunni world, which is often claimed to be the door to each D had been closed around the year 1000 and this of course is not true at all as people were still interpreting and are still interpreting today, but that is a topic for another video. We must remember that these are broad generalizations and that I am speaking mainly from a historical perspective, in fact, the HD HUD concept has resurfaced a lot in the Sunni world, especially in the last two centuries, with the rise of certain reformist movements such as what often called Islamic modernism, in which people have begun to reinterpret and The use of HD again had to reinterpret original sources such as the Quran, which has led to everything from Islamic feminism to Al Qaeda, so the Sunni law schools, the mother centers being the Hanafi, Shafi, Maliki and Hanbali, are independent and differentiated from the various Shia schools.

The 12er school of jurisprudence is often known as the Joffrey school. The Sayyidi school is called the Zion school. and these emoticons have the Smyly school very simple, of course these emoticons at least in the Saudis still make their living Imam, which means that he still has the highest authority and the final say when it comes to interpreting the Quran and deriving o adapt your loss to today's society. In fact, this is one of the main doctrines of Shiism. Shia imams are not simply worldly leaders of the world. The Muslim community are also the spiritual leaders and authority.

Ali is believed to have received the inner secrets to interpreting the Quran, a spiritual wisdom that he passed on to the next Imam, who passed it on to the next, and so on to the Shiites. The Quran is not complete in that sense, but must always be interpreted and understood by the living Imams (the descendants of the Prophet himself), the Sunnis, on the other hand, while the early caliphs had some authority over religious matters and the law, this authority eventually disappeared. and they became more secular leaders, religious matters that were then dealt with by groups of jurists, theologians and to some extent Sufis.

Sufi sheikhs. We must remember that we must avoid seeing this divine as some clean factions that are in perpetual war or something like war conflicts, of course. the minority group was often persecuted and oppressed by the majority. These are just a few of the multitude of different perspectives and ideas that existed within the broader Muslim community. Many Sunnis were inspired by Shiites and vice versa. I would say they didn't show up. a clear dichotomy between Sunnis and Shiites as we see it today until the rise of the so-called gunpowder empires in the early modern period, say between the 16th and 18th or 19th centuries, so on the one hand we had the Ottoman Empire ruling .

Large portions of the Middle East from Istanbul were predominantly Sunni and then on the other hand we had what is in modern Iran the Safavid Empire whose state religion was Shiism, so here for the first time we have two empires, one which is very clearly Sunni and other Shia and not always on the best terms, these empires and the cultural and religious practice there were often very different from each other to the point that they can sometimes seem like completely different religions, for example in Sufism of the 11th Safavid Empire. began to be seen in a very suspicious light, many of the Safavid Empire's jurists were very opposed to Sufism and it was often persecuted, which is especially strange since the Safavids were founded and named after a Sufi order, the Safavieh, and this stands in stark contrast to the other two Sunni empires, the Ottomans and the Mughals, in which Sufism flourished, this negative stance towards Sufism that began during the Safavid dynasty has left its mark even in many of the Sufi orders. in Iran, as the new Mutulu order. severely oppressed still today, so although the gunpowder empires no longer exist, their effect can still be greatly felt, the lands that were ruled by the Ottoman and Mughal empires are still dominated by Sunnis in terms of population, in contrast to Iran and the larger Persian region. has a majority of Shiites with the rise of the nation-state system, these conflicts are not as clear as they were back then, although there are clearly still tensions, as we can see today in the region, what is important to remember is that the great Shiites The Sunni tension we see today is not that old either;

In reality, it has only gotten worse in the last 70 years or so with the rise of divisive politics in the Middle East and the subsequent expansion of fundamentalist groups. It is also important to remember that many religious groups and leaders on both sides of the spectrum are working hard today to establish religious unity and solidarity between these two groups. There are many examples of this type of syncretism both in the contemporary world and historically to conclude the difference between the Sunnis and the Shiites is not simply a matter of succession after Muhammad. This initial division led to many other distinctions developing between the two.

They often differ on how the Quran should be interpreted or even conceived. They have different points of view andauthority. His theologies have developed in different ways. directions, they often use different collections of hadiths from different narrators and therefore the loss of their Sharia and their rituals often differ, they celebrate different holidays such as Ashura, in the case of the Shiites, the doctrines of the imams as well It is a significant distinction as there is more prominent focus on the Upper Wheel and Shi'ism and, as we have seen, the Shi'a themselves are also divided into multiple branches that are often very distinct from each other, as are the many branches within the Sunni ISM, there are even differences in very central types of ideas. and concepts like the so-called five pillars of Islam, while the Sunnis and the Twelve have five pillars, these emoticons actually have seven, so as you can see, the differences are often much larger and more significant than we think.

They make you believe, but at the same time and like me. I have said several times in this video that we should also avoid drawing to clarify a dichotomy between these two groups as if they were like the Catholic or port churches in medieval times or these two branches that are constantly in perpetual war. History has shown a complicated myriad schools and ideas that have sometimes been in opposition to each other. There have been periods in history like now or during the gunpowder empires where the division seems much more prominent and other periods and places where it has not been.

Everything I've said in this video are, of course, generalizations as well, but I hope I've given you a slightly more nuanced and complex view of these two movements within Islam. Let me know what you think and correct me if so. I have made serious mistakes. I'll see you next time.