THE HOUSE DIVIDED

A masterly engagement with the most delicate and important of subjects filled with gentle empathy learning and rare balance Rory Stewart Rogerson is an original eloquent and always fascinating William DalrympleRecommended on The Rest is Politics and EmpireAt 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 Kerbala 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 caliphates and 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 re