n>It is no great secret that coverage of Islam tends to favor Sunni over Shi‘a Islam, a trend that is puzzling in its persistence given geopolitical concerns of the past decade (indeed, of the past 40 years). Even in the academy, a glance at the Middle East Studies Association’s latest annual conference yields a total of six out of around 1000 total papers with “Shi‘a” or “Shi‘i” in the abstracts (though this is an admittedly imperfect measure). Laurence Louër’s Sunnis and Shi‘a: A Political History, then, provides a useful service to the field, not only in attending to the tradition of 15-20 percent of global Muslims who are Shi‘a, but also in bringing both major sects of Islam together in one comprehensive history. It is no small feat to create a political history of Islam, much less one that attends so well to Shi‘ism, in so few words, and I am aware of no other contemporary work that achieves this. Read Full Article »