New Books In Islamic Studies

Sometimes a shallow explanation, the kind you read in newspapers and hear on television, is enough. “The home team was beaten at the buzzer” is probably all you need to know. Sometimes, however, it’s not. The intermittent conflict between the Shias and Sunnis in Iraq (and elsewhere) provides a good example. It is just not sufficient to say, as the major news outlets often do, that the Shias are fighting the Sunnis in Iraq because the Shias were oppressed by the Sunnis under Saddam Hussein, a Sunni. If this is all you understand about the conflict, you do not understand it. And you need to understand it. To even begin to comprehend the Sunni-Shia conflict, you need to know how, out of one revelation, Islam broke into two major parts; how, in the course of time, multi-national empires integrated those parts under one ostensibly pan-Muslim writ; how European imperialist broke up those empires, with their Shia and Sunni parts, and out of them made “nation states” where there were no