Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2025 -

This is a thoughtful book that promotes understanding and progression in a field (religious peacebuilding) that has long been shoved into a back seat on the bus of conflict resolution. While clearly written to build bridges and provide insights for opportunities within the larger Islamic world for Muslim practitioners and Muslim NGOs to continue making contributions to the field of peacebuilding (something that has been woefully underresearched overall), the work does not shy away from some biting and important criticism of Western Christian dominance in the field. This dominance has been largely symbolically inclusive and barely tolerant of the Muslim world in general, something the work does not hide from or treat with toleration. The analytical critique of this aspect of peacebuilding overall is worthy in and of itself. That the author successfully embeds it within a bigger--and more important--narrative of securing greater space and significance for religious peacebuilding is a testament to deft writing and properly dense research and analysis. A powerful illustration of the work's usefulness is that it shows how it could impact future relations in the Gaza conflict.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

By illustrating how "sexism functions in academic Islamic studies," Ali (Boston Univ.) makes a critical intervention in the discipline (p. 9). Through concrete examples and insights drawn from both qualitative and quantitative analysis, she critically interrogates the conditions and presumptions that shape knowledge production on Islam in the Anglophone academy. Focusing on gender, each chapter examines whose work is being engaged or ignored, tracing when and how this occurs. Ali details how the subfields of Islamic studies are gendered, how citational practices ignore women's contributions, how public scholarship is particularly perilous for women, and how women authors and gender as a topic figure marginally into course syllabi and curriculums. Three brief interludes reflect on the affective experience of uneven gendered realities in the everyday experience of academic life. The book's appendix offers a critical self-accounting of the methodology used to draw its conclusions, detailing helpful techniques that scholars might employ in other fields or that future researchers might return to when digital tools of analysis develop further. Finally, Ali's conclusion offers Islamic studies scholars concrete ways to make scholarship more gender equal. This is crucial reading for any newcomer or expert in the field and excellent for anyone interested in understanding gender and academia beyond Islamic studies.Summing Up: Essential. General readers through faculty; professionals.