Sooner or later you will notice it. You pray next to one person who folds their hands on their chest, another on the navel; one says ameen aloud, another silently; one raises their hands at several points, another only once. Your first thought may be: who is doing it wrong, and am I?
No one is doing it wrong. What you are seeing is the four schools of law, the madhhabs, and understanding them will save you a great deal of anxiety. This is not four religions. It is one religion, carefully studied, with small honest differences on the details.
Just for today
The next time you see someone pray a little differently from how you learned, practice one thought: 'that is probably just a different school, and it is valid.' Do not correct them, and do not panic about yourself. Just let the difference be what it is: normal.
Why Muslims pray a little differently
لِكُلٍّ جَعَلْنَا مِنكُمْ شِرْعَةً وَمِنْهَاجًا ۚ وَلَوْ شَآءَ ٱللَّهُ لَجَعَلَكُمْ أُمَّةً وَٰحِدَةً وَلَٰكِن لِّيَبْلُوَكُمْ فِى مَآ ءَاتَىٰكُمْ ۖ فَٱسْتَبِقُوا۟ ٱلْخَيْرَٰتِ
“To each of you We prescribed a law and a method. Had Allah willed, He would have made you one nation, but He intended to test you in what He has given you; so race to all that is good.”
Al-Ma'idah 5:48 Read 5:48 with tafsir
The Prophet ﷺ prayed in a certain way, and his Companions learned it directly from him. But on some small points he did things more than one way at different times, or a detail reached one Companion and not another. So when the great scholars later gathered all the evidence, they sometimes weighed an ambiguous point differently, in good faith, from the same Qur'an and Sunnah.
The result is not chaos; it is richness. The Qur'an itself tells us that differing approaches, within the bounds of the truth, were part of the design, and that the response is not to argue but to compete in goodness:
Four trustworthy roads
Over the early centuries, four great scholars and the students who refined their work became the four enduring schools of Sunni law, each named after its founder: the Hanafi (after Abu Hanifa, in Iraq), the Maliki (after Malik ibn Anas, in Madinah), the Shafi'i (after Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafi'i), and the Hanbali (after Ahmad ibn Hanbal). Whole regions of the Muslim world follow one or another to this day.
Hear this clearly: all four are valid, all four are Sunni, and all four are sincere, rigorous efforts to follow the same Qur'an and the same Prophet ﷺ. Choosing to learn within one of them is not joining a faction. It is choosing a trustworthy, complete road that a billion people have walked safely.
The small differences, and why they exist
The differences between the schools are real but small, and they cluster around fine points: exactly where the hands rest in standing, whether ameen is said aloud or silently, when the hands are raised, the wording of a supplication, the details of what breaks wudu. None of them is a difference about who God is or what the prayer is for.
And the Prophet ﷺ told us how Allah views a sincere scholar who weighs the evidence and still lands on a different detail. There is reward even in an honest mistake:
So what should you actually do?
Do not try to choose a school in a panic, and do not try to mix all four at once. The simplest, wisest path for a new Muslim is this: pray the way your local mosque and a trusted local teacher pray. Over time, you will likely settle naturally into the school of your community, and learning one school well, rather than a confused little of each, is a strength, not a limitation.
And never, ever let these differences become a weapon. The moment someone uses the madhhabs to look down on another Muslim, they have misunderstood the whole point. The schools are four windows into one house. The people inside are family. This lesson is an overview; the precise position of each school on each point is exactly the kind of detail to learn, in person, from a qualified teacher.