Praise forAfter the Prophet "InAfter the Prophet, veteran Middle East journalist Lesley Hazleton tells with great flair the 'epic story of the Shia-Sunni split in Islam,' as she rightly calls it.    " Ms Hazleton frames her account between such ghastly events as the bombing of the Shia shrine in Karbala on March 4, 2004, and the later, equally devastating attack by Al Qaeda on the Askariya Mosque in Samarra in February 2006.  ButAfter the Prophetisn't simply on-the-spot reportage.  Ms Hazleton has steeped herself in the work of classical Muslim historians and in recent scholarship.     The book is often thrilling in its depiction of long-ago events such as the tragedy of Karbala in 680, when Ali's son Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet, was massacred with most of his family.  The slaughter -- still commemorated by the Shia in the annual Ashura rites -- is evoked vividly by Ms Hazleton, and it forms the inevitable climax ofAfter the Prophet.  Though she's quite even-handed in her narrative, her sympathies tend to lie with the Shia.  That is to the good.

  Earlier accounts have almost always been skewed to the Sunni version of history.  Sometimes the sheer telling of a tale, passionately and scrupulously done, can ease even the oldest and sorest of grievances -- with luck, maybe Ms Hazleton's work will have that effect on at least a few of these entrenched adversaries."                     -- Eric Ormsby,The Wall Street Journal "After the Prophetis a remarkable and respectful telling of the story of Islam-a tale of power, intrigue, rivalry, jealousy, assassination, manipulation, greed, and faith that would have made Machiavelli shudder (had he read it), but above all it is a very human story, told in a wonderfully novelistic style that puts most other, often dreary, explanations of the Shia-Sunni divide to shame." -Hooman Majd, author ofThe Ayatollah Begs to Differ "After the Prophetvividly re-creates the personal rivalries and resentments that led to Islam's great schism in the immediate wake of Muhammad's death, and makes one understand how truly contemporary they are with our own time. Lesley Hazleton brings off the happy effect of turning the reader into a participant in the world she describes-a world of long memories, where the deep past lives on in the present day, as if the Battle of Karbala in 680 A.D. was little more than an eyeblink away from the Ashura Massacre there in 2004. "My only regret is that Hazleton didn't write this terrific and necessary book in time to enlighten Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, et al.

, before they so unwisely invaded a land, and a religious culture, of which they were reprehensibly ignorant. I hope they read it now, with proper rue. Meanwhile, the rest of us can take pleasure in Hazleton's vigorously drawn characters, her lucid storytelling, and her enthralling, imaginative grasp of the roots and consequences of the Sunni-Shia divide." -Jonathan Raban, author ofMy Holy WarandSurveillance "Lesley Hazleton succeeds in bringing out the truly epic character of the Shia-Sunni split, telling the story with great empathy. The general Western reader will come away from this book with a newfound respect for the depth and power of the early schism in Islam and of what happened at Karbala." -Wilferd Madelung, Laudian Professor of Arabic, University of Oxford, and author ofThe Succession to Muhammad "Whether or not George Bush even knew there were such things as Shias and Sunnis before invading Iraq, after reading Lesley Hazleton's.