Long before Saddam, Iraq had been split along social, ethnic, religious, and economic fault lines: Sunni versus Shi ' ite, Arab versus Kurd, tribal chief versus urban merchant, nomad versus peasant.

Although some violence and lack of widespread Sunni Arab participation marred the event, most of the eligible Kurd and Shia populace participated.

A Kurd and Sunni Muslim, Othman was a member of the Political Bureau Kurdistan Democratic Party ( KDP ).

Although some violence and lack of widespread Sunni participation marred the event, most of the eligible Kurd and Shia populace participated.

After weeks of negotiations between the dominant political parties, on April 4, 2005, Sunni Arab Hajim al-Hassani was chosen as speaker ; Shiite Hussain Shahristani and Kurd Aref Taifour were elected as his top deputies.

Sunni Muslims believe and confirm that Muhammad's father-in-law Abu Bakr was chosen by the community and that this was the proper procedure.

The death of Uthman was followed by a civil war known as the First Fitna, and the succession to Ali ibn Abi Talib was disputed, leading to the split between the Sunni and Shia sects, and later to competing caliphates when the descendants of Muhammad through his daughter Fatimah and Ali set up separate Fatimid societies.

The north was ruled by the Khanate of Bukhara, the west was under the rule of the Shi ' a Safavids, and the east belonged to the Sunni Mughals of India.

Fighting was primarily between the majority Shia and the minority Sunni.

Violence was conducted by Sunni groups, nationalists and others who sought an Iraq freed from foreign rule that include the Iraq Insurgency, which has been fighting since the initial U. S. invasion of 2003.

It was formed to resist efforts by the U. S. and Iraqi authorities to win over Sunni supporters of the insurgency.

Low Arab Sunni turnout threatened the legitimacy of the election, which was as low as 2 % in Anbar province.

Olivier Roy argues that " Sunni pan-Islamism underwent a remarkable shift in the second half of the 20th century " when the Muslim Brotherhood movement and focus on Islamistation of pan-Arabism was eclipsed by the Salafi movement with its emphasis on " sharia rather than the building of Islamic institutions ," and rejection of Shia Islam.

Jahangir, like his father, was not a strict Sunni Muslim ; he allowed, for example, the continuation of his father's tradition of public debate between different religions.

While Sunni Islam was the state religion, there was not widespread pressure to convert ; indeed, Jahangir specifically warned his nobles that they " should not force Islam on anyone .” In the first century of Islamic expansion this attitude was taken partially because of concerns that an absence of non-Muslims would deprive the state of a valuable source of revenue.

Drafted by a treaty and a bill of sale, and constituted between 1820 and 1858, the Princely State of Kashmir and Jammu ( as it was first called ) combined disparate regions, religions, and ethnicities: to the east, Ladakh was ethnically and culturally Tibetan and its inhabitants practised Buddhism ; to the south, Jammu had a mixed population of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs ; in the heavily populated central Kashmir valley, the population was overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim, however, there was also a small but influential Hindu minority, the Kashmiri brahmins or pandits ; to the northeast, sparsely populated Baltistan had a population ethnically related to Ladakh, but which practised Shi ' a Islam ; to the north, also sparsely populated, Gilgit Agency, was an area of diverse, mostly Shi ' a groups ; and, to the west, Punch was Muslim, but of different ethnicity than the Kashmir valley.

The president was required to be a Christian ( in practice, a Maronite ), the prime minister a Sunni Muslim.

By 1975, Lebanon was a religiously and ethnically diverse country with most dominant groups of Maronite Christians and Lebanese Sunni and Shia Arabs ; with significant minorities of Druze, Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians and Palestinian Arab refugees and their descendants.

The person responsible for this conversion was a Sunni Muslim visitor named Abu al Barakat.

In Hamburg, Atta was drawn to al-Quds Mosque, which adhered to a " harsh, uncompromisingly fundamentalist, and resoundingly militant " version of Sunni Islam.

Unlike the Shias, Sunni Muslims believe that slandering the Prophet's companions is prohibited and that we cannot judge them right or wrong.

In some Sunni schools of jurisprudence, for example Shafi ' i, it is possible for a woman to petition a qadi (" judge of Muslim jurisprudence ") for a divorce under certain conditions.

Yusuf was a Sunni Sufi Ottoman Palestinian Islamic scholar, judge, prolific poet, and defender of the Ottoman Caliphate.

