On Shia Islam. I was aware that there were different sects of Shia Islam, but the images online were so frustrating, as they didn't give a concise or clear understanding. In Shia Islam, like any religion based on succession, there are going to be schisms, and thus I asked what is the exact difference between, for example, the practice in Iran versus the practice of Isma'ilism. This lead me to a deep dive where I finally created a graphic. In this graphic, I show the timeline in both the Islamic calendar and the Gregorian calendar, and later the Baháʼí calendar. Then the branching begins. My main source was Wikipedia, as it seems to be reasonably thorough. I did cheat in one way: in some cases, there were many names for the same sect, but almost universally was the ending 'ayya.' Consequently, I simply appended that to many of the names.
Figure 1. A snapshot of "A timeline of Shia sects."
Click to view the original pdf.
Something I found humorous was that when I began speaking to some of my Shia friends about this, I quickly became aware that Islam is no different from Christianity; specifically, everyone knows a lot about their own sect, and almost nothing about any other sect. Thus, it was difficult to get serious commentary on the relationships shown in this graphic. My goal is for accuracy, so if there is anything that is incorrect, please let me know. I would very much appreciate it!
Most interesting was finally understanding the difference between Isma'ilism and Iranian Twelver Islam. Also was the Al-Hashishin (assassins) and Alamut.