The House Divided By Barnaby Rogerson

Rogerson’s timely book begins with the contemporary Middle East and the proxy wars between Saudi Arabia and its Sunni allies and Shiite Iran. To understand these, he suggests, we must understand the origins of the Sunni-Shia divide, which go back to the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632, the accidental coup that set aside the claims of Ali, and the slaughter of Ali’s son Husayn at Kerbala. These events, known to every Muslim, have created a slender fault line in the Middle East.

This is a vivid and pulsating tale full of doomed heroes and secret conspiracies as Rogerson shows how the rivalry between Arab, Turk and Persian has shaped the modern chessboard of nation states, oil wells, mountains and minorities, and at the seismic shift from the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Iit is vital, Rogerson contends, to empathise with the Islamic world and understand their story-lines, or this disastrous schism may pull us all apart.