how-sunni-and-shia-came-to-be

How Sunni and Shia Came to Be

The succession question, the scriptural evidence on both sides in their own terms, and the timeline of a divergence that took three centuries to finish.

Mohammad Siddiqui

— 85 min read
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How Sunni and Shia Came to Be
Part one of three

The succession question, the scriptural evidence on both sides in their own terms, and the timeline of a divergence that took three centuries to finish.

Mohammad Siddiqui, min readSeven sections · 21 verses and reportsSources throughout
I

What the argument is actually about

It is tempting to say the split is about who should have led after the Prophet ﷺ. That is the presenting symptom. Three distinct questions are tangled together, and the traditions differ on all three, the second one most consequentially.

Question one

Who was to succeed him?

SunniHe appointed no one in binding terms, leaving the community to choose. Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, ʿUthmān and ʿAlī, the Rāshidūn, held the office legitimately, in that order.
Twelver & IsmailiHe designated ʿAlī explicitly, by naṣṣ, clear textual designation, at Ghadīr Khumm and elsewhere. The community failed to honour it.
ZaydiʿAlī was the most worthy, but the first caliphs are not condemned as usurpers. Any qualified descendant who rises in arms is Imam.
Question two, the deep one

What kind of office is it?

KhilāfaExecutive and political leadership. The caliph enforces the law; he does not author or receive it. He can err, and is not a source of religious knowledge, that sits with the scholars and the transmitted texts.
ImāmaA divinely appointed office. The Imam is maʿṣūm, protected from sin and error, the authoritative interpreter of revelation, holding inherited knowledge, the necessary link between God and creation in every age.

Losing the argument about who would matter far less if both sides agreed the office was purely executive. They do not, and Sunni theory does not hold it merely administrative either: al-Māwardī defines the caliphate as a religious obligation of the community.

Question three

Whose transmission is reliable?

Sunni methodAuthenticate by the chain (isnād) back to the Prophet through the Companions, whose collective probity is a working presumption of the system.
Shia methodAdmit reports from the Prophet and the Imams; rijāl grades transmitters partly by doctrinal affiliation, so Companions who opposed ʿAlī are not neutral conduits. Not purely confessional, though: the category muwaththaq accepts a reliable but non-Imāmī transmitter, and thousands of such reports are relied on.

The two traditions do not merely disagree about conclusions. They disagree about what counts as evidence, which is why sincere, rigorous scholars reach incompatible results.

Not in dispute: the text of the Qur'an. Both traditions use the identical muṣḥaf. The accusation that Shia hold it corrupted (taḥrīf) is rejected by mainstream Twelver scholarship, explicitly by al-Ṣadūq (d. 991), al-Ṭūsī (d. 1067), and at length by al-Khū'ī in al-Bayān.
II

The evidence, and both readings of it

The Qur'an nowhere names a successor; both traditions accept this at the literal level. Every verse below needs an external narration to fix its referent, which is why the argument moves immediately to hadith, and why the hadith canon question is the real fault line.

The same word, two different roads. An isnād is a chain of named people. The Sunni chain runs through the Companions; the Shia chain runs through the Imams. Both authenticate by continuity and transmitter reliability, but a Companion who opposed ʿAlī is not a neutral conduit on one side, and the presumption of collective Companion probity is load-bearing on the other. This is why the two systems cannot validate each other: they disagree at the intake stage about who counts.

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III

The timeline, in five phases

The split is a process, not an event. Dots on the rail mark the turning points; gold marks the moments after which the picture cannot be put back.

The gap is the finding. The political rupture and the doctrinal rupture are not the same event and are not close together. A century separates the end of the first civil wars from the beginning of the doctrinal formation, and the Sunni hadith canon, the creed schools and the name itself all fall in the third band, two hundred years downstream of Karbala.

