My latest over at AltMuslimah.
Related Posts
The Changing World – Being Muslim
The Changing World. What does it mean to be a Muslim in the U.S. in the post-9/11 world, and why are so many new converts to Islam – women?
Muslims for Secular Democracy [updated]
Update: The original post has been recovered here. Comments on this post are now closed. This post was originally sent in by Ghostdog. However, TypePad managed to lose all our posts from yesterday, so I had to re-post, and it’s now tagged with me as the author. To be clear, I am not.
What is Shi’ism?
In the contemporary period Shi’ah is the standard short form for Shi’ah Ali, the Partisans of Ali. The Shi’ah have a history that goes back as far as the time of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), and form one of the two main schools of thought in Islam; the other group being the Sunni, short for Ahl us-Sunnah wa Jama’ah, the People of Tradition and Consensus. The main division between these two groups relates to questions of religious authority, and who has that authority. In this post I want to give a brief outline of Shi’ah understandings of authority. Rather than cover…