The House Divided: Sunni, Shia and the Making of the Middle East

An incisive look at the past, present, and future of the religious divide that lies at the heart of the Middle East.

At the heart of the Middle East, with its regional conflicts and proxy wars, is a 1400-year-old schism between Sunni and Shia. To understand this divide and its modern resonances, we need to revisit its origins—which go back to the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632; the accidental coup that set aside the claims of his son Ali; and the slaughter of Ali's own son Husayn at Karbala. These events, known to every Muslim, have created a slender faultline in the Middle East.

The House Divided follows these narratives from the first Sunni and Shia caliphates through the medieval empires of the Arabs, Persians, and Ottomans to the contemporary Middle East. It shows how a complex range of identities and rivalries—religious, ethnic, and national—have shaped the region, jolted by the seismic shift of the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

Rogerson's original approach takes the modern chessboard of nation states and looks at each through its particular history of empires and occupiers, minorities and resources, sheikhs and imams. The result is wide-ranging empathy, understanding, and insight—a book that is vital for anyone wishing to understand many of the current tensions in the Middle East today.

Barnaby Rogerson is an author, publisher, and journalist. He co-runs Eland Publishing, which specializes in keeping the classics of travel literature in print. Barnaby has also written dozens of travel articles, book reviews, and historical essays on various North African and Islamic themes, for Vanity Fair, Cornucopia, Condé Nast Traveller, Geographical, the Guardian, the Independent, the Telegraph, House & Garden, Harpers & Queen, and the Times Literacy Supplement. He lives in London.