Introduction / Ofra Bengio and Meir Litvak -- Responses to unwanted authority in early Islam: models for current Shi'i and Sunni activists / Jacob Lassner -- Early Hanbalism and the Shi'a / Nimrod Hurvitz -- The confrontation between Sunni and Shi'i empires: Ottoman-Safavid relations between the fourteenth and the seventeenth century / Max Scherberger -- Encounters between Shi'i and Sunni 'ulama' in Ottoman Iraq / Meir Litvak -- The Ottoman dilemma in handling the Shi'i challenge in nineteenth-century Iraq / Ismail Safa Ustun -- Religious extremism and ecumenical tendencies in modern Iraqi Shi'ism / Amatzia Baram -- Quietists turned activists: the Shi'i revolution in Iraq / Ofra Bengio -- The Sunni-Shi'i struggle over Lebanon: a new chapter in the history of Lebanon / Eyal Zisser -- The Wahhabiyya and Shi'ism, from 1744/45 to 2008 / Guido Steinberg -- Unity or hegemony? Iranian attitudes to the Sunni-Shi'i divide / Ze'ev Maghen -- Debating the "awakening Shi'a": Sunni perceptions of the Iranian Revolution / Meir Hatina -- Interesting times: Egypt and Shi'ism at the beginning of the twenty-first century / Rainer Brunner -- Epilogue: the Sunni-Shi'i paradox / Ofra Bengio and Meir Litvak.