John L. Esposito with his co-editors has in this book assembled a group of scholars to reflect on trends in Asian Islam. Sixty percent of the world's Muslims live in Asian nations, and yet, as Esposito so elegantly explains in the introduction to this book, most of the West's images of Muslim culture and politics are drawn from a narrow and often misrepresented segment of the Arab Muslim world. In essays that discuss contemporary Muslim politics from Pakistan and India to Indonesia and Thailand, the contributors to this collection enrich our perception. They reveal an Asian Muslim politics of great challenge but also enormous opportunity. The result is a timely and important book that should be read by scholars and the general reader interested in understanding the true diversity of the Muslim world.
Robert Hefner is the author of Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia (2000) and editor of Remaking Muslim Politics(2005).