Nasr cannot be held responsible for the fact that some readers have gravitated to his thesis to soothe bad consciences about the invasion and occupation. Yet The Shia Revival--and here is where the prognosis comes in--engages in no small amount of special pleading. In retort to US officials who, since the hostage crisis and the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, have seen Shiites as the bad Muslims and Sunnis as not so bad, he clearly wants his readers simply to invert the mental equation.

This agenda comes through in passages like this: "The Shias' historical experience is akin to those of Jews and Christians in that it is a millennium-long tale of martyrdom, persecution and suffering. Sunnis, by contrast, are imbued with a sense that immediate worldly success should be theirs." Several times in the text, Nasr compares Shiites to Catholics, Orthodox Jews and Hindus--people the cosmopolitan West is familiar with--in tacit distinction to the alien Sunnis. And the diffusion of Salafi ideas wrongly described as Islamization? By Nasr's lights, that is "Sunnification." There is also transparent legerdemain in his insinuation that Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani intervened to insure that every third candidate on the "Shiite list" in the January 2005 Iraqi elections was a woman. In fact, women were accorded such prominence on every electoral slate because of a quota requirement in the Transitional Administrative Law crafted in 2004--and Iraqi women's rights activists deserve all the credit.

The goal of Nasr's book is to persuade Washington to downgrade its alliances with Sunni Arab regimes and forge friendlier ties with the rising Shiites of the Middle East. Indeed, he believes Washington will have to pursue this course, "if for no better reason than that the Shia live on top of some of the richest oil fields in the region," in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait and, of course, Iran. As a result, he defies classification in the usual schemas of contemporary Middle East policy debates. Like Ajami and some Bush Administration hawks, he wants the United States to stop pressuring Iraqi Shiite religious parties to seek reconciliation with Sunni Arabs. In its extreme form, this policy orientation is expressed as the "80 percent solution," of which some in Vice President Dick Cheney's office are reportedly enamored, whereby the United States would accompany the condominium of the Shiite religious parties and the Kurds in a Sherman-style march through the so-called Sunni Triangle. Yet Nasr is a staunch realist regarding Hezbollah and Iran, and--writing with Iran scholar Ray Takeyh--he took to the New York Times op-ed page recently to advocate precisely the "policy of engagement" with Tehran that is anathema to neoconservatives and Cheneyite cold warriors. Like Takeyh, and indeed most Iran specialists in the West, Nasr is no fan of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the clerical regime, which he accuses of making "overweening claims about religious authority over political decisions." (Nasr's distinctive twist on this conventional view of Khomeini, in keeping with the theme of the book, is to decry "his agenda of subtly steering Shiism closer to Sunnism.") Sistani, with his image of traditionalist aversion to the direct exercise of temporal power, is Nasr's model ayatollah.

On the other hand, Nasr unequivocally locates the origins of the Shiite revival in the Islamic Revolution, and he is proud of the modernizing accomplishments of the Islamic Republic. How can a moderate Muslim minority that the United States should befriend have emerged from this quintessentially radical event? Nasr is unclear on this point, but his implied argument is that the radical tone of Khomeinism--voiced today by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad--retains purchase among Shiites only because of long mutual enmity between Iran and the West. If the West, and especially the United States, would forgive Tehran its transgressions in the fervor of revolution and deal in good faith with the pragmatists in the clerical hierarchy, the likes of Ahmadinejad would eventually lose their cachet. This, too, is a familiar realist argument, and both Takeyh (Hidden Iran) and British-Iranian scholar Ali Ansari (Confronting Iran) have devoted their very useful volumes to its explication. No detailed treatment of Sunni-Shiite tensions, or Shiism for that matter, is necessary to comprehend the trajectory of the US-Iranian confrontation. With their focus on Iranian nationalism, Takeyh and Ansari are better, though not more encouraging, guides to this subject than Nasr.

Viewed through the regional prism, Nasr's disdain for the "Sunni" worldliness of Khomeinism raises another question: Why do Middle Easterners, including Sunni Islamist parties like Hamas but also large segments of Sunni Arab populations, regard Shiite Islamist militancy with admiration? One important answer surely lies in the conflict over Palestine, left to fester by Arab regimes obsessed with their own security and subservient to Washington, while Iran and Hezbollah position themselves rhetorically (and seek to transcend sectarian divisions) as the redoubtable defenders of Muslim Jerusalem. At a deeper level, the Islamic Revolution's ouster of the Shah, Ahmadinejad's insistence on Iran's right to enrich uranium and Hezbollah's "divine victory" over Israel in 2000 and 2006 are perceived as rare triumphs over colonial encroachment, moments when Arabs and Muslims wrote history instead of having it written upon them.

It is instructive, however, that Hassan Nasrallah's preferred narrative for interpreting Iraq, divide et impera, is highly contested in the Arab world, where many see the malign hand of Iran as well as an illegal US occupation. The Iraqi government is widely viewed as a puppet of the United States or Iran or both. Anti-Shiite sentiments have spread through virulent, Salafi-run TV channels operating in Iraq, as well as through the Iraqi refugees' tales of targeting by death squads. The most popular satellite channel, Al Jazeera, has been banned from Iraq since 2004 because of its alleged sympathies for Sunni rebels, and hundreds of Shiites recently demonstrated in Najaf against its portrayal of Ayatollah Sistani. Among Iraqi Shiites, meanwhile, the old questions of identity and relation to the state are far from settled by the Shiite revival. Notions of Arabism and Iraqi nationalism exert a powerful pull alongside Islamism and sectarian pride. Indirect evidence of the vigor of these debates came in mid-May, when the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, in a subtle distancing from its place of exile in Iran, changed its name to the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council and scaled back its demands for a Shiite mega-province in the south. According to Reidar Visser, a prominent scholar of Iraqi Shiism, party members took these steps "to stress their Iraqiness."

Whatever the outcome of these debates, and whatever horse Washington eventually bets on in the Green Zone, Nasr and Nakash are undoubtedly correct that the rise of the Iraqi Shiites promises to be a lasting feature of the strategic landscape, along with the heightened clout of Iran and Hezbollah's prominent role in Lebanon's confessional politics. These developments are not solely understandable in sectarian terms, but they have been understood that way by key elites in the Middle East, most visibly in Amman, Cairo and Riyadh. Not only did the Saudis loosen the reins on the excommunicators among the Wahhabi clergy; columnists in the quasi-official press organs of Egypt and Jordan also flirted with the sectarian analysis emanating from the palaces there. Since late 2006 cooler heads have seemingly prevailed. On the clerical level, the respected Egyptian scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi has convened a series of meetings between prominent Sunni imams and Shiite mullahs to find common theological ground. On his website, Qaradawi dismissed the early April meeting as a "conference of empty compliments" but stressed the importance of continuing dialogue "for the preservation of Muslim unity." On the state level, Saudi and Iranian diplomats are widely believed to have talked down Lebanese Sunni and Shiite parties from the brink of extended street fighting over the disputed composition of the Lebanese cabinet. Still, with the Lebanon crisis unresolved, Iraqi refugees languishing in Jordan, Syria and elsewhere, and no end in sight to the Iraqi maelstrom, the shadow of sectarianism is far from lifted. The Bush Administration's Iraq adventure has unleashed volatile transformations in the Middle East whose direction is impossible to predict or control.

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