Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2023 -

This volume tracks how a uniform kitab (book) came to supplant the many traditions of qur'an (recitation) that, Deroche (College de France, Paris) argues, in the early days of Islam were "characterized, above all, by plurality." (p. 231) According to tradition, Muhammad approved variant recitations with equivalent meanings, and was unbothered by different interjections at the ends of verses to establish the rhyme. Yet divergences from the seventh-century Uthmanic recension were repressed, sometimes brutally; and Ibn Mujahid (d. 936) had a narrow view of permissible recitations. Deroche discusses ramifications of Arabic written without dots distinguishing letters, the testimonies of early classic historians and commentators, and the trajectories of modern Qur'an scholarship. He posits that the earliest surviving manuscripts suggest the Qur'an's chapter organization was early and could go back to Muhammad but that the earliest level of the seventh-century Parisino-petropolitanus palimpsest documents a variant text/recitation. A handy glossary of terms and names will aid nonspecialists, but the volume will be most accessible to those with a good background in Arabic and Islamic history. Those readers will find this volume invaluable for its detailed analysis of Qur'anic variants, review of scholarship classic and modern, and reconstruction of how the text came to be standardized.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Founded in 2015, the Women's Mosque of America--the US's first women-led Muslim house of worship--sits at the center of this gem of a book, in which Ali (Washington Univ., St. Louis) explores ongoing US Muslim debates about gendered religious authority and women's experiences of religious practice. In 2017 Ali attended Friday prayers and interviewed khateebahs (i.e., women preachers) and participants at Women's Mosque of America, and she brings this ethnographic research to bear in this thorough discussion of khutbahs from 2015 through 2021. The result is a deeply engaging read, offering finely textured analysis of the sermons and their authors in conversation with Black feminist and womanist theorists and secondary literature, from the study of US Muslims to gender in Islam studies and American religions. This valuable case study of US Muslim institution-building and the individuals and communities that shaped it shows the impact of racism and Islamophobia forged against the backdrop of women's marginalization in conventional mosque spaces. The book takes seriously the agency of the women participating in the mosque as sources of exegesis and knowledge production, as engaged in embodied practice, as authority figures in and beyond the Women's Mosque of America, and as activists for social justice.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.