Sunni Vs Shia Conflict

Islam is the second largest religion in the world, and is on the rise to overtake Christianity as the largest practiced religion. Islam has two major groups, the Sunni, and Shia. Although the Sunni and Shia have many of the same beliefs, but they are often in dispute with each other over their differences in their beliefs. Of course they haven't been fighting forever and there was a time when they worshipped together peacefully, but conflict between these two groups can be traced back almost 1400 years. The first time that these two groups were at disagreement was in 632 when people of the religion had two different ideas on who should have leadership in the religion. In modern times, the Sunni and Shia conflicts first arose in 1979 after when

When Muhammad died, the community split when some people of the community thought that only people from Muhammad's bloodline should be the ruler, but others believed that “leadership should be awarded to qualified individuals.” (The Sunni-Shia Divide) The Sunni believes that the person who becomes the leader should be granted to the most qualified person, while the Shia believed that political succession should be based on Muhammad's bloodline. A group of prominent followers of Islam elected Abu Bakr, a companion of Muhammad, to be the first leader of the Islamic community. This upset the Shia because they wanted Ali, Muhammad's cousin, to be the first leader. This is when conflict first started between the Sunni and Shia. Ali became the caliph in 656, but was then assasinated 5 years later. The caliphate was then passed to the Umayyad Dynasty and later the Abbasids. Shias rejected the authority of these leaders and didn’t believe that they deserved to be the leaders of the Islamic Religion. In 680, the second Umayyad caliph had his soldiers kill Husayn, Ali’s son, in Karbala. Karbala became a defining moral story for the Shia. The Sunni on the other hand were nervous that the Shia would use Karbala as a way to take over monarchs and capture the public's imagination. This resulted in further persecution and marginalization of

Today, the “Sunni and Shia forces have fed a Syrian civil war that threatens to transform the map of the Middle East, spurred violence that is fracturing Iraq, and widened fissures in a number of tense Gulf countries.” (The Sunni-Shia Divide) The modern tensions started between these two groups in 1979 when Iran’s Islamic Revolution gave Shia cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini the opportunity to start his vision for the Islamic government. He planned to rule by the “guardianship of the jurist.” This concept is very controversial among Shia scholars and is opposed by Sunnis. The transformation of Iran into a Shia power after the Islamic Revolution created a lot of conflict between the Sunni and Shia. This induced Saudi Arabia to try and grow the Sunni, which reopened an old rivalry between the two groups. This rivalry led to Saudi Arabia backing Iraq in the war with Iran, and sponsoring militants that were not only fighting against the Soviet Union, but also suppressing Shia movements backed by Iran. The violence didn’t stop there though. As stated in The Sunni-Shia Divide, “The bombing of the Shia shrine in Samarra in 2006 kicked off a cycle of sectarian violence that forced Iraqis to pick sides, stirring tensions that continue today.” This bombing started more violence between the two groups, which lead to historic monuments being destroyed and more deaths caused by extremists of each