One of the two main branches of orthodox Islam

Usage examples of sunni.

Shias from the Iranian province of Daylam south of the Caspian Sea, the Buwayhids continued to permit Sunni Abbasid caliphs to ascend to the throne.

Because the Sunni caliphs were cognizant of this hope, the Imams generally were persecuted during the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties.

Assad took power, the Muslim Brotherhood, a loosely knit underground coalition of Sunni Muslim fundamentalist guerrilla groups, which had existed on and off in Syria since the late 1930s, began working to topple the predominantly Alawite Assad regime through a ruthless campaign of assassinations and bombings.

Assad understood from the start that at a certain basic level Hama was a tribe-like clash between his Alawite sect and the Sunni Muslim sect.

It is quite possible to find in such a village a Sunni Muslim villager who has hung a picture of Alawite President Assad on his wall, not simply because it will ingratiate him with the local party and intelligence officials, but also because he sincerely feels that this man Assad has behaved not just as an Alawite, and not just as a power-hungry autocrat, but as his own President, with a national interest in mind.

But more important, the new man was the son of peasants and from the minority Alawites, a poorer Moslem sect which was traditionally scorned and oppressed by the majority Sunnis.

Sunni elites, and Tehran periodically reminds the world that it believes Bahrain should again be a part of Iran, as it was at the height of the Persian Empire.

Milksnake, a Yemenite Sunni, and not the brightest star in the mercenary sky, cocked a Beeman air pistol modified to fire tranquilizer darts.

Baghdad, believing that they will be more favorably inclined toward their coreligionists in Tehran than the Sunnis have been over the last seventy years.

Beginning in the sixteenth century, when the Ottoman Sunnis favored their Iraqi coreligionists in the matter of educational and employment opportunities, the Shias consistently have been denied political power.

I am but a fighting man, and no darvesh, caring, as thou knowest, as much for Shiah as Sunni.

Now the fear was that the Sunnis would be caught in a similar cycle of disenfranchisement, frozen out of a new Iraqi government for all time.

Ottoman Sultans assumed the title of Khalif, which they hold to this day, and are recognised by the Sunnis as the head of the Muhammadan religion, and the successors of Muhammad.

Assad hailed from the village of Qardaha, near the Syrian seaport of Latakia, and he and his main allies were not Sunni Muslims but Alawites.

A Sunni Muslim, he maintained a multivolume collection of the Koran, and once reportedly set a bomb that killed twenty-six rival Shiites at a mosque in Iran.