Free God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World by Stephen Prothero

Paradise.
    Fiqh , or interpretation of Shariah, is based on both the Quran and the Hadith, a secondary body of scripture comprising thousands of accounts of the words and deeds of Muhammad. These Hadith, which were gathered in the eighth and ninth centuries into six respected Sunni collections, cover both law in the secular sense of that term and ritual obligations. They extend to such seemingly mundane matters as the cut of Muhammad’s beard and the foods he liked (honey and mutton) and disliked (garlic and melons). The Shia have their own Hadith literature, which also includes accounts of the lives of their Imams (leaders).
    Not all Hadith are equally authoritative, however. Each comes with both a chain of transmission, known as the isnad, and content, known as the matn , and the authenticity of any given Hadith can be challenged on either basis. If the chain of oral transmission from Muhammad to whomever recorded the Hadith is dubious—if one of the transmitters is unreliable, for example—it can be rejected. If its content contradicts the Quran, it can be rejected too. So Muslims disagree routinely over whether a given Hadith is authentic. 20
    Outsiders often imagine that Islamic law is unchanging and immutable, but Sunnis and Shias differ significantly on all sorts of legal matters, and Sunnis themselves recognize four major legal schools. 21 Like Roman Catholics, the Shia centralize religious authority, in their case in the Imam. Sunnis decentralize religious authority, placing it in the Muslim community as a whole. So it should not be surprising that Sunni legal views vary widely.
    There has been much talk in the West of the fatwa , or legal opinion, since the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa against the novelist Salman Rushdie in 1990 and Osama bin Laden issued fatwas in 1996 and 1998 protesting the presence of U.S. military troops in Saudi Arabian holy lands. Beginning with the Quranic recitation to “slay the pagans wherever you find them,” bin Laden referred in the latter fatwa to U.S. military activity on the Arabian Peninsula as “clear declaration of war on God, his messenger, and Muslims” and called the killing of Americans and their allies “an individual duty for every Muslim.” 22 Few Muslims heeded that call. That is because a fatwa carries the force of law only to those who recognize the authority of the jurist who issues it, and traditionally fatwas have been issued by jurists, not by laypeople such as bin Laden. In 2005 Muslim clerics in Spain issued a fatwa condemning “the terrorist acts of Osama bin Laden and his organization al-Qaeda” as “against Islam.” 23 Bin Laden, they found, is an apostate who follows not the Quran but a law of his own devising.
    Sunni and Shia
    As this fatwa slinging shows, there are many interpretations of Islam. There is no Muslim pope to issue infallible encyclicals, so Islam is a big tent theologically. There are fundamentalists and feminists, legalists and mystics, progressives and moderates. But the most basic division in the Muslim world pits Sunnis, who constitute roughly 85 percent of the world’s Muslims, against Shias, who account for the remaining 15 percent.
    Surviving a founder’s death is a challenge for every new religious movement. Mormonism splintered in 1844 over the question of Joseph Smith’s successor, and the Hare Krishna movement was thrown into chaos after the death of Swami Prabhupada in 1977. Following Muhammad’s death, Muslims split over this key question of authority. A majority backed Muhammad’s father-in-law Abu Bakr as his successor. But a minority, insisting that Islam’s next leader share Muhammad’s bloodline, backed the Prophet’s son-in-law Ali.
    Those who supported Ali came to be called Shiat Ali (“partisans of Ali”), or Shia for short. Those who supported Abu Bakr came to be called Sunni (from sunna , which means tradition). The broader and deeper disagreement concerned how the Islamic community was