On men jumbling the past and future, see Hannah Arendt’s Between Past and Future, Viking Press, New York (1961).
Readers interested in the political culture of the Shia of Lebanon, see Fouad Ajami’s The Vanished Imam: Musa al Sadr and the Shia of Lebanon, Cornell University Press, 1992.
For further reading on Hafez al-Assad and Bashar al-Assad’s relationship with Iran, consult Itamar Rabinovich’s The View from Damascus: State, Political Community and Foreign Relations in Twentieth Century Syria, Vallentine Mitchell, 2008.
For an authoritative source on Iraqi Shiites, see Yitzhak Nakash’s seminal book, The Shi’is of Iraq, Princeton University Press, 2000.
Hassan al-Alawi, in his book Al-Iraq al-Amriki (American Iraq), London, 2005, describes the two sects in Iraq—the rulers and the ruled.