Branches of Islam.
T.M.P. Duggan has an excellent article in the archives of the Turkish Daily News that shows how Sunni Muslims categorize religious beliefs.
- The Kafir, or unbeliever: either a polytheist or an atheist.
- The People of the Book: those people who follow a monotheistic religion but are not Muslims; these include the Jews, Christians and Sabeans.
- The Shia: those who follow the descendants of the fourth Caliph of Islam, Ali, often regarding Ali as taking precedence over the Prophet of Islam, and who regard Ali or selected members of Ali’s descendants as infallible Imams and practice dissimulation or Taqiyah. They have split from the majority of the community, Shia meaning a faction rather than the majority, and today they consist of roughly 14 percent of the world’s Muslim population.
- The Sufis: those who are termed the Mystics of Islam and may be more or less orthodox or may, on occasion, follow a compromise among numbers 2, 3 and 5 in practice or in doctrine.
- The Sunni or orthodox majority who follow one of the four schools of Islamic law or Madhha.
(*) The four schools of Islamic jurisprudence range from the conservative to the liberal.
The most liberal of these schools is the Hanifa. In the middle are the Maliki and the Shafi.
The most conservative school, the Hanbali, was the school followed by the theologian Taqi-al din Ahmad ibn Taymiyah. Talmiyah was a major influence on Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al Wahhab, who founded Wahhabism, the doctrine followed by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia today. (†) Wahhabism in turn has had a great deal of influence in the forming of Islamism. (‡) Some Islamist groups have been militant and violent, and others not. One Islamist group is the Muslim Brotherhood, which in turn was instrumental in the creation of Al Qaeda.
Thus, we can see that militant Islamism and Al Qaeda do not represent all Muslims. There have been centuries of disagreement within Islam as to the meaning of the religion. One of Osama Bin Laden’s stated goals is to unite all Muslims. He of course means uniting all Muslims under his banner.