Is this true? I know there's seemingly infinity amount of christian denominations , but for muslims it seems to simply be, moderate or fanatical.
Oh yeah... very much so. In fact, in some respects, even more so than is the diversity of Christian denominations.
You see, they never developed an organized centralized authority, like Roman Catholics did, nor did they even have an official distinction between who are believers, and who are Bishops - authorized to make definitive interpretations of scripture for members of their church - like the Orthodox Catholics.
Each person is supposed to read the Quran and understand it for themselves, but some would come up with more inspiring interpretations than others, and they'd talk about their interpretations, and others would be impressed, and next thing you know, the guy's being followed around and copied, and before you know it, his followers are building a mosque in his name, and reading his interpretations of the Quran almost as if they're more definitive than the original writings.
It's like they'd fast-forwarded to the Reformation, started by Martin Luther, who rebelled against Roman Catholicism because of its obviously incestuous, pork-barreling politicization.
Luther said that everyone should read the Bible and make sense of it for themselves, and that created an explosion of denominations... people like Calvin or Jerry Falwell would start preaching their interpretation of the Bible, others who were not so adept at reading the Bible for themselves would listen and feel like he was speaking to them, and next thing you know there's a new denomination.
Likewise, this would happen all the time among Muslims, and it's still happening to this day. That's where you get crank-cases like Osama Bin Laden and nut-bar organizations like Al-Qaeda.
Osama is a very tall, hawkish, bad-tempered, bitter, hateful black-sheep outcast of the Bin Laden clan who was generally mediocre at everything he did, but his childhood as a Bin Laden (a very rich, influencial family into construction, often described as the Rockefellers of mid-east construction; it was growing up within a construction family that Osama learned that flying jets into the Twin Towers would collapse them, unlike flying them into the Empire State building, where the planes would have simply wrapped around the building in a ball of fire) gave him a taste for greatness, but his own family thought he was weird and shunned him, so he went east, plugged into a nascent group called Al-Qaeda, gave them lots of money if he could become a big-shot, and they proceeded to recruit new members from among other disenfranchised losers who's options were to become thieves and have their hands cut off by Saudi authorities, or join a gang... all justified by cherry-picking bits and pieces out of the Quran and interpreting it to the recruits as a uniquely inspiring interpretation of what the Quran is all about.
In other words... Al-Qaeda if a frikkin' denomination, and OBL is their televangelist!
What drives Christians nuts about Muslims is that so many Muslims seem blase about the fact that OBL and Al-Quieda exist, and yeah, that is annoying until you understand that they never had a concept of there being an official leadership as part of the religion, even though as humans they run around creating leadership structures all the time, such that the only thing even the most liberal and enlightened Muslims can do is shrug and say that's how OBL has interpreted the Quran, regardless of how much they might personally think he's a loon.
Now, personally, I think this issue of personal interpretation of scripture versus authoritative interpretations is something that Muslims could learn a lesson or two from Christian history, and I'm not talking about the conflicts and denominational splits created by Martin Luther's notion of personal interpretation of the Bible versus the Roman Catholics' notion of authorities delivering interpretations... I'm talking about what started happening right from the day after Jesus's tomb was found empty.
You see, Jesus was kind of enigmatic in the way He'd deliver His revelations. When Mohammed delivered a revelation, people would ask him what it meant, whereupon Mohammed would add his personal interpretation, which got recorded separate from the Quran in the hadish, but when disciples asked Jesus what his revelation meant, Jesus would say, "Let him who has ears hear".
That left it wide open for the disciples themselves to re-interpret what He meant, such that immediately upon His death (and resurrection) there was an instant split among the disciples.
Some like James took it one way, and attempted to splice Christianity into mainstream Judaism ("I am not to replace the teachings, but to complete them").
Others like Philip believed that Jesus had embedded secret knowledge in His sayings that only an elite were destined to comprehend ("let he who has ears hear"). He left Judea and started a sect that became classified as one of what they call the Gnostic interpretation of Christianity. His Gospel went like this:
The Gospel of Philip -- The Nag Hammadi Library
Especially galling was the way Jesus would sometimes pick out subsets from among the disciples, take them aside, and tell them things that were not told to the other disciples, such that after His tomb was found empty, different disciples would claim to have authority over subjects that others did not have, justified by saying that Jesus had told them their information in secret, which means there was no way for anyone to prove whether or not they were making it up, but they'd *all* had the experience of being taken aside by Jesus for private teachings, so they *all* knew it was possible, but who could prove what?
It caused the disciples to scatter in different directions, each spreading their interpretation of the teachings of Jesus. If God's plan was to implement a strategy to get the disciples to scatter in different directions in order to spread the message, it worked. They couldn't *stand* each other!
So, early Christendom was this boiling stew of countless interpretations of the meanings of the sayings of Jesus. The only thing they could agree on was that He had a unique, never before seen relationship to God that was familial in nature - above and beyond that of an ordinary prophet - and that He'd somehow changed the rules of the game so that people could continue to live after bodily death (which was not clear to ancient Jews, some of whom, like the Sadducees, believed that upon death a person's existence ceased)...
... and the only ceremony they could agree on was the mass, in memory of the last supper (which is how we know the last supper almost certainly happened pretty much as described... when Portuguese first landed in India they discovered the Thomas branch of Christianity, brought to them by the disciple Thomas and with about 13 million members today; they'd never heard of European Christians - in fact, a lot of them figured they were the only Christians in the world - and they practiced exactly the same mass as that performed by the Roman and Orthodox Catholics in Europe, and by the Coptic Christians in Ethiopia).
Then along came Saul of Tarsus, aka Saint Paul, who tended towards the Peter, John and James interpretations. St. Paul was fundamental in giving Christianity some structure and focus. He could see all the different denominations evolving into extreme sects, and part of his solution was to advocate that each church have as its authority a Bishop. (And by church I don't mean something that could sprawl... it was one building = one church = one Bishop.)
That didn't make for perfect unity, because until the Council of Nicaea each church had a different collection of books, as a function of the preferences of that church's Bishop. Some would retain the Gospels of Mathew, Mark, Luke and Thomas, while others would go by the Gospels of John, Philip, and The Egyptians, etc...
But they'd achieved some conformity in at least accepting that each church would have a final-word authority called the Bishop, and if you didn't like that Bishop's interpretations, you could leave and go join another church.
It's definitely not a perfect system, given how it evolved into the corruption of dark-age Roman Catholicism, but it held the line against the interpretative chaos that was happening at the time.
If Muslims had something like that, then it would be easier for them to stand up as groups to tell Osama Bin Laden to shut up, but as it stands, they can only tell him he's a loon on a one-by-one basis.
And by the way, the issue of denominalization gets even more extreme when dealing with Shi'ite.
They believe in leaders called Imans, who are said to have such remarkably sinless spirits that their statements are to be held almost on par with those of Mohammed himself, and they are venerated to a degree beyond even how Christians will venerate saints like Thomas Aquinas and Francis of Assisi, plus their spiritual lineage have clout on the scale of whoever is the leader of the Jesuits.
It's one of the *big* bones of contention between Shi'ite and Sunni.
Anyway... yeah... Muslims have denominations in plethora.
