Research on Sunni-Shiʿi Relations

Matthiesen’s The Caliph and the Imam, a global history of Sunni-Shiʿi relations, is an encyclopedic work with striking differences of quality. While the detailed treatment of the last decades contextualizes the development of Sunni-Shiʿi relation regarding competing, non-Islamic ideologies, geopolitical conflicts and social change, moreover with due consideration of transnational networks, the passages on colonialism overstate the importance of colonial rulers at the expense of local actors. While the analysis of Sunni-Shiʿi relations in the age of the gunpowder empires nuances the cliché of the Ottoman Empire as a sectarian Sunni state, two conflicting accounts on the emergence of Sunni and Shiʿi Islam are presented in the first chapter, one close to the traditional Shiʿi narrative, one close to the current scholarly consensus. Matthiesen highlights confessional ambiguity as characteristic of the post-Mongol period and the era of gunpowder empires but does not use the full potential of the concept for the analysis of recent Sunni-Shiʿi relations

Ambiguity · Colonialism · Confessional · Empire · Geopolitics · Gunpowder · Islam · Islamic Studies and History · Islamic Thought and Society Studies · Turkey's Politics and Society