Introduction
This chapter explains what this book is about and why the topic is important. Some of the challenges in writing a book on this topic are also described. Thereafter, a short summary of each chapter is presented, followed by an overview of Esther in the Hebrew Bible. Although most of the book’s contents deal with the premodern period, in this introductory chapter I present a handful of examples in which Esther has been discussed in modern Muslim contexts, focusing on an Egyptian “televangelist” on the one hand, and a handful of Iranian politicians on the other. Moreover, the ways in which this study of a biblical book’s reception in Islamic cultures differs from other examples of Islamic reception history are described.