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The House Divided

Sunni, Shia and the Making of the Middle East

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About this listen

At the heart of the Middle East, with its regional conflicts and proxy wars, is a 1400-year-old schism between Sunni and Shia. To understand this divide and its modern resonances, we need to revisit its origins—which go back to the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632; the accidental coup that set aside the claims of his son Ali; and the slaughter of Ali's own son Husayn at Karbala. These events, known to every Muslim, have created a slender fault line in the Middle East.

The House Divided follows these narratives from the first Sunni and Shia caliphates through the medieval empires of the Arabs, Persians, and Ottomans to the contemporary Middle East. It shows how a complex range of identities and rivalries—religious, ethnic, and national—have shaped the region, jolted by the seismic shift of the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

Rogerson's original approach takes the modern chessboard of nation states and looks at each through its particular history of empires and occupiers, minorities and resources, sheikhs and imams. The result is wide-ranging empathy, understanding, and insight—a book that is vital for anyone wishing to understand many of the current tensions in the Middle East today.

©2024 Barnaby Rogerson (P)2025 Tantor Media Islam Israel & Palestine Middle East Iran War Africa Middle Ages Imperialism Ottoman Empire Royalty Crusade
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A good overview/primer for anyone interested in the history of Islam and how it has affected the Middle East and geopolitics. I found it helpful to dip in and out of this book rather than listening from beginning to end.

A good overview

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This is a very informative and important book which tells us how many of today’s wars and tensions came to be. Rogerson has done his research and writes with sympathy and authority, and keeps a great pace. I bought the book twice (physical copy too) as I was keen to share it with family.

Sadly the audiobook is let down by horrendous narration. Rogerson has really been let down here by using a different narrator instead of reading it himself. I don’t think he has listened to the narration either to proofread/prooflisten, as I’m sure he would have caught all the errors. I suspect automated/AI speech-to-text may have been used for part of this; it sounds that way because the pronunciations of Arabic & Turkish names are so wildly inaccurate that sometimes the listener is confused as to who is being spoken about. This makes Rogerson’s otherwise very authoritative work sound much less than authoritative (how do you trust someone on history if they can’t even read the name of the figure they’re speaking about?), and frustrating to listen to. These mispronunciations are of both well-known historical figures as well as current world leaders - hence my suspicion about the use of automation in narrating this work, because it takes trivial research to find the correct pronunciations for all of these names, which I imagine a real human narrator would take the time to do. One example is Recep Tayyip Erdogan - the narrator reads his Turkish first name as “ressop” (as if it was English phonetically) - his first name is of course pronounced “Rajab” which newsreaders say all the time, and as the most cursory Internet search will tell you. The same errors are made for at least half the historic figures in the nearly almost 1,500 years of history that the book covers - quite jarring sadly.

Worth a listen if you can tolerate it, otherwise please just buy the physical book or Kindle e-book.

Excellent informative book let down by poor narration

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