What's the difference between a shiite and a sunni muslim?

Answer 1

The main difference is on who should have succeeded the Prophet (pbuh) after his death.

Shi'a :believe it should have been/is Ali Bin Abi Talib who is a relative of the Prophet (cousin, and also husband to the Prophet's daughter Fatima)

Sunni: believe the Prophet (pbuh) deliberately declined to designate a successor but the people's choice was dear friend (to the Prophet) Abu Bakr, followed by Umar, Uthman and then Ali Bin Abi Talib (may Allah be please with them all). Who are known as the Caliphs.



peace unto you

Answer 2

Tribal traditions, a number of religious traditions, and of course, physical location. The two groups do not have a friendly history.

It's pretty peculiar that I've heard Muslims say that there is only one kind of Muslim...but there are all these deep divisions even between one town and another. There's a refusal to accept that there are different sects within the Islamic faith...at least publicly.

Answer 3

Shiites pray with their foreheads on a little stone they pull out of their pockets and they practise temporary marriages and Sunni pray on carpets or mats but they both preach the same Satanic Hadith and kill their wives on suspicion in honour killings and have both turned their backs on the good deeds of the Quran.

Not much difference really!

Answer 4

Sunnis follow a man named Abu Bakr. He was the father of Muhammad's favorite wife and was elected as Muhammad's successor by the leaders of Medina.

Shiites follow Ali. He was hand chosen by Muhammad as his successor.

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

why you don't want to see that all the Muslims are humans, and , after all, their religions beliefs don't matter. They get born, they live and die like every human on this planet. Don't try to see the difference! See all like humans and try to make them see the humans!

Answer 7

i think they should come to common terms..
that is to believe in one God (Allah swt) and believe that Muhammad (SAW) is the last messenger of Allah..
and one who rightly follows Quran and the ahadiths of Prophet Muhammad SAW .. he will call himself.. Muslim
becuase our prophet was Muslim .. nor sunni neither shites..
anyway I alhum dulillah Call myself Muslim.. coz my Prophet was Muslim...
and no where in Quran .........the word sunni or shiete is mentioned..
and we are not allowed to make sectors...........
coz one who follows Quran and sahi ahadith will enter in paradise.............
nowhere it is said to believe in such and such Imam.. or firq.. you'll enter in paradise.........
try not to believe in Taqleeed(blind following) try to find out byurself.. the reasons and facts and the conclusions... with the help of Quran . sahi ahadith and known ..... knowledgable Imam..

Allah swt knows.. best.........
May Allah swt guide us All

Answer 8

One believes in someone being elected by the elders or chosen.
the other I believe they said has to inherit it from like royal parents or from the priestly class of clerics. If your not from that tribe you can not rule.

Answer 9

its not a big difference...both believe in Allah...both believe in book..Qu'ran...Both believe Muhammad pbuh.....
the differences is between..some laws....shariat...