Yitzhak Nakash: Reaching For Power - Shia In The Modern Arab World

"I shall write soon about the 5th Anniversary but I wanted to postpone that until the 9th of April, in the meantime I'll review this book since I just finished it.


Like me, Nakash is a non-Shi’i (Iraqi Jew) who seems to have developed a fascination with Shi’ism, he’s written a number of books on the subject, including the solid The Conversion of Iraq’s Tribes to Shiism, a book I found thoroughly researched, sourced and balanced, which led me to pick up this book, making it the second Naqash book I read.

The book is essentially a very informative country-by-country overview of Shia conditions beginning from the nation-state period in the Arab world, it outlines in painstaking detail the relationship between the state and Shi’i community in four gruesome chapters, beginning by Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, briefly touching on Kuwait [which it praises as the most Shia-tolerant], then jumping headlong into the informative Iraq and Lebanon chapters, before finishing with a brief opinion-recommendation."
Konfused KId