Toby Matthiesen, The Caliph and the Imam: The Making of Sunnism and Shiism (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Toby Matthiesen (TM): I wrote this book in response to the events in the Middle East in the past twenty years or so, and to the wide-ranging and often misleading debates about the formation and political relevance of sectarian identity. I was dissatisfied with simplistic answers to the whole topic—in public discourse, in policy-making circles, and in parts of academia. These include accounts that depict sectarian conflict as age-old and unchanged for 1400 years, as well as those that have a contemporary and ahistorical focus, arguing that it is only current affairs that somehow lead to conflict and the political relevance of sectarian identities. I always felt that when one aspect of the topic had been explained, one could invoke a counter example to complicate matters again. I decided to try and answer the research questions—namely “what are the relations between Sunnis and Shia?” and “when does sectarian identity become politically relevant?”—in a more wholistic way, by writing a global and longue-durée history of Sunni-Shii relations. The book is based on fieldwork across the Arab and Islamic worlds, including in the Gulf states, Lebanon, Iraq, and India. It included a thorough revision of the secondary literature in numerous languages—one of the things I realized was that English-language scholarship often did not engage enough with literature produced in Arabic and Persian, French, and German. So a key aim of the book was also to bring different literatures, regions, periods, and academic fields and traditions into conversation with one another.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

TM: The book engages with different disciplines and subfields, from religious and Islamic studies and theology to Middle East and South Asian studies, history, anthropology, sociology, and political science and international relations. 

The approach of the book is twofold. It firstly shows that it is vital to understand how Sunnism and Shiism developed chronologically and doctrinally, and how earlier periods shaped later ones. History matters, and only by understanding the early and middle periods can we understand how later ones constituted themselves with reference to them. And secondly, it highlights that only a global perspective that studies connections across the Nile to Oxus region, the land mass from North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean to the Indian subcontinent, from the Arabic- and Turkic-speaking worlds to the Eastern parts of the Persianate ones, and linking those to European and American empires, can do justice to the subject. The book takes intra-Islamic debates and contestations seriously, while placing them in their social, political, and historical contexts. This is not meant to exoticize and essentialize Islam. Rather, the book traces how developments in the Islamic world interacted with wider ones such as: the Crusades and the Mongol conquests; early modern state formation; the discovery of the sea route to Asia; the beginnings of empire and capitalism; the print revolution; the emergence of the modern state and especially British and French colonialism; independence; and, eventually, the attempt to remold societies through foreign intervention in an age of American hegemony.

After outlining the causes of the original split after the death of the Prophet, and the consolidation of Sunnism and Shiism as separate schools within Islam with different ideals of political and religious authority, the book focuses on the confessionalization of the early modern period and the rivalries between Islamic empires, in particular between Safavids and Ottomans. It then looks at the recognition and institutionalization of sectarian difference by the modern state and Orientalist scholarship, including in the colonial period; the relationship between nationalism and sectarianism; the tension between sect-centered activism and pan-Islam; and the use of sectarian identity in inter-state rivalries since 1979. It seeks to draw out the connections between different periods and regions, especially the instrumentalization of memories of earlier conflict in the modern era. It also looks, for example, at the impact of printing and editing of Islamic “classics” in Arabic and Persian on the establishment of more rigid sectarian identities. And it shows how the meaning of Sunnism and Shiism could shift over time and how “confessional ambiguity” slowly gave way to more hardened sectarian identities. It argues that, in the modern period, Sunnism and Shiism became global communities of faith tied to specific resource-rich states, which allowed these states, namely Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, and others, to use their respective branches of Islam to project power abroad.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

TM: This book is in many ways a continuation and expansion of my previous work and research interests. My interest in the subject stems from my doctoral research on the politics of Shii communities in the Gulf, especially in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, and the sectarianization of the Arab uprisings (resulting in the publication of The Other Saudis and Sectarian Gulf, respectively). However, my new book looks at the question of Sunni-Shii relations in a much more wholistic manner and delves into regions and periods that I had not previously worked on. By doing so it also problematizes some of the more straight-forward, elite-centered, or modernist and contemporary arguments that myself and many others have previously invoked at length. One of the points I am making is that the period of the so-called “gunpowder” empires—and the ways in which they interacted with early European empires, not least on the Indian subcontinent and along the Indian Ocean and the Gulf route to India—is key in setting the foundation for the sectarianization of the modern period. Likewise key is the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century recognition and institutionalization of sectarian identity by European colonial powers, Orientalism, and Middle Eastern and Muslim-ruled states themselves. So while the book in many ways tackles similar questions as my previous work, in more narrow confines—namely, at what point does sectarian identity become politically salient? and how did Sunni-Shii relations develop?—it answers these questions through a historical approach that is distinctively shaped by insights from the fields of global history, historical political sociology, and comparative area studies.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

TM: I hope that the book will have a wide and diverse readership. First and foremost, it is written for scholars and students in the various fields that I seek to connect, primarily in Islamic studies and Middle East and South Asian studies. The book has an extensive notes section, bibliography, and an index. As such, scholars and students can use it to look up things that they perhaps do not work on directly themselves, or to receive hints for further reading. It is also designed as a textbook on Sunni-Shii relations and confessionalization in the Middle East and the wider Islamic world, and some colleagues and I have already started using it in teaching. Each chapter is meant to be coherent in itself and can be used as a required reading for an advanced undergraduate or a postgraduate option. I hope that the book will also be of use to students and scholars in the various disciplines that the book speaks to across the humanities and social sciences, in particular global history, comparative area studies, global religion, confessionalization, and colonialism, as well as the relationship between religion and empire and religion and politics more generally. 

