You are making two common mistakes here. 1. You can’t say “Muslims _________”. As with Christianity there are many different schools of theology in Islam, many with very serious divides. Some schools take the Quran more literally than others, and some have more of a focus on teachings and traditions that have been passed down. (Sound familiar?). The second mistake is that you are reading an English translation. So much is lost in translation that unless you have a Muslim helping you understand each passage in question, you really can’t presume to know the theological meaning.
There are no major divides in (Sunni) Islam as there are in Christianity. The four schools or jurisprudence (maddhahib) are not “denominations”, or “Churches”; all interpret the Koran very literally, with the main difference being in which laws apply when, and when dispensations can be granted. All believe in the same six articles of faith, and all apply them essentially the same way. All believe in the same five/six pillars, and all practice them in the same way with the exception of shellfish, witr, and whether it’s allowable to eat pork if one would starve otherwise. A Muslim can switch from Hanbalism to Shafi’ism, and this is not a conversion of any sort; the West has no category for what this is. It is somewhat similar to a Western Christian switching parishes.
The Ash’ari school of theology is completely dominant, through its descendant the Athari school of the Hanbalis, whose main dogma is bila-kayf: “Without asking how or why”, that is, a completely literalistic reading with no attempt to reconcile difficulties. All four schools of jurisprudence follow the aqida of Asha’riyya. There is a school called the Maturidi, which is dominant from within the other three madhahib, and has one difference from the Ash’ari school: it believes that faith remains the same at all times, but piety increases and decreases. (The Ash’ari and Athari believe that both faith and piety increase and decrease.) Obviously, this doesn’t actually affect any doctrine.
Maturidism and Atharism are both subsets of Ash’arism. Like having Calvinism, Hyper-Calvinism, and Arminianism in the West. All are subsets of Calvinism or Reformed theology.
Previous schools of jurisprudence, such as the Jafari, Dhahiri, and Mutazili, are considered heretical by all Sunnis. (Dhahiri is accepted by Shi’i, who are less than 15% of all Muslims. Muslims in the West, and Islam as Westerners know it, is almost solely Sunni.) I’ll get Qadianism (Ahmadiyya), Koranism, and Sufism out of the way by stating that all Muslims view Ahmadis as apostates, and the majority view Sufism as an heretical corruption of Islam combined with paganism. Sufism is less than 3-5% of the world Muslim population. Ahmadism is less than 0.5%. Koran-onlyism is a tiny, tiny minority, immeasurable, but which has a presence in America disporportionate due to the headquarters of the Submitters International (the main Koranist sect) being in Arizona, where the Koranist founder, Rashad Khalifa, was
assassinated for refusing to believe in the inspiration of the ahadith almost 30 years ago.
All Sunnis and Salafis accept the same five books of tradition and interpret them in the same, literal way. There is no school of Islam that doesn’t place an absolute reliance on tradition as recorded in the ahadith and sunnah. The Shi’i have some different ahadith collections that support Shi’i claims over against the Sunnis.
Hyper-literalists, the Salafi or Ahlus Sunnah, are a majority amongst Saudians, as they are a large amount otherwhere in the world due to Saudian money funding masajid and madaris around the world to propagate their teaching. Sometimes Salafism is considered the same as Wahhabism (Taliban, al Qaida, etc. adhere to Wahhabism, named after an 18th century reformer, Abdal Wahhab of Arabia), but more often Wahhabism is considered the most militant/political wing of Salafism.
All of these are equally political, have the same views of relation to non-Muslim religions, etc.; no real analogy can be drawn from the West, but, trying to, it would be as if only the SSPX and traditional Catholics under the Pope had 90% of all people, with 10% of people joining an extremely conservative Orthodox Church, and
no other denomination or religion existing, and no consequential dissidential or otherwise minor schools of theology or thought existing except for Neo-Scholastic Thomism and Palamism. But even that’s too much: the difference in theology between the poles of Islamic theology is much more minor than the differences that exist between Thomism and Palamism; the difference between the furthest-separated schools of Islamic theology is more equivalent to the difference between early 20th-c. Neo-Scholastic Thomism and early 20th-c. Existential Thomism in terms of magnitude of disagreement.
A good source for this is Reilly,
The Closing of the Muslim Mind. To see politicized Salafism at its finest, read Qutb,
Milestones. One can read several tafsirs, such as Yusuf Ali (a Dawudi Bohra Shi’ite), Khan and Hilali (Salafi-Wahhabis), etc., and one will find that they are all very similar. This similarity is not superficial. The Melkite Robert Spencer produces good popular-level but mostly-accurate books about Islam as well, but none that deal with the theology proper.
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