Sunni Islam

Islam was free from internal boundaries of this kind in Southeast Asia, since the Shafi i school of Sunni Islam was accepted everywhere. Externally, the contest with the Portuguese in the sixteenth century produced a politicised Islam in Aceh, Demak and Banten in particular, which engendered a counter-identity among the peoples who successfully fought to resist Islamisation by force. This helped create a non-Islamic identity for the Bataks of Sumatra and the Balinese in the sixteenth century, and for the Toraja of Sulawesi in the seventeenth, while the Dayak of Borneo and other non-Muslim peoples had a more porous boundary with coastal Malayo-Muslim culture. 

The bloodletting associated with the succession issue eventually split Islam into two main sects, the Sunnis and the Shiites. The Sunnis saw themselves as the upholders of orthodoxy in Islam. They contended that the people had a right to elect whomever they wished to be caliph. The Shiites, on the other hand, insisted that the only legitimate successors were those in whom the blood of the Prophet himself flowed. This meant Ali and his descendants. 

Since the Sunnis far outnumbered the Shiites, they exerted the dominant influence in Islam. The Shiites, however, refused to accept the caliphs chosen by the Sunnis, and instead pledged their allegiance to the family of the Prophet. These descendants were treated as divinely inspired and divinely appointed interpreters of the faith. Obedience to their commands, whatever these might be, was regarded as an integral part of the religion of Islam. 

Jabir ibn Hayyan, known in the West as Geber, was a Shiite Muslim. This branch of Islam was known for valuing direct, inner experience of the spiritual and for its symbolic interpretation of the Qur an, in contrast to the Sunnis who interpreted the Qur an literally as truth to be obeyed.53 Geber belonged to a branch of the Azd tribe from south Arabia that lived in Kufa, on the banks of the Euphrates, and practiced Sufism. He may have known Greek and was a well-read scholar who authored original works in diverse subjects, including mathematics, astronomy and alchemy. 

Islam advanced while the West declined during the Middle Ages. By 1928, Constantinople had a population of 2 million, which was twice that of London, three times that of Paris, and eight times that of Rome. The Sunni and Shi a sects divided Islam in the same way that Catholics and Protestants divided Christianity. A third sect, Wahhabism, was founded by Mohammed ibn-Abad-el-Wahab in what is now Saudi Arabia. The Sunni were the orthodox the Shi a were the heretics and the Wahhabites were the Puritans of Islam. Wahhabism remains the dominant form of Islam in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar, with each person interpreting the Koran for himself. 

Islamic Sunnis and Shiites in the Middle East have experienced violence since the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 622 a.d. The Sunni-Shia division has been a raw wound on the body of Islam since the eighth century when Moslem armies defeated those of the Persian Empire, an empire that stretched from Iberia to the Indus Valley. They manifest a fundamentalist hostility to Christianity, the other sect of the Moslem religion and the values of freedom and democracy. 

The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the Islamic State (IS), Daesh, or the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), started as a splinter group of al-Qaeda with the aim to create an Islamic state (caliphate) across areas in mainly Sunni... 

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