Nearly every contemporary discussion of Muslim politics returns, sooner or later, to the split between Shia and Sunni Islam. It is often described as an ancient feud, but that shorthand hides more than it reveals. What began in 7th-century Arabia as a dispute over who should lead the Muslim community after the Prophet Muhammad’s (SAW) death has, over fourteen centuries, been remade again and again by empire, memory and modern geopolitics.

For Sunnis, authority historically flowed through caliphs chosen by consultation among leading companions, beginning with the gathering at Saqifa in 632. For Shias, legitimate succession ran through Ali ibn Abi Talib, the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, and then through his descendants, the Imams. The theological differences later hardened over the status of the Imams, the canon of hadith, and questions of law which grew out of this political fracture. The killing of Husayn ibn Ali at Karbala in 680 turned that dispute into a wound, and into a ritualised memory of injustice that continues to shape Shia piety and identity.

Yet for long stretches of Islamic history, everyday practice blurred the boundaries we now treat as fixed. Medieval Iraq, Iran and the Levant saw intertwined Sufi orders, shared shrines and dynasties that combined Shia sympathies with formally Sunni institutions. Scholars like Ja‘far al-Sadiq are foundational to Shia thought but also deeply embedded in the Sunni legal tradition. In South........

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