Globalization and the Muslim World marks an important contribution to the state of the art in scholarship on globalization in the Muslim world. Particularly because the research for the eleven contributions was conducted before September 11th, it reminds us of the priorities of scholars right before “everything changed” and the priorities of many scholars naturally shifted toward the myriad of issues involved in the war on terror.

Indeed, the volume's chapters highlight the problems mainstream scholarship has encountered when theorizing globalization—first, as largely a phenomenon of the global North (when it has in fact long been indigenized in the global South), and second, in “trivializing religious activism” as a valid and modern form of globalized experience. The book's first chapter, Birgit Schaebler's “Civilizing Others,” proves this point with a discussion of how similar European and Muslim understandings of “civilization” were until the era of high imperialism saw Europeans reimagine the Muslim world into a backward and nonmodern region that, at best, was an object to be civilized. It was then that civilization was transformed from a “universal concept” in which all peoples could participate to one that at the same time signified several large-scale blocs of cultures and heritages that were differentiated by their position along the spectrum of barbarity and modernity.

Further expanding the notion of the breadth of civilization, Mehrzad Boroujerdi's chapter, “Subduing Globalization,” offers a powerful admonition to scholars in and of the West to pay greater attention to indigenous productions of globalized knowledge on its own terms, that is, without trying to reference or contextualize it within Western paradigms. Boroujerdi demonstrates, in a manner similar to the work of anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff on the “South–South” networks of critical theory, how the indigenization movements in the Muslim world belie the claims of many Western scholars that such knowledge is necessarily defined as “apologetic, chauvinist, essentialist,” and other negative traits.

Indeed, the idea of freeing “captive minds” has occupied a whole generation of Southern intellectuals. Underlying this belief are the dual insights that Western culture and social sciences were not the only valid models for Southern scholars to follow (or even the best ones). What is interesting is that this sentiment emerged out of the same suspicion of Western master narratives of universal rationality and value-free science that motivated post-Nietzschean theory in the West.

At the same time, however, the indigenization process is fraught with difficulties because it can produce a kind of “cultural schizophrenia” in which “religiously sanctioned social science,” for example, critiques modernity yet tries to fulfill the same social roles as modern social science. This latter point also emerges from Jocelyne Cesari's chapter, “Islam in the West,” which explores how the individualization and secularization of Islam as it develops in the Muslim diaspora of the West has sometimes led to a “clash of civilizations” within Muslim families, rather than at the “civilizational” level that is the focus of mainstream policy scholars such as Samuel Huntington.

What is important about the dynamics she discusses is how they reflect an increasing “universalization” of Islam through the seemingly opposed process of individualization and personalization of the religion. For those unable to participate in such a transition, however, Leif Stenberg's chapter on “Islam, Knowledge, and the West” demonstrates how the rationalities underlying the construction of new ideological relations to history by some conservative Islamists aim to construct a normative history to guide believers for whom the West (and by extension, many aspects of their home societies) have “taken a fundamentally wrong direction” (p. 103).

Part 2 of the book builds on the insights of the first part by exploring the long durée of globalization and then its reach into the most modern forms of media: the Internet and the “global muftis” produced by satellite television. Specifically, Heather Sharkey's chapter, “Globalization, Migration, and Identity,” offers a valuable discussion of how a seeming backwater of globalization, 19th-century Sudan, was actually a major node of global integration and movement of peoples, goods, and cultural symbols. Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen's chapter, “The Global Mufti,” reminds us that sometimes the figures and media who are often the most obviously “global,” such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi and al-Jazeera, are potentially not as interesting as other, less publicized scholars and networks, such as the Egyptian imam Shaykh al-Shaءrawi. The latter's program, on Egyptian television, is argued to be more global even as it looks more traditional.

Finally, Anne Marie Oliver's closing chapter returns to an issue—the “anxiety of civilization”—that was an important component of the earlier discussions of the volume. Her analysis of Hamas's supposed literalism shows it not to be merely a “deglobalizing reaction” to an oppressive modernity but also part of an attempt to construct a counteruniversalistic ideology that serves linguistic and aesthetic purposes as well as political and religious ones. Indeed, in a manner similar to the recent work of Palestinian scholar May Jayyusi, Oliver reminds us that spectacular acts of violence such as suicide bombings and the literalism they represent “always point to a subversive force at work” whose aesthetic dynamics need to be elaborated in a much more sophisticated manner than has heretofore been achieved (p. 214).

Although she does not make this argument, it seems from her discussion that the allure of suicide bombings (and, we can suppose, the large-scale violence inflicted by the IDF upon Palestinians as well) can come at least in part from the belief in the “genetically encoded” irredeemability of the other, and the danger of language whose seductiveness can lead one to trust an enemy who can only do one harm.

Globalization and the Muslim World is a useful volume both for scholars who are trying to ground their research in a different set of arguments and theoretical framework than that of mainstream debates on globalization and for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses on globalization and modern Islam. Despite being the product of a pre September 11th world, it should retain a high degree of relevance to contemporary globalization and Islamic studies for some time to come.