The Others

"So this novel was written under a pseudonym by a Saudi, probably a Saudi woman. It describes the lives of young Saudi Shia women in the country’s Eastern Province. They go to school, they fall in love with each other. It shows the day-to-day discrimination they face from other Saudis. I wrote my PhD on the Eastern Province, and on Saudi Shia, and I thought this book was just a very good way of describing the social reality of people from different religious backgrounds living with each other, but one perhaps being the more dominant, and the other the more suppressed and less-known. In the day-to-day interactions in the school, you see that there is a lot of prejudice that people have. No, but it became a huge success outside. It broke two huge taboos: one, the sexual taboo and the other the sectarian taboo by outlining the life of a young Shia woman, and the problems she faces. The book is very famous in the Arab world, and also in Saudi Arabia. Yes, that’s why I included a novel. Carsten Niebuhr is also a very good read. As is Nasir Khusraw. I didn’t choose too many academic books. I’ve been asked a couple of times to suggest books to read on the topic, but here I’ve chosen books that are interesting in and of themselves, including as primary sources or as examples of how the subject has been written about historically. There are lots of books that deal with a sub-aspect, or with one period or one country or region, but no one had really put it all together. There are also some shorter books that deal with the history of Sunnis and Shias. But I wanted to give the subject a full-length treatment, and that is why the book became so long. Some of these other books make one argument, saying, ‘It’s all the modern state’s responsibility’, or ‘It’s all about international politics and military intervention in the Middle East.’ Or, ‘It’s all about the early period.’ I tried to take on all these different hypotheses and see how much of the wider relationship they could explain. Then I realized I had to write a book in which each period has its place, but also, importantly, where the Middle East connected with the Indian subcontinent and Central Asia and Iran and Afghanistan were front and centre. India actually played a very important role, especially in the colonial period, but also before. Most histories of Islam don’t focus on India. I tried to connect these very strongly. Over many centuries, when people had to flee from the conquests of Iran or Afghanistan, they went to India and you had very strong Shia states being established. They had a lot of patronage to offer and they, in turn, managed to fund scholarship and shrines back in Iraq. British colonial rule then proved consequential. From the 18th century onwards, in India, the East India Company established Sunnism and Shiism as two separate legal categories. This was something that was then, much later on, taken up in the Middle East. So, I figured that not only connecting different periods but also connecting different places was really important."