Toby Matthiesen is a Fellow at St. Antony's College, Oxford. He is the author of a number of books, and won prizes from the American Political Science Association and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and Foreign Policy, and has published op-eds in the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian. He has been a guest on CNN, BBC, NPR, ABC and al-Jazeera English.
Matthiesen's masterful survey of Sunni-Shiite relations in history is firmly grounded in the primary sources and ranges more widely geographically than is common in other works on the subject, including South Asia. The author avoids the glib truisms that have come to dominate discussion of this subject, while giving us thought-provoking, contextual insights into one of the key flash points within Islamic civilization. * Juan Cole, Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History and Director, Program in Arab and Muslim American Studies, University of Michigan * Ambitious in its historical as well as geographical scope, this is the first truly global account of the intimate and sometimes also violent relationship of Sunni and Shia in the making and remaking of Islam. * Faisal Devji, Professor of Indian History, University of Oxford *