This title is really dumb. I just wanted to get people's attention. There is no great historical parallel to Catholicism or Protestantism within Islam, anyone who tries to sell you on that is uninformed. I'm going to compare some parts of Islam with protestantism as it actually exists, not as a religious doctrine or a historical social movement.
There seems to be a misconceived notion of Islam among American leftists, who have spent most of their life primarily focused on the weltanschauung of American Christianity, that there are quite a lot of religious doctrines untouched by the same brutal, incoherent capitalist paradigm that they ascribe to "American protestantism" specifically. This is not to say that American protestantism doesn't qualify the most for these criticisms, or that there are 0 religious faiths that still avert the infection of this brutal capitalist logic, but a lot of times I see Islam singled out as a good example of a religion that does, and it's really not. I think a lot of it comes down to noble savagery, tbh. I'll talk about what I mean. Keep in mind I am a Muslim myself so I don't mean this to be a criticism of Islam at all.
Everyone knows about the gulf states and their ideology, but the development of this strain in modern Islam goes much deeper and arguably didn't need any help to spread. This strain is a sort of postmodern, nominally post-doctrine and non-denominational mirror to American evangelical protestantism. People might think that Islam becoming nominally non-denominational to a large number of its adherents would be a good thing, since it would supposedly counter sectarianism. However, much like American protestantism, the perception by Muslims that they are non-denominational is simply an illusion caused by the confusing nature of ideology in the postmodern condition. It is simply a fish not knowing what water is. In my experience, a lot of people who wouldn't consider themselves "Sunni" anymore, and barely know what that is to begin with, still harbor views that are very "Sunni chauvinistic" so to speak. Again, much like American protestantism, Sunnism is simply viewed as an unquestionable default state of Islam, and stuff like Catholicism is to them alien to "real Islam". How do these non-denominational, non-sectarian Muslims justify their chauvinism? They just consider Shias and other non-Sunnis to be some sort of non-Muslim deviation, or even blame Shias for sectarianism entirely, saying that Shias are the only people causing division within Islam. There is obviously an exhaustion with and taboo against being a takfiri, so most of this goes unspoken. The effect is pretty much the same. I know Shias who will never ever tell any other Muslim, even the ones who seem progressive, that they are Shia, because it will immediately start arguments over the ridiculous slander of Shias that is commonplace in pretty much every Sunni majority society. Reading about evangelicals in the US, this seems extremely close to the phenomenon of people seeing themselves as "non-denominational Christians" and seeing non-evangelicals as sectarians, and slandering them with accusations of idolatry and paganism, even when they refuse to identify themselves with any sect. It's like religious people don't even know how religious doctrine works anymore, same as how postmodernity has made the concept of political ideology break down.
Another parallel is Arab chauvinism and "Arabophilia". There is so much imitation of Arabs in non-Arab Muslim countries its insane. Islam is seen by so many Muslims as naturally implying that Arabs are the most pious Muslims, that Arab culture is the most pure culture, that Arabic is the most pure language, etc. People think it is somehow virtuous to dress less like the culture you were born in and more like an Arab, they think its more virtuous to use as many Arabic words and phrases as possible. Do you know how people convert to Islam and change their name to an Arabic one? That's not a doctrine of Islam at all, by the way. Just throwing that out there because it's a good example. If people want to do this that's fine, but again it goes so hand in hand with actual chauvinists who say that gulf Arabs are the truest Muslims and really think that the practice of Islam is synonymous with Arab culture as a whole. To me I think this parallels the engrained American chauvinism and US-defaultism of American Christian ideology. There are some really big differences here, and I think it's by necessity, from the place of Muslim countries in the world. But I think it's still a very interesting parallel.
If anyone else is Muslim here and has experiences with this I'd like to hear about it.