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