After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam Review Praise for After the Prophet“After the Prophet is a remarkable and respectful telling of the story of Islam—a tale of power, intrigue, rivalry, jealousy, assassination, manipulation, greed, and faith that would have made Machiavelli shudder (had he read it), but above all it is a very human story, told in a wonderfully novelistic style that puts most other, often dreary, explanations of the Shia-Sunni divide to shame.”—Hooman Majd, author of The Ayatollah Begs to Differ“After the Prophet vividly re-creates the personal rivalries and resentments that led to Islam’s great schism in the immediate wake of Muhammad’s death, and makes one understand how truly contemporary they are with our own time. Lesley Hazleton brings off the happy effect of turning the reader into a participant in the world she describes—a world of long memories, where the deep past lives on in the present day, as if the Battle of Karbala in 680 A.D. was little more than an eyeblink away from the Ashura Massacre there in 2004.“My only regret is that Hazleton didn’t write this terrific and necessary book in time to enlighten Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, et al., before they so unwisely invaded a land, and a religious culture, of which they were reprehensibly ignorant. I hope they read it now, with proper rue. Meanwhile, the rest of us can take pleasure in Hazleton’s vigorously drawn characters, her lucid storytelling, and her enthralling, imaginative grasp of the roots and consequences of the Sunni-Shia divide.”—Jonathan Raban, author of My Holy War and Surveillance“Lesley Hazleton succeeds in bringing out the truly epic character of the Shia-Sunni split, telling the story with great empathy. The general Western reader will come away from this book with a newfound respect for the depth and power of the early schism in Islam and of what happened at Karbala.”—Wilferd Madelung, Laudian Professor of Arabic, University of Oxford, and author of The Succession to Muhammad“Whether or not George Bush even knew there were such things as Shias and Sunnis before invading Iraq, after reading Lesley Hazleton’s gripping book no one will be able to plead ignorance about why the split between them happened and what it all means.”—Alan Wolfe, director, Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, and author of The Future of Liberalism  About the Author British-born Lesley Hazleton is a psychologist and veteran Middle East journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Esquire, Vanity Fair, Harper’s The Nation, New Republic, New York Review of Books, and other publications. The author of several acclaimed books on Middle East politics, religion, and history, including Jerusalem, Jerusalem and Mary: A Flesh-and-Blood Biography of the Virgin Mother, she now lives in Seattle, Washington.www.AfterTheProphet.com              See all Product description