Al-Azhar and the Shia

This book addresses a very important topic that has not received sufficient attention before. Despite the continuous Sunni-Shia efforts throughout the twentieth century to approach and find common ground, there is no dedicated work to study those efforts and the results that emerged from them. Therefore, Brunner's book fills a long-standing gap in the field of Islamic studies in the modern era. This book describes the different stages of the dialogue of rapprochement between Sunnis and Shia during the twentieth century, reviewing the short-term successes achieved by that dialogue, as well as the fierce and mutual debates that inevitably arose from it. It also pays special attention to the role of Al-Azhar Institution in that dialogue and its relations with Shia scholars, as it is the most important representative of Sunni Islam. The mutual reliance on theological arguments and political motives of the two parties involved was of exceptional importance, especially regarding the significance of Islamic rapprochement for Egyptian foreign policy during the 1950s. Most of this book is dedicated to studying the period before the Islamic Revolution in Iran (pre-1979), although the author briefly refers in the margins of his distinguished work to the post-revolution context, and attempts to trace subsequent developments after it in his appendix, up to the early twenty-first century.