Lawrence Rosen is an emeritus professor at Princeton University and at Columbia Law School. His books include Varieties of Muslim Experience and The Culture of Islam.
Of all the world’s trouble spots few are more susceptible than the Middle East to being seen in terms of binary oppositions. One particularly murky dichotomy is between Sunni and Shi’a, the one accounting for 90 per cent of the world’s Muslims, the other constituting the majority in Iran and a large minority in many parts of the Gulf. Analogies we may want to reach for...
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