- English
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- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
Recommended on The Rest is Politics and Empire '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 Dalrymple 'Brilliant' Anita Anand 'This is not a book to be ignored' The Times 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 cousin and son-in-law 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 resources, sheikhs and imams. The result is a book of wide-ranging empathy, understanding and insights.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Introduction. The House Divided
- Part One. The Origins of the Sunni–Shia Schism
- Part Two. Medieval Caliphates
- Part Three. The Emergence of the Three: Turkey, Persia, Saudi Arabia
- Part Four. Colonial Night, 1830–1979
- Part Five. 1979 Revolutions: the Middle East Transformed
- Part Six. Twenty-first-Century Battlefields: Syria, Iraq and Yemen
- Part Seven. The Enemy of My Enemy: Egypt, Israel, USA and Qatar
- Part Eight. Far Frontiers and Distant Powers: Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Chechnya and China’s New Silk Road
- Further reading
- Acknowledgments
- Index
- Timeline of Islamic dynasties