What is Sunni Islam?
The word “Sunni” is an ascription to the “sunna”-or “way”-of the Prophet (God bless him and give him peace). The mark of Sunni Islam is to cling to the sunna of the Prophet (God bless him and give him peace) as it has been passed down to us through unbroken chains of transmission from teacher to student all the way back to the Prophet (God bless him and give him peace). The sunna of the Prophet (God bless him and give him peace) is the living embodiment of our religion, and he explained in the famous hadith of Gabriel that our religion is composed three fundamentals: Islam, or external compliance with what Allah asks of us; Iman, or the belief in the unseen that the prophets have informed us of; and Ihsan, or to worship Allah as though one sees Him. The way of Sunni Islam is to take the branch of Islam from living jurists who follow one of the four Sunni schools of fiqh: the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi`i, and Hanbali schools; the branch of Iman from living scholars belonging to one of the tw
