New Releases

Demystifying Shariah: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It’s Not Taking Over Our Country

Sumbul Ali-Karamali 2020. Pp. 256. HB. $24.95. Kindle. $13.95. Audio CD. $24.99 Beacon Press, Boston, Mass.

Ali-Karamali, who earned a degree in Islamic law after becoming a corporate lawyer, offers a direct counterpoint to fear-mongering headlines about Sharia law by eliminating stereotypes and assumptions with compassion, irony and humor.

Published in August 2020, this book may have helped those influenced by scare tactics and deliberate misinformation campaigns, as well as anti-Muslim propaganda that the Sharia is a draconian and oppressive law that all Muslims must obey.

During the last few election cycles, the Right has pushed Islamophobic narratives, specifically about the Sharia, to circulate horror stories that encourage Americans to fear it and even to mount anti-Sharia protests ... with zero evidence that it has taken over any part of the country.

Ali-Karamali explains the Sharia as it really is — religious rules and recommendations that guide various aspects of a Muslim’s life, not some rigid and enforceable law.

In her lawyerly approach, she informs readers of the Sharia-based legal system’s various meanings, development, history and operation — especially what the modern calls for it mean and whether it is the law of the land in any country. It is a book that not only Muslims but also other sane-minded people can share with Islamophobes to help them overcome their disease.

How Millennials Can Lead Us Out of the Mess We’re In: A Jew, a Muslim, and a Christian Share Leadership Lessons from the Life of Moses

Iqbal Unus, Mordecai Schreiber and Ian Case Punnett 2020. Pp. 146 HB. $21.95. eBook. $20.50 Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Lanham, Md.

During troubled times, millions have been inspired by the stories and spiritual lessons of the selfless leadership of Prophet Moses (‘alayhi as salaam). In a world increasingly affected by political, social, and racial imbalance, we need strong, innovative leaders who have not forgotten or ignored these valuable lessons. This volume brings together an Israeli-born rabbi, a Pakistani-born Muslim scholar, and an ordained Midwestern American to inspire the next generation of leaders with a timeless story of Prophet Moses.

This book, which serves to synthesize the religious views of Judaism, Islam and Christianity into one unified, harmonious voice singing a single hymn, aims at sincerely spiritual but church-resistant Bible readers as well as those who are familiar with the Moses narrative.

Muslim American City: Gender and Religion in Metro Detroit

Alisa Perkins 2020. Pp. 264. HB. $78.80. PB. $30.00. Kindle. $16.50 New York University Press, New York, N.Y.

Perkins explores how debates over Muslim Americans’ use of public and political space have challenged and reshaped the boundaries of urban belonging. Drawing on her more than a decade of ethnographic research in Hamtramck, Mich., home to one of the country’s largest Muslim concentrations, Perkins shows how they have grown and asserted themselves in public life. For example, in 2004 a Hamtramck mosque won the right to broadcast the adhan.

The author also deals with Muslim American women’s efforts to maintain gender norms in neighborhoods, mosques and schools, as well as Muslim Americans’ efforts to organize public responses to municipal initiatives. She incorporates the perspectives of Muslims, Polish Catholics, African American Protestants and other city residents.

Perkins questions the popular assumption that Muslims’ religiosity hinders their ability to become full citizens in secular societies. She shows how Muslims and non-Muslims have, by negotiating issues over the use of space, invested Muslim practice with new forms of social capital and challenged nationalist and secularist notions of belonging.

Stealing from the Saracens: How Islamic Architecture Shaped Europe

Diana Darke 2020. Pp. 328 + 142 color illus. HB. $29.95 Hurst & Co., London, U.K.

Against a backdrop of Islamophobia, Europeans are increasingly erasing their cultural debt to the Muslim world. However, this legacy lives on in some of Europe’s most recognizable buildings, from the Notre-Dame Cathedral to the British Houses of Parliament.

She writes that her book was ignited by the Notre-Dame de Paris April 2019 fire, a tragedy that moved highly secular France and the world because the cathedral is something that “truly” encapsulates French nationhood. However, it is a little known fact that the Gothic style of architecture so deeply associated with Catholicism in Europe was inspired by the Islamic architecture brought into Europe centuries earlier.

