When souls were delivered to the underworld by the god Hermes, they were ferried across the River Styx by the boatman, Charon. With their ruling planet Mars, the god of war, Aries individuals are often characterized as impulsive, competitive, and quick to take action. If you hear that Islam’s goal is NOT to take over America-DO NOT BELIEVE IT. He recorded them into what is now known as the Koran, Islam’s Constitution and supreme law. If you hear that Islam’s goal is NOT to rule the world-DO NOT BELIEVE IT. DOES ISLAM PLAN TO RULE THE WORLD? It was the place where Joseph took Mary and baby Jesus after the angel warned him of Herod’s plan to kill the child. After the resurrection and ascension of Jesus and following the Apostle Peter’s death, Mark went to Egypt for nearly 20 years and founded the church at Alexandria. How the leader of the Catholic Church became a hero of the secular world. The divide originated with a dispute over who should succeed the Prophet Muhammad as leader of the Islamic faith he introduced. “The essence of the problem is that Muhammad died without a male heir, and he never clearly stated who he would want to be his successor,” says Lesley Hazleton, author of After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Sunni-Shia Split in Islam.

Though the two main sects within Islam, Sunni and Shia, agree on most of the fundamental beliefs and practices of Islam, a bitter split between the two goes back some 14 centuries. Today, about 85 percent of the approximately 1.6 billion Muslims around the world are Sunni, while 15 percent are Shia, according to an estimate by the Council on Foreign Relations. “Neither of them are representative of the vast majority of Sunni Muslims or the vast majority of Shia Muslims around the world,” says Hazleton of the fundamentalist regimes governing both Saudi Arabia and Iran. Finally, in 1979, the Islamic Revolution in Iran produced a radical brand of Shia Islam that would clash violently with Sunni conservatives in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the decades to follow. A common thread in most of these conflicts is the ongoing battle between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran for influence in the oil-rich Middle East and surrounding regions. Twelver Shia Muslim live mainly in a half dozen or so countries scattered around the Middle East and South Asia. Within the century after Muhammad’s death, his followers had built an empire that stretched from Central Asia to Spain. “It was obviously intended by the Ummayads to put the definitive end to all claims to leadership of the ummah as a matter of direct descendence from Muhammad,” says Hazleton of Hussein’s death, and the death of all the surviving members of Muhammad’s family, at Karbala.

Held on the tenth day of Muharram in the Islamic lunar calendar, scores of pilgrims visit Hussein’s shrine in Karbala and many Shia communities participate in symbolic acts of flagellation and suffering. “But of course it’s not what happened.” Instead, Hussein’s martyrdom at Karbala became the central story of Shia tradition, and is commemorated yearly as Ashoura, the most solemn date on the Shia calendar. In 681, Ali’s son Hussein led a group of 72 followers and family members from Mecca to Karbala (present-day Iraq) to confront the corrupt caliph Yazid of the Ummayad dynasty. A massive Sunni army waited for them, and by the end of a 10-day standoff with various smaller struggles, Hussein was killed and decapitated, and his head brought to Damascus as a tribute to the Sunni caliph. Ali, himself, was killed in 661, as the bitter power struggle between Sunni and Shia continued. Despite their differences, Sunni and Shia have lived alongside each other in relative peace for most of history. Despite the long-running nature of the Sunni-Shia divide, the fact that the two sects coexisted in relative peace for many centuries suggests their struggles may have less to do with religion than with wealth and power.

Ali eventually became the fourth caliph (or Imam, as Shiites call their leaders), but only after the two that preceded him had both been assassinated. Their leaders also often seem to be in competition. These three collections form the foundation for Muslim’s religious practices and culture known as Sharia, the entire body of Islamic law. At stake was not only control of Muhammad’s religious and political legacy, but also a great deal of money, in the form of taxes and tributes paid by the various tribes united under the banner of Islam. In the early 20th century, the victorious Allies divided the territory held by the former Ottoman Empire after World War I, cutting through centuries-old religious and ethnic communities in the process. The potential for Muslim empire building was established with the rise of the earliest civilizations in western Asia. First came the rise of the Safavid dynasty in the 16th century, which transformed Iran (through force) from a Sunni center into the Shia stronghold of the Middle East. Islamization of the world began in Mecca and spread first to the Middle East and South Asia. He decreed the spread of Islam to all non-Muslim individuals and nations-by force, if necessary.