↔ Scroll the figure sideways

IV

The branch tree

One framing error to clear first. Popular diagrams draw Islam as a tree with mutually exclusive branches. For Sunnism this is simply wrong: law (madhhab), creed (ʿaqīda) and Sufi order (ṭarīqa) are three independent axes, not alternatives. A Turkish Muslim is typically Ḥanafī in law and Māturīdī in creed and possibly Naqshbandī in ṭarīqa, simultaneously and without contradiction.

Default pairings worth knowing: Ḥanafī ↔ Māturīdī · Shāfiʿī and Mālikī ↔ Ashʿarī · Ḥanbalī ↔ Atharī. Tendencies, not rules. Tap any branch to open it.

V

What is actually shared

After all the disputes, the proportion is easy to lose. A Sunni and a Shia pray toward the same point, in the same language, at the same times, with, allowing for the hands and the combining, nearly the same actions.

Held in common

  • The shahāda
  • The same Qur'an, word for word
  • The five daily prayers
  • The fast of Ramadan
  • Zakat
  • The hajj, same Kaʿba, same month
  • The finality of Muhammad's ﷺ prophethood
  • The same angels, prophets, scriptures, resurrection and judgement
  • The same moral law in the overwhelming majority of its content
  • The same core of fiqh in worship, transactions and family law
PracticeSunniShia (Twelver)
Prayer timesFive distinctCommonly combined into three sittings
Hands in prayerFolded, or at the sides in MālikīAt the sides (sadl)
AdhanStandardAdds ḥayya ʿalā khayr al-ʿamal; commonly a testimony to ʿAlī's wilāya, held recommended rather than part of the adhan
ProstrationAny pure surfaceCommonly a turba, a tablet of earth, often from Karbala
WuḍūʾWashing the feetWiping the feet
MutʿaProhibited, held abrogatedPermitted
TaxationZakatZakat and khums, a fifth, half to the sayyids, half to the marjaʿ
InheritanceA daughter takes her Qur'anic half; the residue passes to the male agnates (ʿaṣaba)The residue returns to the daughter by radd; collaterals are excluded while a direct descendant survives
Legal authorityThe four madhāhib; no living authority bindingBinding taqlīd of a living marjaʿ al-taqlīd
CalendarShared, plus regional practiceShared, plus Āshūrāʾ mourning, Arbaʿīn, ʿĪd al-Ghadīr

None of these is trivial to the people practising them. None of them is the reason the traditions exist separately. The reason is question two: what kind of office succeeded the Prophet, and therefore who has the authority to settle a table like this one.

VI

Three things worth carrying away

Political before theological

On the reading of modern historical scholarship, the theology was built afterwards, on both sides, to explain positions taken for reasons of politics, tribe and grief. This is not cynical and it does not delegitimise either tradition, theology developed in response to crisis is still theology. But the order matters. Nobody in 632 was arguing about the ontology of the Imamate.

The evidence is not hidden

Ghadīr Khumm is in Tirmidhī. Thaqalayn is in Muslim. Manzila is in Bukhārī. The Twelve is in both Ṣaḥīḥs. The Qirṭās incident is in Bukhārī five times over. Fāṭima's displeasure with Abū Bakr is in Bukhārī. Neither tradition works from a fabricated corpus, and anyone who says otherwise has not checked.

The sects are younger than the arguments

By a lot. Take the two-hundred-year gap between the political rupture and the doctrinal one, and the further gap before either tradition had a fixed canon, a settled law and a name for itself. The claim to be the original from which the other departed is a claim about the seventh century sustainable only with ninth-century evidence.

VII

Glossary

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Every technical term used on this page, in one place. The first appearance of each in the text above carries its definition on hover or focus.

