Back to A Different Lens

Sunni and Twelver Shia Islam are remembered for what divides them. Read side by side, their records also show a long list of matters on which neither side has ever disagreed.

What Each Side Refuses

Sunni Islam formally excludes the hadith collections Twelver Shia relies on, and Twelver Shia formally excludes the collections Sunni Islam relies on. Each names the other's central texts and rules them out of its own canon, a complete, mutual refusal of scripture.

The same shape turns up elsewhere. Digambara and Svetambara Jainism, the two branches divided over whether a monk may wear clothing, each formally critique the other's monastic order, in both directions.

What Neither Side Disputes

Set beside that refusal, the atlas also records dozens of matters where Sunni and Twelver Shia hold the identical position: the angels Gabriel and Michael, the sanctity of the Kaaba, the virtues of patience, gratitude and mindfulness of God, and two documents held up as models of interfaith conduct, the Constitution of Medina and the Amman Message. None of it is disputed between them. It sits underneath the argument rather than inside it, and the same two Jain orders that critique each other's monasticism share a comparable list of shared holds of their own.

Rejection can cross a religious line as easily as it follows one. Roman Catholicism, Calvinism, the Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh-day Adventism, Salafism and Wahhabism all refuse Western astrology, a Christian-Islamic agreement that has nothing to do with any dispute those bodies have with one another, and Calvinism and Salafism separately converge on refusing reliquaries too.

Where To Read More

• SunniIslamOne half of the shared list, and of the mutual scripture exclusion
• Shia (Twelver)IslamThe other half
• DigambaraJainismCritiques the Svetambara monastic order while sharing holds with it
• SvetambaraJainismCritiques the Digambara monastic order in return
• Western AstrologyDivinatory DisciplinesRefused by conservative Christian and conservative Islamic bodies alike
• ReliquaryDevotional ObjectsRefused by both Calvinism and Salafism, another cross-tradition agreement