What God Hath Put Asunder
Judd Birdsall Monday, 13 June 2011
During a May 2007 Republican presidential debate, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani was asked to explain the difference between Sunni and Shia Islam. Caught momentarily like a deer in the headlights, Giuliani responded with a fairly satisfactory answer: rival visions of leadership succession following Muhammad's death.
The question itself was more interesting than the response. Including a question about sectarian distinctions in a political debate highlighted three contemporary realities: religion matters, religious difference matters, and Islam matters most in modern geopolitics. These realities form the three central arguments in Stephen Prothero's latest popular writ, God is Not One. The author surveys the dizzying diversity among and within eight major religious traditions and ranks them according to contemporary significance.
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