VIII

Sources

Scriptural

  • The Qur'an, cited by sūra:āya
  • Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī · Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim · Sunan Abī Dāwūd · Jāmiʿ al-Tirmidhī · Sunan al-Nasāʾī · Sunan Ibn Mājah · Musnad Aḥmad, every number here is checkable at sunnah.com
  • al-Kulaynī, al-Kāfī · Ibn Bābawayh al-Ṣadūq, Man lā yaḥḍuruhu al-faqīh · al-Ṭūsī, Tahdhīb al-aḥkām and al-Istibṣār · Nahj al-Balāgha, texts at al-islam.org

Classical

  • al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh al-rusul wa'l-mulūk
  • Ibn Saʿd, al-Ṭabaqāt al-kubrā · al-Balādhurī, Ansāb al-ashrāf · al-Yaʿqūbī, Taʾrīkh · al-Masʿūdī, Murūj al-dhahab
  • Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī, Fatḥ al-Bārī · al-Nawawī, Sharḥ Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim
  • al-Shahrastānī, al-Milal wa'l-niḥal · al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt al-Islāmiyyīn · al-Nawbakhtī, Firaq al-Shīʿa, the heresiographies, and the primary source for most extinct groups named here

Modern academic

  • Wilferd Madelung, The Succession to Muhammad (Cambridge, 1997)
  • Christopher Melchert, The Formation of the Sunni Schools of Law (Brill, 1997)
  • Jonathan A. C. Brown, The Canonization of al-Bukhārī and Muslim (Brill, 2007)
  • Moojan Momen, An Introduction to Shiʿi Islam (Yale, 1985)
  • Farhad Daftary, The Ismāʿīlīs (Cambridge, 2nd ed. 2007)
  • Hossein Modarressi, Crisis and Consolidation in the Formative Period of Shiʿite Islam (Darwin, 1993)
  • Haykel & Zysow, "What makes a madhhab a madhhab", Arabica

Reference works

Demography

  • Pew Research Center, Mapping the Global Muslim Population (2009)
  • Pew, Sunni and Shia Muslims (2011)
  • Pew measured the Sunni/Shia split only. There is no reliable global census of madhhab affiliation anywhere. Every percentage circulating online traces back to unsourced estimates, figures here are directional.

Ecumenical

  • The Amman Message (2004), some 200 scholars across every school affirming the validity of the eight recognised madhāhib: Ḥanafī, Mālikī, Shāfiʿī, Ḥanbalī, Jaʿfarī, Zaydī, Ibāḍī, Ẓāhirī, and forbidding takfīr between them
  • Shaykh Maḥmūd Shalṭūt's al-Azhar fatwa (1959) recognising Jaʿfarī jurisprudence as a school Sunnis may follow

Further reading

Six books to start with, chosen for a reader with no prior background. This is a different list from the sources above, which are there so the claims can be checked.

  • Wilferd Madelung, The Succession to Muhammad (Cambridge, 1997)The most rigorous reconstruction of the succession crisis from the earliest sources. Unusual among Western accounts in taking the case for ʿAlī seriously on its evidence.
  • Najam Haider, Shīʿī Islam: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2014)The best single starting point on Shiism. Organised around memory and ritual rather than a list of beliefs, and covers Zaydīs and Ismailis properly rather than as footnotes.
  • Jonathan A. C. Brown, Hadith (Oneworld, 2nd ed. 2017)How the hadith corpus was built, criticised and canonised. Read this if the isnād material here raised more questions than it answered.
  • Hugh Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates (Routledge, 3rd ed. 2015)The political narrative the theology sits inside. Clear, sceptical and readable without prior background.
  • Fred M. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers (Harvard, 2010)Argues that the confessional boundaries hardened later than anyone assumed. Contested, and worth reading for the argument you will want to resist.
  • Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, vol. 1 (Chicago, 1974)Fifty years old and still unmatched in scope. Demanding prose; the payoff is a sense of the whole civilisation rather than a sequence of sects.
Prepared as a neutral reference. Where the traditions disagree, both positions are given in their own terms and no verdict is offered. Errors of fact are worth correcting; readings you disagree with are, in most cases, someone's sincere reading of the same text.
Cite this page

Siddiqui, M. “How Sunni and Shia Came to Be.” mohammadsiddiqui.com.

Part of a three-part series on the origins, anatomy and diffusion of the Sunni–Shia divergence. Where a causal story is scholarly inference rather than documented event-history, it is marked as such.
Part II · The House and the Schools → ↑ Top

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