Abdul Aziz Said, Mohammed Abu-Nimer, and Meena Sharify-Funk, eds., New York: Routledge, 2006. 272 pages.

At a time when careless opportunism blurs the line separating the hate speech, race-baiting, and xenophobia that we condemn and the misleading expedience of “tolerating” others, the need to change how Muslims engage the hatred facing them has become most apparent. Threatened by French politicians with state-enforced settlement camps and neoconservative social engineering schemes that erect 10-meter high walls in theWestBank, BelAir, and Baghdad, it is critical that Muslims demonstrate the ability to resist their wholesale criminalization with dignity and passion. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of those who publicly “stand-up” for “reason” are non-Muslim, western-based academics speaking for “Islam” as a non-western phenomenon that nevertheless “needs to be tolerated.”

When “Muslims” are given the rare chance of having a forum through which to communicate, the message has more often confirmed the reductionist assumptions of xenophobic racists advocating their legal exclusion from “Christian” Europe. How often has it been noted that those Muslims most frequently given access to the mainstream media are the fanatical and patently violent characters depicted in media stereotypes who actually have no right to “speak” for Islam in the first place?

Contemporary Islam: Dynamic, Not Static challenges these prevailing currents in scholarship by actually engaging the audience in a fashion that does not concede Islam’s centrality to a larger human experience.With contributions from a wide range of scholars, this collection provides an important springboard to a new way for interacting with the larger world other than spoon-fed generic approximations of Islam that fit what often seem to be the propaganda agendas of various interest groups. While some of the commissioned chapters are clearly reacting to the traumatic experience of a “new world order” set by the suspiciously simple storyline of 9/11 during its aftermath, a precious few push the parameters of our discussion beyond apologies and spineless overtures to others’ charitable “tolerance” and articulate the dynamism of Islam’s multiple worlds.

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