Schism: Islam

The main schism in Islam is the between the Shia and the Sunni. Originally this split was relatively unimportant. Although those who believed Ali should be the successor (the Shia) lost at the outset, they generally followed the rulings of the next Imam. Only after Ali was killed was the split problematic.

The center of Shi'a power and the center of Sunni power are in different language families. The Shi'a center is in Iran, speaking Farsi, an Indo-European language, while the Sunni center is in Saudi Arabia, where they speak the Afro-Asiatic langauge Arabic.

It might be fairly obvious why the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) would become the center of any branch of Islam, it contains Mecca and Medina.

Very interesting is how the spread of Islam and the existence of the Afro-Asiatic language family are connected.

Ironically, the march of Islam seems to have supported the spread of Persian out to the east: the Arab conquests in what had been Buddhist central Asia in th eigth century spread Person, at the expense of local languages, especially Sogdian . Presumably most of the troops were from the east of Iran, where Persian was still the lingua franca. That is why Tajikistan, and the north-western half of Afghanistan, is Persian-speaking to this day. And when five hundred years later an Islamic army penetrated into India and beyond, and set up the Delhi Sultanate, it brought Persian rather than Arabic in its wake.1

There is more on Persian in the history of the Delhi Sultanate, see the article on Pakistan