Muslim VGCers: What's the difference between Sunni and Shiite?

[superchunk]

huaxiong90 said:

superchunk said:

huaxiong90 said:

 

Agreed with everything you said except the last part. The Hadiths aren't the reason the Sunni-Shia split occured (followed by the many offshoots of Shia Islam).

I would send you a link that explains the roots of the divide, but it's in Arabic (unless you can read Arabic).

Personally, although I live in Saudi Arabia at the moment, a country that follows the Hanbali way, my thoughts are more closely aligned to the Hanafi school. The Hanbali math'hab is too extreme for me.

I know why they originally split due to a disagreement on who should be the Caliph and what each side based their arguments on.

However, many decades later they developed their own set of Hadiths and now these hadiths form a more religious gap between the sects. These need to be removed as the Qur'an forbade any other book before it and the Prophet even forced his followers to not keep records of anything that he didn't claim was from God to try and prevent Islam from becoming like Christianity. However, people will be people and disobeyed these guidelines. Now we have Hadiths full of factual issues, historical issues, contradictions to each other and the Qur'an, men's personal vendettas, etc. They should be abolished.

See, that's the thing. It's not as simple as just a disagreement regarding who should be the Caliph or the sort. Can you read Arabic? If so, I have to send you a link (assuming I can find it), and see what you make of it.

As for the Hadiths: I can't really answer that at the moment, as I have yet to completely go through them, but from what I know, Islamic scholars worked hard to document the Hadiths, and lies within them were spaded and removed. And even today, the more controversial ones are disputed. It's really a study, moreso than a thing to live by.

It all goes back to my original issue with Muslims today: They do NOT educate themselves. This is the bane of us contemporary Muslims.

Sorry, I do not speak Arabic. I took two years, but have retained very little. However, the minor of my Bachelor's degree was in Middle Eastern history. I have read numerous books and multiple classes on ME history as well as Islamic history. However, on a forum I don't tend to cite sources and go into great detail. For the point of this thread a high level view and summary is more than sufficient.

The origins of the Shia are from the phrase Shiatu ali or parties of Ali or faction of ali. The majority of Muslims wanted to follow more traditional tribal ways of accepting a leader by essentially voting among the men of the community. Whereas a minority group wanted it to be Ali who was the closest thing to a direct male descendant of Muhammad.

This is the original split. At first it was purely civilized and all was good, but later it became a strong separation and eventually led to other relatively minor religious issues and included various Mahdi's or principle religious leaders in the varying sects of Shia Islam. Mahdi's btw is something that is really odd to me as it has no basis in the Qur'an as far as I have studied.

I think its obvious that the Hadiths are majority a farce as they were recorded generations after the prophet died and are all hearsay.