The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future (Nasr)

Vali Nasr's account of the modern Sunni-Shia divide and its political consequences across the Middle East, published by W.W. Norton in 2006. Nasr, a scholar of Middle Eastern politics, discusses how Ayatollah Khomeini's post 1979 revolutionary government framed the export of its Islamic revolution, including its war effort against Iraq, in explicitly sectarian and pan-Islamist Shia terms, appealing directly to Iraq's own Shia majority population, while Saddam Hussein's government in turn invoked long standing Sunni Arab anxieties about Persian and Shia influence to rally domestic and regional Arab support. Its strength is a close account of how both governments actually used sectarian religious appeals during the war, distinct from asking what caused it. Its limit is that its focus is the modern Sunni-Shia relationship broadly, so the Iran-Iraq War itself is one case study within a wider argument rather than the book's central subject.