They are largely Sunni Muslims, in contrast to the Hazara, who are mostly Shias.

He is a well-respected Sunni cleric who studied in the Sudan, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

The four schools ( or Madh ' hab ) of Sunni Muslims are each named by students of the classical jurist who taught them.

Thus, the Sheikh of al-Azhar in Cairo, Muhammad Sayid Tantawy, who is the leading religious authority in the Sunni Muslim establishment in Egypt, alongside the Grand Mufti of Egypt, said the following about fatwās issued by himself or the entire Dar al-Ifta:

In every day terms, the imam for Sunni Muslims is the one who leads Islamic formal ( Fard ) prayers, even in locations besides the mosque, whenever prayers are done in a group of two or more with one person leading ( imam ) and the others follow by copying his ritual actions of worship.

Those who are considered imams in the context of scholarly authority by Sunni Muslims.

The son of a Hindu Rajput mother who converted to Islam, Jahangir made the precepts of Sunni Islam the cornerstone of his state policies.

Consequently, the demographics of Lebanon were profoundly altered, as the territory added contained people who were predominantly Muslim or Druze: Lebanese Christians, of which the Maronites were the largest subgrouping, now constituted barely more than 50 % of the population, while Sunni Muslims in Lebanon saw their numbers increase eightfold, Shi ' ite Muslims fourfold.

Muslim groups rejected the move and pledged support to Selim al-Hoss, a Sunni who had succeeded Karami.

In the late 1990s, the government took action against Sunni Muslim extremists in the north who had attacked its soldiers, and it continues to move against groups such as Asbat al-Ansar, which has been accused of being partnered with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network.

Syria's refusal to exit Lebanon following Israel's 2000 withdrawal from south Lebanon first raised criticism among the Lebanese Maronite Christians and Druze, who were later joined by many of Lebanon's Sunni Muslims.

The term " Sunni " denotes those who claim to practice these usages, as part of the Ummah.

The Kurds of northern Iraq ( who are Sunni, but not Arabs ) were also permanently hostile to the Ba ' athist party's pan-Arabism.

Those who believe and those who are Jews and Christians, and Sabians, whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day and do righteous good deeds shall have their reward with their Lord, on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve ... let there be no compulsion in religion "-that all monotheistic religions or people of the book have a chance of salvation, to the most exclusive teaching common amongst Salafis and Wahhabis, and supported by several works of medieval Islamic theology and by traditions ( hadith ) which are considered correct ( sahih ) by Sunni Muslims, for the most part are summed up in Surah 9: 5, 29: " Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them, and besiege them, and lay in wait in every stratagem of war.

The Ash ' ari school of Sunni aqidah ( theology ) holds that those who had never heard of the message of Islam, by virtue of isolation, can still be saved by the grace of Allah, similar to Karl Rahner's concept of the Anonymous Christian.

By contrast, religion is also central to the lives of several X-Men, such as Nightcrawler, a devout Catholic, and Dust, a devout Sunni Muslim who wears an Islamic hijab.

* 1492: The death of Sunni Ali Ber left a leadership void in the Songhai Empire, and his son was soon dethroned by Mamadou Toure who ascended the throne in 1492 under the name Askia ( meaning " general ") Muhammad.

This is largely due to the fact that their prophet, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, came over 1, 300 years after Muhammad, who is viewed as the " last of the prophets " by Sunni, Shia, and Ibadi variants of Islam.

The Seljuqs, who were orthodox Sunni Muslims, had formerly ruled the Great Seljuq Empire, but by the time of the First Crusade it had divided into several smaller states after the death of Malik-Shah I in 1092.

Farrakhan joined Imam Warith Al-Deen Mohammed who he followed, and eventually became a Sunni Imam under him for 3 1 / 2 years from 1975-1978.

A pupil, Wasil ibn Ata, who was expelled from the school because his answers were contrary to then Sunni tradition and became leader of a new school, and systematized the radical opinions of preceding sects, particularly those of the Qadarites and Jabarites.

Since the tragedy of 9 / 11, Sunni Muslim terrorists have been attacking the Hazara community in southwestern Pakistani town of Quetta, home to some 500000 Hazara who fled persecution in neighbouring Afghanistan.

" Nisa ' i was not the only Sunni scholar who accepted this hadith-there were many others, the foremost being the imams Bukhari and imam Muslim who compiled the Sahih of Muslim.