Shia Muslims, as journalists and experts on the Middle East tell us, are fundamentally opposed to their Sunni counterparts - except, of course, when they are not, as revealed by the popularity of Hizbollah among Sunni Arabs. As violence in the Middle East and South Asia outpaces our ability to comprehend it, it is hard not to wonder whether we ought to stop trying to understand non-western peoples through exclusively religious identities. Certainly, both Amartya Sen and Arjun Appadurai, authors of stimulating new essays on identity in the age of globalisation, caution us against this commonplace practice.