The Sunna and Shi'a in history : Division and Ecumenism in the Muslim Middle East edited by Ofra Bengio and Meir Litvak Sunni-Shi'i relations have undergone significant transformations in recent decades. The 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran had a major spill-over effect on the entire Middle East, and the 2003 war in Iraq transformed the Shi'is into the dominant force in Iraq. The emergence of Iran as a regional power following Saddam Husayn's removal, along with the weakness of the Arab state system, raised the specter of the "Shi'i Crescent" threatening Sunni-Arab domination in the region. The present volume demonstrates the complexity of Sunni-Shi'i relations by analyzing political, ideological, and social encounters between the two communities from early Islamic history to the present. While analyzing specific case studies in various Middle Eastern regions, the book provides a panoramic picture ranging from hostility to efforts of cooperation and ecumenism. Ofra Bengio is an associate professor at the Department of Middle Eastern History and senior research fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University. She is the author of Saddam's Word (1998), The Turkish-Israeli Relationship: Changing Ties of Middle Eastern Outsiders (2004), and The Kurds of Iraq: Building a State within a State (2012), as well as the editor of several books on Middle Eastern history. Meir Litvak is the director of the Center for Iranian Studies and an associate professor at the Department of Middle Eastern History at Tel Aviv University. He is the author of Shi'i Scholars of Nineteenth Century Iraq: The 'Ulama’ of Najaf and Karbala’ (1998), co-author of From Empathy to Denial: Arabic Responses to the Holocaust (2009), and editor of several books on Middle Eastern history.