Much has been said about Muslims in the contemporary United States – specifically about reprisals against them and threats to their civil liberties after 9/11 – yet the social and ethnic dimensions of this faith group remain under-researched. The subject of Pakistani Americans is a case in point in studies of both Muslim Americans and the South Asian diaspora in the US. Ahmed Afzal's Lone Star Muslims, an ethnographic study of recent Pakistani settlement in Houston based on fieldwork conducted between 2001 and 2011, is thus a welcome and timely intervention. Through chapters on Houston's ethno-racial history, “model-minority” Ismaili Muslims in corporate America, Pakistani American small businesses and the underclass that sustains them, gay men of Pakistani descent, and the strategic importance of local cultural festivals and radio respectively, Afzal's monograph intersects with such different academic fields as ethnic studies, Asian American studies, southern studies, and queer studies.

Early in the book, the author notes the greater significance of the “mundane everyday challenges” that Pakistani Americans face than of “the events of 9/11” (3). At the same time, the destructive effects of 9/11 on Muslim American communities frame and indeed haunt the study, acting as a touchstone for Pakistani Americans throughout the book. The aftermath of 9/11 is shown to have had a very real impact upon men in particular, including Afzal himself, as he discusses in the Introduction. It is in such accounts of lived experience that his study is at its most powerful and eloquent. This is most evident in chapter 3, where he writes simply and movingly about “the working poor” (97 and passim). After relating the story of Nadia and Ali, a struggling young couple who put in punishingly long hours at their video and DVD store at the expense of time with their two small children, he recounts the experiences of men such as Rashid and Kaiser. They are poorly paid members of the service industry, who are vulnerable to government surveillance and even deportation. Following rumours that Rashid has been incarcerated and then forced to return to Pakistan, Afzal writes that “his alleged deportation was disturbing, bringing to the forefront the precariousness, dispensability, and vulnerability of Muslim male immigrants … following 9/11” (119). Thanks to the coherent biographical narrative Afzal has fashioned, we feel the author's shock at the sudden change in Rashid's circumstances.

Afzal also notes that the Pakistani American community's own emphasis upon upward mobility and economic success can obscure the lives of such men so that they are “barely present in most representations and discussions of the Pakistani or the Muslim immigrant experience” (120). Through his dogged insistence upon recording their life stories and the stoicism, altruism, and fatalism which characterize the lives of these “undistinguished Americans” (in Hamilton Holt's phrase), Afzal recuperates their importance in a testimonial chapter which strongly contributes to the book's bid to represent Pakistani Houstonians in objective, yet new and surprising, ways.Footnote ¹ Chapter 3 exposes the classed aspects of the city's Pakistani community in that it follows on from the accounts of Amjad, Feroz and Salim, the highly educated, commercially successful Ismaili men discussed in chapter 2, whose accounts of their American achievements regularly appear self-congratulatory. Afzal rightly situates their discourse within a model-minority framework while showing that it is religiously based through the Aga Khan's injunction to his followers to achieve academic and professional excellence in order to survive as a religious minority in the modern world.

Afzal acknowledges the limits of his study: with a few notable exceptions, he interviews men rather than women, and his subjects are always Muslim rather than belonging to one of Pakistan's minority religions. What is more problematic is his diffuse and prolix style – as distinct from the directness of his writing in chapter 3 – and reliance upon particular stylistic and theoretical constructions: for example, “South Asian epistemologies and histories of same-sex sexual eroticism,” which recurs throughout chapter 4 (124 and passim). This leads to a certain conceptual repetition within each of the chapters. Indeed, having carried out such rich ethnographic fieldwork and offered some compelling ideas within each section of the book, Afzal could have pushed his analysis of the primary material further to offer even more intrepretation and insights. Lone Star Muslims is nevertheless a valuable contribution to scholarship, breaking new ground across several academic disciplines.