A book on the white backlash to multicultural politics and another on recruitment to a radical Islamist group seem odd choices to examine together, but the resulting dialogue emphasizes the extraordinary value of comparative methods in general and ethnographic research in particular. In Radical Islam Rising, Quintan Wiktorowicz asks why rational individuals would join a high-risk organization such as al-Muhajiroun, a radical Islamist movement based in the UK. Joining entails high risk because members are “targets of stigma, harassment, retaliation, and even more extreme sanctions such as loss of a job, injury, or death” (p. 206; also pp. 45–77). Rational-actor models, he argues, cannot explain why thousands of individuals were attracted to the movement. (The group was formally disbanded in late 2004 but likely continues underground.) Wiktorowicz offers a five-stage model, and the chapters are organized accordingly.

The initial stage is cognitive opening: when an individual is open to alternative belief systems. This may be facilitated by activists who establish relations with potential converts, but triggers also include deteriorating economic conditions, political repression, cultural alienation, identity crisis, generational gaps, experiences with racist or religious discrimination, or death in the family. Cognitive openings are necessary but insufficient for recruitment, as potential converts must also engage the second stage, religious seeking: when “affected individuals seek to address their grievances and concerns through a religious idiom” (p. 207). Religious seeking can be self-initiated, but the most common pattern is that “disaffected seekers are guided by someone already in the movement, particularly where the cognitive opening is facilitated by movement outreach in the first place” (pp. 206–7).

Even if the conditions for cognitive opening and religious seeking are satisfied, why do individuals choose to learn about Islam from al-Muhajiroun rather than from some other source? Here is the pivotal mechanism in Wiktorowicz's model, when seekers accept the credibility and religious authority of al-Muhajiroun's spiritual leader and founder, Omar Bakri Mohammed. Only if seekers trust Omar's authority as an Islamic scholar can the final stages of culturing and commitment be realized. The former entails deep socialization into the group's ideology as a way of overcoming obstacles to high-risk activism; the latter reflects the establishment of a deep commitment to the movement's objective of overthrowing non-Islamic regimes, even at great personal risk to members (including death).

Although Wiktorowicz employs a new vocabulary, his model will be familiar to scholars of social movements, cults, and terrorism—literatures he cites extensively and appropriately throughout this highly readable book. The analysis does an excellent job in locating al-Muhajiroun among a wide range of radical movements, rather than exclusively among Islamist groups. The author is also correct that there is nothing particular about Islam that encourages high-risk activism. For example, in early encounters between al-Muhajiroun activists and potential recruits, the activists frequently hide their affiliation and guide conversations to create cognitive openings and facilitate religious seeking; only later do activists introduce particular tenets of al-Muhajiroun ideology. These are common recruiting tactics for groups with extremist ideologies.

However, a significant problem emerges with the model. Wiktorowicz rightly notes that both cognitive openings and religious seeking are necessary but insufficient conditions for joining al-Muhajiroun; rather, the pivotal moment is the acceptance of Omar's authority. But here the argument is tautological: The causal mechanism that explains joining al-Muhajiroun is acceptance of the authority of the leader of al-Muhajiroun; in effect, the mechanism of acceptance is itself the act of acceptance. Wiktorowicz thus describes joining rather than explaining it.

Nevertheless, the work remains valuable for its detailed description of the internal party workings of al-Muhajiroun. The author conducted nearly three months of fieldwork in 2002, and he combines in-depth interviews (including several fascinating dialogues with Omar), party documents, newspapers, and surveys to provide a close examination of the ideological commitments and recruiting practices of a group almost wholly overlooked in the literature on radical Islam.

Roger Hewitt's White Backlash and the Politics of Multiculturalism focuses on the reactions to three racist murders in the white working-class neighborhood of Greenwich in the early 1990s. In this extraordinary book, he uses ethnographic research to produce a subtle analysis of the “white backlash” against the politics of multiculturalism. Unlike the white backlash of the 1960s when much of the focus of antiracist policies was on competition in the workplace, the backlash of the 1980s reflected a more complex response by local working-class whites at a time when middle-class concerns about multiculturalism and antiracism dominated national political agendas. Hewitt provides a nuanced view of how the complexities of racial, class, and multicultural politics play out locally.

