Sectarian War: Pakistan's Sunni-Shia Violence and its links to the Middle East / Khaled Ahmed / Paperback / Oxford University Press 

ISBN: 9780199065936

Sectarian War is an account of how the Shia-Sunni conflict was relocated from the Middle East to Pakistan after the rise of Revolutionary Iran in 1979, through the mediating agency of the rulers in Pakistan and the proliferation of the religious seminaries funded by Saudi Arabia. It examines the death of General Zia in the context of the sectarian conflict, goes into the process of production of apostatizing fatwas in Pakistan followed by violent action by organizations formed from the non-state actors used by the state for its covert wars.

Sectarian War also delves into the state of the Shia communities in the Middle East and their historical connections with South Asia. It examines the rise of Shia culture in Lucknow and its formative influence on the rise of the Shia in Iraq, with a parallel scrutiny of the rise of Wahhabism and its infiltration of India in the eighteenth century, and records the origins and history of organizations doing sectarian terrorism in Pakistan and their linkages to Al Qaeda whose trajectory into a sectarian identity is also traced to the rise of Al Zarqawi as a parallel leader in Iraq. Sectarian War facilitates an understanding of the phenomenon of terrorism in Pakistan today.

Khaled Ahmed is Consulting Editor of Daily Times and The Friday Times, with a 30-year career in journalism. His previous books include Pakistan: Behind the Ideological Mask and Pakistan: The State in Crisis. 

Khaled Ahmed, Consulting Editor Daily Times and The Friday Times, with a 30-year career in journalism, has written on the ideology and politics of Pakistan. From 1991 to 1993 he was one of the founder members of Indo-Pak Neemrana Dialogue, track-two diplomacy. In 1996 he was a SAARC observer of the
Bangladesh national elections and wrote the SAARC report on the status of the minorities in Bangladesh.

He has lectured at the Civil Service Academy, Lahore, Administrative Staff College, Lahore, the Naval War College, Lahore regularly over the years. He gave a lecture at Berkeley University on Jihad in February 2001 and attended a Brookings conference on US and the Islamic World at Doha in November 2002. He spoke on Media in Pakistan in Boston, US, 2004; spoke at War College, Washington, in 2007. He was scholar at Woodrow Wilson Centre, Washington, in 2006.