Moreover, I have tried to write it in an engaging way, and so people with a general interest in history or the Middle East, South Asia, and Islam should also be able to read and learn from it. I have often tried to explain concepts from scratch so that readers with less prior knowledge in Islamic studies, for example, are able to read it.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

TM: My future research interests relate to the role of religion in international affairs, especially the rise of political Islam during the Cold War; and the modern history of the Gulf states. My next book will be a new history of the rise of the Gulf states that will place the region at the center of modern and contemporary Middle Eastern history and look at the myriad connections that have shaped the Gulf states and facilitated their rise. I am also working on a number of articles, including those based on previous research projects, one involving the archives of the Baath party of Iraq and another reassessing the impact of the Iranian Revolution on political Islam more broadly. I am also interested in the resilience of so-called nationalist Islamist movements, especially compared to global Islamists, and the wider place of the Middle East in international relations. 

J: What does the book’s title refer to? 

TM: The title of the book refers to the two ideal types of political and spiritual leadership that have at most times been embraced by Sunnis and Shia respectively. Sunnis embraced the Caliphate, and Shia the Imamate, as the ideal types of political leadership—although there were times when the two concepts were blurred and embraced by the other, and it took centuries before the terms “Sunni” and “Shii” came to delineate cohesive religious communities and the connotation they have today, as I show in the book. The title therefore refers to a process that turned myriad interpretations of Islam and a multiplicity of popular practices into two major branches of Islam, Sunnism and Shiism, under which most manifestations of Islam were to varying degrees subsumed. Some could see the title as indicating that the book is primarily about early Islam, but that is not what the title is meant to evoke. As the book shows, the making of Sunnism and Shiism has been a long and drawn-out process, and while of course on a doctrinal level much is negotiated and then codified in the first centuries of Islam, I argue that the institutionalization of religion in the modern state and the impact of printing and mass media likewise played crucial roles in the remaking of Sunnism and Shiism as Islam’s two main branches. And to understand their complicated and often contested relationship, one has to understand these wider processes, including how different understandings of the ideal political system and the nature of religious authority affected that relationship. 

Excerpt from the book (from the Prologue)

The midday sun struck the gilded dome built over the grave of Hussain, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, blinding anyone who dared to look up at it. It was the spring of 2019. I was sitting inside the shrine, located in the holy city of Karbala in Iraq, attending the ‘Spring Martyrdom’ Conference, intended to promote and celebrate Hussain as a universal figure. I was among a few dozen guests and hundreds of visitors, all gathered at a site which, over centuries, has been both a place of fervent worship and heavy fighting. Here took place the massacre of Hussain and his followers in the Battle of Karbala in the year 61 of the Islamic calendar (680 ad) at the hands of an army sent by the Umayyad Caliphate based in Damascus. The shrine was often contested between competing powers espousing Sunnism and Shiism. It was ransacked by Wahhabi zealots in 1802, and bombarded by Saddam Hussein’s tanks during the short-lived Shii uprising of 1991. (Plaques around the shrine commemorate the latter event, indicating the bullet holes still visible in the marble walls.) After the US-led invasion of 2003, it became a symbol of a new-found Shii self-consciousness, and when the so-called Islamic State (IS) declared a Caliphate in Northern Iraq and eastern Syria in 2014, it vowed to turn to rubble the ‘idolators’ and ‘tomb worshippers’ holy sites at Najaf and Karbala. In response, tens of thousands of Iraqi Shia, urged on by Iraq’s senior Shii cleric, took up arms to defeat IS. (As I entered the shrine, some of these Shii paramilitaries were still celebrating their victory in front of it.) Karbala is thus to many the birthplace of the Sunni–Shia split, and epitomises how Sunni and Shia have been at odds ever since.

That morning in 2019, on the podium in front of Hussain’s grave, Sunni and Shii dignitaries praised Hussain as a unifying figure. Given the polarisation and violence of recent years, this was remarkable. Hussain is of course an especially important figure for Shia, who see him as an Imam, the rightful political and spiritual successor to the Prophet Muhammad. Less known, however, is that Sunnis and Sufis likewise hold Hussain in high regard and feel he was wronged. Karbala and many other shrines associated with the Family of the Prophet Muhammad constituted not only Shii sites of memory, but similarly places where adherents of various confessions and faiths could come together without focusing on differences. The symposium offered the hope of celebrating this inclusive heritage of Islam. And it served as a corrective to standard narratives of perpetual Sunni–Shia strife.

