what are shiite and sunni muslims?

Answer 1

Shiite and Sunni Muslims are pretty much the same. However they disagree on who should have been the first caliph. The Shiites think that it should have been Ali bin Abi-Talib, Prophet Muhammad's (PBUH) cousin, and the Sunnis believe that who the Prophet (PBUH) chose to be the first caliph (Abu Bakr, his best friend) was the right choice. However, they both read the same Qur'an, and follow the same Five Pillars of Islam.

Answer 2

So after Muhammad died, the Shias wanted Ali to be the Caliph, because they believed that the imam of Muslims should be from the family of the Prophet. This caused the split. The Sunnis believe the Shias glorify Ali to much, to the extent that it is against Islamic teachings. That's pretty much the basis of it. Nothing to do with what is stated in the Koran, but just because they want their tribes to be in power.

Answer 3

they are both muslim . but sunnis believe after death"s mohammad Abubakr replaced him and shiites beliene Ali ebn Abutaleb replaced him . after a long time political group abuse this matter.

Answer 4

sunni are the peopel who are making all the problems in Iraq!

they just hate shiite gots,,,,i mean they hate them as hell,,

all Bin Ladin,Saddam,etc..
are sunni,
so,,good luck buddy!!


i mean what the hell,,,Muslims are not United anyway,,

Answer 5

A pain in the #$%, especially to each other. But if you want to get technical:

The Islam religion was founded by Mohammed in the seventh century. In 622 he founded the first Islamic state, a theocracy in Medina, a city in western Saudi Arabia located north of Mecca. There are two branches of the religion he founded.

The Sunni branch believes that the first four caliphs--Mohammed's successors--rightfully took his place as the leaders of Muslims. They recognize the heirs of the four caliphs as legitimate religious leaders. These heirs ruled continuously in the Arab world until the break-up of the Ottoman Empire following the end of the First World War.

Shiites, in contrast, believe that only the heirs of the fourth caliph, Ali, are the legitimate successors of Mohammed. In 931 the Twelfth Imam disappeared. This was a seminal event in the history of Shiite Muslims. According to R. Scott Appleby, a professor of history at the University of Notre Dame, "Shiite Muslims, who are concentrated in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon, [believe they] had suffered the loss of divinely guided political leadership" at the time of the Imam's disappearance. Not "until the ascendancy of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1978" did they believe that they had once again begun to live under the authority of a legitimate religious figure.

In a special 9-11 edition of the Journal of American History, Appleby explained that the Shiite outlook is far different from the Sunni's, a difference that is highly significant:

... for Sunni Muslims, approximately 90 percent of the Muslim world, the loss of the caliphate after World War I was devastating in light of the hitherto continuous historic presence of the caliph, the guardian of Islamic law and the Islamic state. Sunni fundamentalist leaders thereafter emerged in nations such as Egypt and India, where contact with Western political structures provided them with a model awkwardly to imitate ... as they struggled after 1924 to provide a viable alternative to the caliphate.

In 1928, four years after the abolishment of the caliphate, the Egyptian schoolteacher Hasan al-Banna founded the first Islamic fundamentalist movement in the Sunni world, the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun). Al-Banna was appalled by "the wave of atheism and lewdness [that] engulfed Egypt" following World War I. The victorious Europeans had "imported their half-naked women into these regions, together with their liquors, their theatres, their dance halls, their amusements, their stories, their newspapers, their novels, their whims, their silly games, and their vices." Suddenly the very heart of the Islamic world was penetrated by European "schools and scientific and cultural institutes" that "cast doubt and heresy into the souls of its sons and taught them how to demean themselves, disparage their religion and their fatherland, divest themselves of their traditions and beliefs, and to regard as sacred anything Western."14 Most distressing to al-Banna and his followers was what they saw as the rapid moral decline of the religious establishment, including the leading sheikhs, or religious scholars, at Al-Azhar, the grand mosque and center of Islamic learning in Cairo. The clerical leaders had become compromised and corrupted by their alliance with the indigenous ruling elites who had succeeded the European colonial masters.

Osama bina Laden is a Sunni Muslim. To him the end of the reign of the caliphs in the 1920s was catastrophic, as he made clear in a videotape made after 9-11. On the tape, broadcast by Al-Jazeera on October 7, 2001, he proclaimed: "What America is tasting now is only a copy of what we have tasted. ... Our Islamic nation has been tasting the same for more [than] eighty years, of humiliation and disgrace, its sons killed and their blood spilled, its sanctities desecrated."

Answer 6

Shiate= more peaceful
Sunni= Believes in Jihad (so therefore more war)

Answer 7

follow link below

Answer 8

They are the branches of Islam and you can study Islam here;

http://blacklight79.wordpress.com/category/islamic-books/