The Oxford Handbook of American Islam

Abstract

Shortly after publishing Jocelyne Cesari’s edited Handbook of European Islam (Oxford University Press: 2014), Oxford University Press more or less rounds off the topic of Muslims in the western world with this volume on the United States. The editors, Yvonne Y. Haddad and Jane I Smith, have made ample contributions on this topic during the last twenty years at least. This volume, to some extent, updates their previous works that have followed the evolution and changes seen by the country’s Muslim communities (e.g., Muslim Communities in North America [Albany: SUNY Press, 1994], edited by both, and The Muslims of America [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991], edited by Haddad). This may not be the last step in this direction, but it is certainly the most comprehensive and ambitious one so far. The titles of their previous works, and indeed of this volume, touch on a preliminary problem. As a matter of fact, the volume should have borne the title Islam in the USA, since Central and Latin America and even Canada are not mentioned. Many reasons, in any case, justify this circumscribed focus. As rightly pointed out in the “Introduction” (p. 4), American Islam is the most heterogeneous in the world and no doubt constitutes the main issue when dealing with Islam in North, Central, and South America. It is also the most heterogeneous and the most complex. As a matter of fact, these complex lines of evolution of the West’s Islamic communities are exemplified by a simple comparison between the two handbooks. Whereas Cesari’s edited European Islam was described with an extensive first part that introduced the history and evolution of Muslim communities in European countries plus some thematic chapters, in this book the approach is different. The thirty chapters deal with a number of specific topics identified as significant, not to say fundamental, and are, furthermore, organized in three ...