The question of the nature of relations between Sunnism and Shiism preoccupied me long before that conference in Karbala, and indeed since I first started engaging with the Middle East and the wider Islamic world in the aftermath of 9/11 and the Iraq War of 2003. Before the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the terms ‘Sunni’ and ‘Shii’ were little used outside of specialist literature. Yet within a few months of the invasion, Western media and politicians invoked them to explain the conflict in Iraq, and much of the region’s ills. Many argued that the two sides had resented and fought each other for nearly 1,400 years. The description of Iraq as sectarian served both to deflate blame from the American-led administration, and in a circular logic, to legitimise reshaping Iraqi politics along sectarian lines. Simplistic narratives of binary opposites, of Islam and the West, of Sunni and Shii, made me wary. I decided to dig deeper and over years of research, fieldwork and countless conversations with people across the Islamic world realised that Sunnis and Shia indeed have had a long and complicated relationship but that standard narratives fall way short of explaining it. It took centuries for Sunnism and Shiism to develop. Neither the coherence of the two nor the dividing line between them were always clear, nor always conflict-prone.

I encountered many examples of coexistence, ambiguity, and polarisation. Shrines in the post-Ottoman world and on the Indian subcontinent, and Muharram processions in India, attended by Shia and Sunnis, are examples of the former. Mourning the death of Hussain and his Companions in battle and atonement for not having saved Hussain could assert Shii difference and Sunnis sometimes criticised Shia for it. But these could likewise become inclusive festivals at which Sunnis invoked Hussain.

Sunni Revivalists I engaged with in North India and Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, strongly refuted Shiism (they called it a ‘deviant sect’, or not part of Islam at all) and warned me against going to Shii areas with wild rumours of Shii practices, and that it was not possible to trust Shia because they might perform dissimulation (taqiyya)—to which over the centuries Shia sometimes have been forced to resort to for self-preservation. This was a common trope in anti-Shii polemics even if it was much less frequently used than these polemics made Sunnis (and many Orientalists) believe. Many Shia I met held similar prejudices towards ‘Wahhabis’, a term some applied widely to Sunnis. While they want Sunnis to accept them as a valid branch of Islam, most Shia believe that they constitute a chosen group of Muslims. On both sides, prejudices and conspiracy theories exist. 

But these issues did not lead to conflict in and of themselves. As I and some of my colleagues have long argued, sectarian identity is most salient when political powers instrumentalise it. This was evident in many of the countries that I visited during my research. In Bahrain, Sunnis and Shia have long lived side by side, joining in Muharram processions, and Leftist movements. Sunni–Shia tensions stem from the island’s history as a province of Iran and then its conquest by a Sunni ruling family in the eighteenth century and the disenfranchisement of its Shii population; a pattern that entrenched itself under British protection. After the Iranian revolution, the Shia’s pent-up resentment intersected with the appeal of the revolution, and Gulf rulers’ fear of a region-wide Shii rising. Many Lebanese have long tried to transcend the limits of sectarian identity as institutionalised under the French Mandate, a system symbolised by the huge posters of political leaders and the flags of sect-based militias and parties on streets across the country, but to little avail. In Syria, the Baath party’s nationalist rhetoric positioned itself against that colonial legacy, rendering sectarian identity officially a taboo. The regime’s ubiquitous informants wanted to stamp out all talk of difference, while relying on the support of non-Sunnis, who dominated the highest echelons of the state, and the security services that policed the country. In Iran, the Shii clerics in charge officially embraced Islamic unity and its Sunni minority. But Shiism and a sense of ethnic superiority were so pervasive, and so coupled with the ambition to become a major power, that I understood why its Sunni and Arab neighbours feared its revolution, and why Sunni Iranians feel like second class citizens.

And in Iraq, a country in which centuries of Ottoman rule and then the British had enshrined Sunni supremacy, competing cultural memories, rooted in the many sites across the country associated with the early split, like Karbala, were reconstituted after the US-led intervention brought to power the first Shii-led government in a millennium. When a civil war engulfed Iraq shortly afterwards, the Americans and their allies as noted quickly blamed ‘ancient hatreds’, rather than their own lack of post-invasion planning, while simultaneously institutionalising ethno-sectarian divisions in ways reminiscent of French and British imperial policies. (…) 

Despite the overwhelming evidence, both historically and contemporary, that it is the interaction of doctrinal tensions with political ones that lead to conflict, many still see Sunnism and Shiism as perpetually at loggerheads and invoke ‘Sunni’ and ‘Shii’ as catch-all terms to explain division and bloodshed in Muslim societies. The notion that ‘ancient hatreds’ divided Sunni and Shii and that the two were polar opposites throughout Islamic history, persists, not least in public debate and amongst decision-makers (and amongst scholars working on especially polarised periods or places, and who are unaware of contrasting examples). Some argue that doctrinal debates a millennium ago explain violence today. Others solely focus on the impact of the modern state and the interventions of regional and global powers, or see sectarian conflict as purely a product of material struggles, often refusing to take history seriously and make connections with previous periods, or to engage with doctrinal debates. It is against these simplistic notions that reduce Sunni–Shia relations to conflict and doctrinal tensions, or that argue that history and doctrinal debates don’t matter, that I chose to write The Caliph and the Imam.