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Podcast: New Books in Medieval History
Episode: Toby Matthiesen, "The Caliph and the Imam: The Making of Sunnism and Shiism" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Description: It was common during the years of the U.S. invasion of Iraq to talk about the Sunni-Shia splitâand how the sectarian violence was the result of a âcenturies-long hatredâ between the two different religious schools.But seeing this divide as the result of a longstanding feudâor to see it in the model of other religious schisms, like the Catholic-Protestant split and the centuries of war that followedâwould be a mistake, argues Toby Matthiesen.Toby, in his most recent book The Caliph and the Imam: The Making of Sunnism and Shiism (Oxford University P...