There are two huge branches - Sunni and Shi'ite, and a whole lot of minor ones. I suppose you could think of that as very roughly equivalent to the difference between Eastern and Roman churches in Christianity or, idk, between Ashkenazi and Ethiopian Jews?
It's technically more like the split between Orthodox, Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist and other chunks of Judaism, in that they consider each other fellow co-religionists but have doctrinal differences.
Judaism is weird because it has a large ethnic/cultural component and a very low desire for conversion -- the largest Jewish proselytization effort is entirely internal, with Chabad trying to encourage other Jews to join their flavor of Orthodox.
By way of contrast, Islam, like Christianity, is not associated with a particular ethnicity across borders, but may be associated with an ethnicity inside some particular country. In the US, there's a prejudice that Muslims are Arabs, but it's not particularly true, so much as Arab-Americans in the US are often Muslim.
For whatever you're writing, getting the cultural details right will be most important -- and that depends strongly on your character's family and upbringing. Did they emigrate together? Are they fourth-generation New Yorkers? Are they observant?
no subject
It's technically more like the split between Orthodox, Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist and other chunks of Judaism, in that they consider each other fellow co-religionists but have doctrinal differences.
Judaism is weird because it has a large ethnic/cultural component and a very low desire for conversion -- the largest Jewish proselytization effort is entirely internal, with Chabad trying to encourage other Jews to join their flavor of Orthodox.
By way of contrast, Islam, like Christianity, is not associated with a particular ethnicity across borders, but may be associated with an ethnicity inside some particular country. In the US, there's a prejudice that Muslims are Arabs, but it's not particularly true, so much as Arab-Americans in the US are often Muslim.
For whatever you're writing, getting the cultural details right will be most important -- and that depends strongly on your character's family and upbringing. Did they emigrate together? Are they fourth-generation New Yorkers? Are they observant?