The Council for Arab-British Understanding (Caabu) would like to invite you to a book launch on Sunnis and Shi’is with John McHugo.

In this richly layered and engrossing account, John McHugo reveals how the great divide in Islam occurred. Charting the story of Islam from the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad to the present day, he describes the conflicts that raged over the succession to the Prophet, how Sunnism and Shi’ism evolved as different sects during the Abbasid caliphate, and how the rivalry between the empires of the Sunni Ottomans and Shi’i Safavids contrived to ensure that the split would continue into modern times. Definitive and insightful, A Concise History of Sunnis and Shi’is is an essential guide to understanding the genesis, development and manipulation of the greatest schism that has come to define Islam and the Muslim world.

John McHugo is an honorary Senior Fellow at the Centre for Syrian Studies at St Andrews, and a board member of the Council for Arab-British Understanding and the British Egyptian Society. He has also written on legal aspects of the Arab-Israeli dispute and advised Tim Farron, when he was leader of the Liberal Democrats, on Palestinian

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