This beautifully illustrated book reveals the Arab and Islamic roots of Europe’s architectural heritage. Darke traces ideas and styles from vibrant Middle Eastern centers like Damascus, Baghdad and Cairo, via Muslim Spain, Venice and Sicily, into Europe. She describes how medieval Crusaders, pilgrims and merchants encountered Arab Muslim culture on their way to the Holy Land and explores more recent artistic interaction between Ottoman and Western cultures, including Sir Christopher Wren’s inspirations in the “Saracen” style of Gothic architecture.

Darke’s deep look into this long but overlooked history of architectural “borrowing” offers a rich tale of cultural exchange that sheds new light on Europe’s greatest architectural landmarks.

Apart from being enjoyed by practitioners and students of architecture, this book should also help open a few eyes, especially those of the Islamophobes.

Varieties of American Sufism: Islam, Sufi Orders, and Authority in a Time of Transition

Elliott Bazzano and Marcia Hermansen (eds.) 2020. Pp. 240. HB. $95.00 Kindle. $33.95 State University of New York Press, Albany, N.Y.

Bazzano (associate professor of religious studies, Le Moyne College) and Hermansen (professor of theology and director of Islamic World Studies, Loyola University, Chicago) offer a collection of eight participant-observation-based historical, ethnographic and documentary studies that explore a range of Sufi movements operating across the contemporary American religious landscape.

Spanning more than a century of political, cultural and embodied relationships with Islam and Muslims, this volume introduces readers to diverse expressions of contemporary Sufi religiosity in the country.

It also offers a provoking, stimulating reflection on a range of issues relevant to contemporary Islamic studies, American religions, multireligious belonging and new religious movements.

Western Families in Crisis: Muslims Resurging

Siraj I. Mufti 2019. Pp. 340. PB. $14.99 Self-published, Tucson, Ariz.

Mufti argues that secularism is the root cause of the West’s societal problems. Starting at the time of the Enlightenment, it now pervades all state and public institutions and is fervently propagated by the mainstream media.

He contends, citing contemporary research, that faith is intimately tied to families, fertility and growth and that the lack of it is responsible for declining Western populations.

Muslims, he says, were a great world power for a thousand years but then became weak and were colonialized by European powers. The U.S.’s hegemonic agenda, he asserts, supports corrupt authoritarian regimes opposed to democracy and human rights.

Muslims also have to contend with Islamophobia, stereotyping, Washingtonled wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the “global war on terrorism.” These wars have killed thousands of civilians and devastated their countries’ land and economies, and have cost the U.S. as well, in terms of soldiers killed and treating physically and mentally injured veterans. Billions of dollars wasted in anti-terrorism strategies chasing “ghosts” could have been used to save Americans lives, as pointed out by John Mueller and others.

American Muslims organizations have actively built coalitions with other faith communities, thereby serving as a model community involved with people of other faiths. They serve the sick and needy and are among the first responders during disasters.

Thus Americans of all persuasions opposed President Trump’s Muslim Ban, and leaders of all faiths rebuked him and the Republican Party by standing with Muslims as their “siblings-in-faith.”

The world’s Muslims are actively working to root out corruption and uplift their communities, firm in their belief that dedication and commitment will enable them to regain their former position of honor and live in cordiality with others by working for justice, peace and welfare for everyone.

Sport, Politics, and Society in the Middle East

Danyel Reiche and Tamir Sorek (eds.) 2019. Pp. 256. PB. $34.95 Oxford University Press, New York, N.Y.

Sport in the Middle East has become a major issue in global affairs. Sports scholars Danyel Reiche and Tamir Sorek’s eleven contributors discuss the intersection of political and cultural processes related to sport in the region, tracing its historical institutionalization and role in negotiating “Western” culture.

Sport is found to be a contested terrain in which struggles are being fought over the inclusion of women, competing definitions of national identity, preserving social memory and press freedom. Also discussed are the implications of mega-sporting events for host countries and how the region’s elite sport policies and sports industries are being shaped.

This book may benefit those who are interested in studying and examining the power dynamics around sport in the Middle East. ih