The Sunnis are the heretics!
OP - May 12, 2015, 07:50 AM
A long time ago a usurper called Darius captured the Persian Empire using a new weapon, God was his mate. Tom Holland Persian Fire describes this.
Fast forward and Constantine uses the same technique, this time with a certain "oriental cult".
What if the Shia group is the original, a mix of Ahura Mazda, Christianity and Judaism to primarily take over the Persian Empire?
Groups with more contacts with the Roman Empire also used these techniques, and eventually get to be more powerful, which means they can call the original group names.
So Islam is actually a political and military tool to defeat the Persian and Roman Empires, that developed different sects dependant on which Empire they had the closer links to. The Sunni Shia split is the Rome Persia split fossilised.
When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.
A.A. Milne,
"We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"