Multiculturalism emerged in the late 1970s as a rearticulation of the antiracist narrative of the 1960s that had been particularly concerned with equal opportunities. Despite often producing similar policy outcomes, antiracist narratives are often at odds with multicultural narratives: The former emphasize the structural nature of racism (and thus prescribe equal opportunities as a remedy), while the latter focus on diversity and mutual understanding. Multiculturalism itself is characterized by two distinct narratives: One is used specifically in domestic contexts and encompasses the moral and political vocabulary of the post-Holocaust period; the other is international in scope, tied to discourses of rights, migration, and settlement, and is thus less susceptible to changing local circumstances.

By exploring white backlash through the complex interplay of local and national narratives, Hewitt emphasizes that these political contests are as much about class as they are about race. A gulf began to emerge between the “sections of the middle class that had supported black progress and the white working-class groups who felt themselves materially threatened by the extension of racial equality in ways that the middle class were not” (p. 6). While broader national attention focused on the continued oppression of blacks, working-class whites often protested the new policies using racist language that led the middle class to portray them as backward, redneck-style bigots. This tension was exacerbated by silence in the media and among local government agencies about certain crimes against working-class whites (for example, against the elderly). The failure to address these and other grievances led to the emergence of a white-backlash narrative in Greenwich whereby “white-on-black” crimes were seen as unfairly and consistently characterized as racist, while “black-on-white” crimes were denied their racial dimension or ignored entirely. At the local level, then, a “core of violent racist adolescents and their adult mentors, plus a small supporting cast of racial bigots, were located within a wider pool of people who were at odds with the local political order in which, to them, minority concerns were given precedence” (p. 55). Ultimately in Greenwich, the official responses to the racist killings were understood as the promotion of a “special interest group” by a local authority “against the will of a victim white community” (p. 152). Hewitt argues that this line between unambiguous racism and the rejection of an equalities narrative by a broader white working-class community will continue to play out politically in coming years.

Hewitt's theoretical apparatus is one of narratives and counternarratives functioning at various local, national, and international levels. This approach provides extraordinary analytic purchase for disentangling the political salience of race and for understanding how competing narratives are generated and connected to various sites of power (local and national government agencies, tenants associations, branches of racist parties, schools, etc.). As local and national policies employ various multicultural frameworks to redress racial problems, the policies produce peculiar results that feed white backlash. For example, multiculturalism suggests that “cultures” should be treated on equal terms. One policy prescription is thus to “celebrate diversity,” a practice that entails identifying distinct and often national cultures and their caricatured symbols (native costumes, flags, cuisine, etc.). Working-class whites are then hard-pressed to identify symbols of their own culture. As a result, policies celebrating diversity can reinforce tensions surrounding complex issues of race and international migration. Indeed, migrant communities seldom find their own complex identities and experiences reflected in these performances of multiculturalism.

Although a close analysis of Greenwich anchors the analysis, Hewitt's work is broadly comparative and includes sustained analysis of the politics of multiculturalism in the United States and a briefer examination of Canada and Australia. This is clearly a must-read for scholars of racism and British politics, but those exploring migration, urban politics, political culture, and contentious politics in general will find much here of exceptional value. Given Hewitt's clear narrative and elegant prose, the book is also surprisingly accessible for advanced undergraduate courses in a manner atypical of many substantive theoretical contributions.

Putting the works of Wiktorowicz and Hewitt in dialogue raises questions about the racial politics surrounding al-Muhajiroun. While Wiktorowicz details how the movement primarily attracts followers of South Asian origin, he does not locate al-Muhajiroun among local narratives about immigration, race, and class, nor does he address the sort of spatial and temporal variations captured in Hewitt's ethnographic research. One wonders, for example, when one al-Muhajiroun activist notes that his father “stands with the Union Jack” (p. 56), whether this really reflects an allegiance to a British identity over a Muslim identity, as Wiktorowicz suggests. Hewitt examines, however, how the racist British National Party (BNP) appropriated the Union Jack as a symbol of white Britain against the threat of “black” immigration, which suggests not an “identity crisis” but rather racist politics. Hewitt repeatedly encountered schoolchildren opposed to efforts to “put black in the Union Jack” (pp. 128–29)—a racist BNP phrase. Read in this light, one wonders whether the overwhelmingly immigrant al-Muhajiroun is directly responding to this racist narrative when it routinely issues statements that it will not rest until “the black flag of Islam is flying over Downing Street” (p. 78). Ethnographic research of the sort undertaken by Hewitt would be necessary to unpack these complexities surrounding al-Muhajiroun, but such work would substantially advance our understanding not only of racist politics but also of the specific local circumstances that lead individuals to join radical organizations.