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had no responsibility to help the poor. Here began a shift in the ideological-cumintellectual explanation of the conditions of the urban poor. The cause of poverty was no longer associated with genetic defect, but with what Oscar Lewis came to describe as The Culture of Poverty. And by the 1960s the culture of poverty thesis had assumed a racial cast, especially in the work of Patrick Moynihan, now linking African-American families with the urban cultural pathology that poverty supposedly reproduces. What comes out clearly from the text is that the Ishmaels are yet another example of the cycle of history. In 1480, for example, the Inquisition formalized the correspondence between purity of faith and purity of blood, suggesting that religious faith is ultimately manifested in ones blood. The less pure the blood, the weaker the faith in ones religion and the greater the potential inclination towards other less honourable religions. In spite of their European ancestry, the Ishmaels came to symbolize precisely this interplay between genetics and culture in a new historical context framed by new institutional realities. With great methodological rigour, meticulous detail and brilliant analysis, the author presents a compelling account of Americas obsession with Orientalism within a larger racial narrative of the unfolding of the American nation. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of Islam in the USA.

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Alamin Mazrui Rutgers University E-mail: amazrui@rci.rutgers.edu

doi:10.1093/jis/etp093 Published online 16 August 2010

Muslims in Britain: Race, Place and Identities Edited by Peter Hopkins and Richard Gale. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 244 pp. Price PB 18.99. EAN 9780748625888.
This volume uses the concept of place to challenge the public perception of British Muslims as homogeneous and the associated perception that there is a uniform British Muslim political identity. Place denotes a focus on the spatial or geographic aspects of peoples lives, including their economic, historical and political locations. As such, it provides a thread that links the different contributions, resulting in a volume that has greater intellectual coherence than some of the other recent collections of writing on the identity and identity politics of Muslims in Britain. The contributions are organized in three parts, after a review by the editorsa geographer and a sociologistof the history and demography of Muslims in Britain and an introduction to the theme of place. Part I contains UK-based chapters on British Muslims as individuals at work, in education and at home. More accurately, these ve chapters are about people of South Asian heritage, who constitute the majority (68%) of British Muslims. Deborah Philips examines

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the extent to which UK-raised Pakistani, Kashmiri and Bangladeshi women in Oldham, Rochdale and Bradford have created a home physically apart from their in-laws and rejected the norms of marriage and motherhood of their parents generation. Sophie Bowlby and Sally Lloyd-Evans examine the workplace experiences of Pakistanis in Reading and Slough and ask if the relative socioeconomic disadvantage of British Muslims as a whole arises from being Muslim or for other reasons. Claire Dwyer and Bindi Shah consider the extent to which Pakistani women in Slough are taking up new opportunities by participating in higher and further education. Louise Archer turns to Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims boys in a town in northern England and, using some striking interview extracts, examines the links between the rhetoric of Muslim identity and local assertions of masculinity. In Part 2, the exploration of place and identity, shifts to processes and networks that extend beyond Britain and to the role of transnational connections in how different groups negotiate their Islamic identities. Richard Gales chapter on the politics of mosque construction in Birmingham examines how far the interactions between mosque organizations and local planning ofcials have co-constructed the meaning and style of the citys mosques. Gales chapter complicates the usual views of mosque construction in the UK as a straightforward symbolic and material identication with Muslims overseas. Sean McLauglins chapter explores further the question of how far British Muslims identify with a standardized global Muslim community. Drawing on interviews with Mirpuri origin Muslims, McLaughlin asks how far pilgrimage promotes integration into an increasingly standardized global Muslim community. The other two chapters in this section depart from the usual focus on Muslims of Pakistani, Bangladeshi or Kashmiri heritage. Caroline Nagel and Lynn Staeheli ask how British Arab activists, i.e. those involved with organizations for people with Arab backgrounds, reconcile their Arab identity with its strong cultural association with Islam. These mainly well-to-do professionals who self-identify as British Arabs rather than British Muslims reject the politicized nature of British Muslim identity and its association, or synonymy, with British Asians or British Pakistanis. Reecting the current political concerns about integration, and revived interest in early American anthropological theories about acculturation or what happens to artefacts, customs and beliefs when people of different backgrounds some into contact, Anjoom Mukadam and Sharmina Mawani ask why well-todo Nizari Isma6ili (Shi6a) Muslims, who came to Britain from Gujarat via East Africa, have successfully integrated in Britain, in contrast to the (less-integrated) Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims. They suggest the answer lies in the Nizari Isma6ilis differential adaptation of cultural commodities during the processes of migration and settlement. By cultural commodities the authors mean not artefacts but language, food, dress, marriage patterns and religion, and their argument relies on distinguishing sacred commodities (religious belief and practice) from mundane ones that, as they put it, have been discarded as excess baggage, at least in part with reference to the advice of Agha Khan IV to always be loyal to the country of your adoption.

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The emphasis on acculturation is problematic because it downplays structure and partitions off religion from mundane culture, as if this separation is always easily accomplished. Signicantly, Nizari Isma6ilis were able to buy into the middle class on their arrival in England. Mukadam and Mawanis implied comparison of Isma6ili Shi6as with the relatively (non-) integrated and (more slowly) acculturated among Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims is also problematic in this regard; the implication is that the latter have simply held on to their excess baggage, and should not have done so. The situation is not as simple as this implies, as Roger Ballard demonstrated using a different South Asian comparison in an earlier volume on diasporic South Asians that was edited by two geographers and an anthropologist (C. Clarke, C. Peach, and S. Vertovec, South Asians Overseas, 1990). There, Ballard asked how far religion versus other factors explains differences in the socio-economic status of Mirpuri Muslims and Punjabi Sikhs. For him the socio-economic starting points of migration were at least as important as culture; these factors interacted with each other in the timing of migration and the process of settlement to explain the differential outcomes of these two South Asian groups. The nal part of the book presents essays by Lily Kong on the limitations and future scope of the geography of contemporary Islam; Tariq Modood on locating Muslim identity politics in a European context and Jonathan Birt on the relationship between Islamophobia and British Muslim identity politics. The volume is rounded off with an Afterword by the editors. The volumes emphasis on identities in the plural is clearly justied as the contributions show there is no single Muslim identity; even when the context is one time and place Muslim identities are negotiated in a variety of different ways.

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Alison Shaw Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies E-mail: Alison.Shaw@dphpc.ox.ac.uk

doi:10.1093/jis/etq074

Islam in the Nordic and Baltic Countries ran Larsson (London and New York: Routledge, Edited by Go 2009), 160 pp. Price HB $135.00. EAN 9780415485197.
More than three-quarters of a million Muslims live in the Nordic and Baltic countriesrather unevenly distributed and with a varied history. Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway and Sweden) has over the last three decades received relatively large numbers of migrants with Muslim background, whereas the Baltic countries and Finland contain small Muslim minorities which to some degree have historical bonds to Russia before the revolution in 1917. The Faroe Islands and Iceland have experiences similar to the Scandinavian countries, yet on a much smaller scale. The research on Islam in the Nordic and Baltic countries is not overwhelming, but Scandinavia has for some years been included both in