[Review] : Political and cultural representations of muslims: Islam in the plural

Abstract

This 11th volume in Brill’s Muslim Minorities Series, like some of the others in the series, is not devoted exclusively to issues surrounding Muslim presence in Europe. Three of the eleven chapters geographically focus on countries situated far from Europe’s borders, namely, India, Australia, and the USA, with the rest ‘based’ in such countries as the UK, France, the Netherlands (even two chapters), Switzerland and Denmark. Though the title of the book indicates that it contains ‘representations of Muslims’, and most chapters indeed deal with representations of Muslims by non-Muslims, several chapters (first of all, the ones by Chloe Patton on Muslim immigrants in Australia and by Danila Genovese on Hizb at-Tahrir in the UK, but partially also the one by Signe Kjær Jørgensen on a Danish Muslim politician) approach the issue from the opposite direction—that of the self-representation by Muslims, and in this regard form a distinct set of contributions.Such edited volumes as the one under consideration by default call for their raison d’etre (or internal logic) to be explicated from the onset or at least through the structure of the book visible in the Contents. Unfortunately, this volume does not have sections, thus it is not immediately clear on what grounds the chapters were put into the sequence. The Introduction also fails to explain that satisfactorily as it also is silent on how the volume came about in the first place—it remains unclear both in the Introduction and throughout the book why the team of the editors (and there is a hefty team of four for such a relatively modest volume of some 200 pages with no individual contributions by the editors themselves) settled on these particular topics which, apart from the fact that they are about ‘representations of Muslims’, have little to nothing in common.[...]