Sunnis and Shias agree on the basic tenets of Islam: declaring faith in a monotheistic God and Mohammed as his messenger, conducting daily prayers, giving money to the poor, fasting during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and performing the pilgrimage to Mecca. The transformation of Iran into an agitator for Shia movements in Muslim countries seemed to confirm centuries of Sunni suspicions that Shia Arabs answer to Persia. Their religions influenced the evolution of Shia Islam as distinct from Sunni Islam in rituals and beliefs. Islam is partially based on the Judeo-Christian religions. Saudi Arabia has a sizable Shia minority of roughly 10 percent, and millions of adherents of a puritanical brand of Sunni Islam known as Wahhabism (an offshoot of the Sunni Hanbali school) that is antagonistic to Shia Islam. Many Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian converts to Islam chose to become Shia rather than Sunni in the early centuries of the religion as a protest against the ethnic Arab empires that treated non-Arabs as second-class citizens. Sunni governments, especially Saudi Arabia, have increasingly worried about their own grips on power, a concern that was exacerbated during the protest movement that began in Tunisia in late 2010. The Arab Awakening, as the uprisings are known, spread to Bahrain and Syria, countries at the fault lines of Islam’s sectarian divide.

Sectarian tensions are mounting in Iraq as the newly ascendant Shia majority struggles to accommodate the Sunni and Kurdish minorities while confronting extremist Sunni groups. There are divisions even over the precepts of Islam, but the main difference relates to authority, which sparked the political split in the seventh century and evolved into divergent interpretations of sharia, or Islamic law, and distinct sectarian identities. This made all of the other politicians angry and jealous, and they devised a plan where they tricked the king to sign a law, that for 30 days, no one was to pray to any god except the king. Instead of spinning one endless strand, the moth’s silk comes out in broken pieces, but it’s also considered a sturdier substance. We reached out to William Rorabaugh, history professor at the University of Washington and author of “American Hippies,” to see if the anti-hippie theory rang true. Figuring out exactly what to teach and how to teach it can be downright impossible.

Bridesmaids, parents and friends can use this quote to toast the bride, but you shouldn’t use it as an excuse to pick on the groom. Fundamentalists no longer have to infiltrate mainstream mosques to attract recruits surreptitiously, but can now disseminate their call to jihad and wait for potential recruits to contact them. Mainstream Shias believe there were twelve Imams. For their part, both mainstream and hard-line Sunnis aren’t singularly focused on oppressing Shias. The divisions among Shias were discussed above. Iran and Saudi Arabia, which have repeatedly postponed efforts to establish a dialogue for settling disputes diplomatically, discussed the conflict in Syria in October 2015 at U.S. Sony’s PlayStation 2 home gaming console launched in North America on October 26, 2000, going onto sell over 150 million units worldwide by 2011 and putting itself in a distant first place in terms of sales against its closest competitors, Microsoft’s Xbox and Nintendo’s GameCube (24 million and 21.7 million units sold, respectively) in the process. The 2011 protests and brutal government crackdown uncovered sectarian tensions, which have rippled across the region. Meanwhile Hezbollah and some Shia militias from Iraq, such as Asaib Ahl al-Haq and Kata’ib Hezbollah, backed the Syrian government.

The influx of more than one million mostly Sunni Syrians into Lebanon, a state that experienced its own fifteen-year civil war (1975-90), has burdened its cash-strapped government and put pressure on communities hosting refugees. Sunni fundamentalists, many inspired by al-Qaeda’s call to fight Americans, flocked to Iraq from Muslim-majority countries, attacking coalition forces and many Shia civilians. Tens of thousands of Syrian Sunnis joined rebel groups such as Ahrar al-Sham, the Islamic Front, and al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front, which all employ anti-Shia rhetoric; similar numbers of Syrian Shias and Alawis enlisted with an Iran-backed militia known as the National Defense Force to fight for the Assad regime. Saudi Arabia provides hundreds of millions of dollars in financial support to the predominantly Sunni rebels in Syria, while simultaneously banning cash flows to al-Qaeda and extremist jihadi groups fighting the Assad regime. Saudi Arabia backed Iraq in the 1980-1988 war with Iran and sponsored militants in Pakistan and Afghanistan who were primarily fighting against the Soviet Union, which had invaded Afghanistan in 1979, but were also suppressing Shia movements inspired or backed by Iran. Many Shias emulate a marja for religious affairs and defer to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in Iran for political guidance.