In Mass Religious Ritual and Intergroup Tolerance: The Muslim Pilgrims’ Paradox, Mikhail A. Alexseev and Sufian N. Zhemukhov focus on a well-known Muslim religious duty, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, or Hajj. They ask the question: How can participation in this journey by one group, Muslims from the North Caucasus, specifically from the Kabardino-Balkaria Republic, help us understand a broad phenomenon of social interaction that has been undervalued; namely, social tolerance toward those outside one’s own ethnic, linguistic, national, or religious community? If most policy studies on Islam try to answer the question of why terrorism or the lack of terrorism among Muslims, this study flips the question, asking how and why tolerance is expanded through a singular central ritual, the Hajj.

The study itself is the result of nearly a decade-long collaboration. At its core is a 2009 participant-observation survey conducted by both authors in the North Caucasus, home to one of the researchers, Sufian Zhemukhov. His collaborator, Mikhail Akexseev, is a Russian/Ukrainian-born US citizen, with training as a political scientist and interest in the Caucasus region. The two conceived the project at a 2008 workshop in Tbilisi, Georgia (p. 34). Their research design relies on in-depth interviews and content analysis comparing pilgrims from Kabardino-Balkaria who performed the Hajj in 2009 with nonpilgrims who possess similar levels of religiosity and intentions to perform the Hajj but did not. They were able to get such detailed information because Sufian Zhemukhov is himself not only a Muslim from this region but was also a participant in the 2009 Hajj, and so the text that forms the core of the book “draws extensively on Sufian’s diaries, notes, and interview transcripts during the pilgrimage” (p. 7). To find the argument convincing, one must conclude both that these authors are uniquely positioned to examine differences in individual views between two groups—pilgrims and nonpilgrims—and that those who performed the Hajj became more tolerant because of the Hajj experience, rather than any other factor, such as age, gender, education, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status.

More complex but critical to social theorists is the authors’ collective effort to move beyond Zhemukhov’s observations of Hajj participants to develop and then deploy a model of repositioning, recategorization, and repersonalization (3 Rs) to explain what they frame as the pilgrims’ paradox. Each R is explored in successive chapters of part II: repositioning (chapter 4), recategorization (chapter 5), and repersonalization (chapter 6). Each is developed with reference to Sufian’s diaries, charts, and tables that provide quantitative details. Crucial to this process is what the authors term “social identity theory” (SIT), intended to show how the Hajj “behaviorally reinforces the perceptual intergroup boundaries” of the Hajjis’ worldview (p. 75; emphases in original). Understanding this process requires that a major key term be explained: the “Axis Mundi effect.” Both “Axis” and “Mundi” elevate the subjects’ outlook. Axis increases common identity, producing a high common identity value, whereas Mundi reflects in-group expansiveness caused by high subgroup diversity (p. 109). This double descriptor combines the scale or vertical element (Axis) with the scope or horizontal element (Mundi). It is a term that the authors use with reference to other theorists, notably Mircea Eliade (pp. 172–74), when in the final part of the book they move beyond the Hajj to explain the Axis Mundi as applicable not only to Muslim actors in Europe and the United States (chapter 7) but also the Hispanic population of California (chapter 8). The contrast in the final chapter is between two institutions, LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens) and NCLR (formerly the National Council of La Reza and now UnidosUS). The former did not espouse in-group diversity until the 1980s when it grew in numbers, whereas the latter embraced in-group diversity from the outset, projecting what the authors call “the in-group identity-diversity synergy” (p. 179).

Of special interest in this book are its antecedents. The review of previous scholarship is at once extensive and critical: other studies are adjudged to have been too normative or too political or too global or too essentialist or too policy directed (pp. 2–5). Yet the one study that is extensively praised is not fully explored (David Clingingsmith, Asim Ijaz Khwaja, and Michael Kremer, “Estimating the Impact of the Hajj: Religion and Tolerance in Islam’s Global Gathering,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 124 [3], 2009). Later, in introducing the paths of the pilgrims’ paradox, the authors observe, “The Pakistan survey made two questions particularly important: Why was the paradox observed? And how we can observe the causal linkages, if any, between the Hajj experience and putative tolerance?” (p. 37). The reader would like to learn more about the Pakistan survey, especially because we are told that its conclusions are matched by a 2013 “ethnographic analysis of second-generation Bengali immigrants in London” done by Daniel Nilsson DeHanas (p. 78). Both works, but especially the 2009 Pakistan survey, underscore how other social scientists are tracking the pilgrims’ paradox; to wit, that “in-group pride (speaking to the logic of social identity) leads to out-group tolerance (speaking to the logic of social capital)” (p. 90). The difficulty is that neither of these earlier studies is adequately explained in the always detailed, but often dense, analyses of the Alexseev and Zhemukhov study. Alas, the highly technical language of this monograph, despite the evident labor and broad scope of its collaborators, is not likely to give it more traction in general scholarship on Islam or on the social consequence of ritual activities.

One can dare to hope that future scholarship on the Hajj, from other sites and with other disciplinary perspectives, will confirm the authors’ general thesis: that in-group diversity can and does lead to outgroup tolerance through ritual acts that may be occasional and limited but have enduring consequences for not just the individuals involved but also the larger social groups they represent. The question of Islam and tolerance deserves to be a booming research agenda along with and, one hopes, ahead of the question of Islam and terrorism. Despite its flaws, this book is a welcome addition to that literature.