Cold War in the Islamic World

The tug of war within the Muslim world between the Shi[ah and Sunnis has been a popular subject that has provoked the investigative curiosity of historians and political analysts alike ever since the shocking events, cumulatively titled as the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979. Roy Mottahedeh’s book, The Mantle of the Prophet (2000), looked at this story through the prism of the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979. More recently, John McHugo’s A Concise History of Sunnis & Shi’is (2017) gave an overview of the developments that have taken place in the realm of Sunni-Shi[i relations throughout Muslim history. The book under review is another such effort that captures very nicely the march of political history in the Middle East and the Gulf during the last hundred years.

The book is primarily a chronicle of events and developments – interspersed with brief comments and analytic insights – that have unfolded on the political landscape of the Middle East and the Gulf region from the mid twentieth century onwards. Combining published reports with insider information as its source, the book presents a fairly detailed account of the political and economic dynamics that have helped shape the Middle East into what it is today. Episodes of domestic scale have been interwoven with interventions from global power players like Britain, the USA and Russia to craft a story that would particularly interest students of international politics. However, a number of reviewers have pointed out the lack of ‘broader analytic patterns that can only be identified through rigorous scholarly engagement’ in the book. More importantly, while the political and geographic dimensions of the present Arab-Iran conflict must be taken into account, going back to the historical roots of it in the early Islamic, rather pre-Islamic, period holds key to understanding the true nature and depth of this conflict.