"For the second half of a two-course sequence in Muslim history, Islamic Civilization, and religious studies courses on Islam." The history of the predominantly Muslim world is examined within the context of world history. It examines political, economic, and broad cultural developments, as well as specifically religious ones. The themes of the book are tradition and adaptation: It examines the tensions between the desire of Muslims to maintain continuity with their legacy and their recognition of the need to adapt to changing conditions.

A stunning collection of maze art that takes the coloring phenomenon one step beyond. Elizabeth Carpenter offers a compelling twist on the genre that will inspire both creativity and curiosity. Contemplative and calming to color, Elizabeth Carpenter's 30 mandalas also offer delightfully challenging mazes running through her striking designs. Very different from the childhood mazes you're familiar with, each of these intricate puzzles exercises the critical part of the brain as you work your way through the winding paths. 2018 WINNER: National Indie Excellence Book Award; Independent Press Distinguished Favorite Book Award; Body, Mind, Spirit Book Award; Family Choice Book Award; Creative Child Magazine Book of the Year Award; Living Now Awards Gold Medal Winner

Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee undertake a careful and rigorous hermeneutical approach to nearly two centuries of German philological scholarship on the Mahabharata and the Bhagavad Gita. Analyzing the intellectual contexts of this scholarship, beginning with theological debates that centered on Martin Luther's solefidian doctrine and proceeding to scientific positivism via analyses of disenchantment (Entzauberung), German Romanticism, pantheism (Pantheismusstreit), and historicism, they show how each of these movements progressively shaped German philology's encounter with the Indian epic. They demonstrate that, from the mid-nineteenth century on, this scholarship contributed to the construction of a supposed "Indo-Germanic" past, which Germans shared racially with the Mahabharata's warriors. Building on nationalist yearnings and ongoing Counter-Reformation anxieties, scholars developed the premise of Aryan continuity and supported it by a "Brahmanical hypothesis," according to which supposedly later strata of the text represented the corrupting work of scheming Brahmin priests. Adluri and Bagchee focus on the work of four Mahabharata scholars and eight scholars of the Bhagavad Gita, all of whom were invested in the idea that the text-critical task of philology as a scientific method was to identify a text's strata and interpolations so that, by displaying what had accumulated over time, one could recover what remained of an original or authentic core. The authors show that the construction of pseudo-histories for the stages through which the Mahabharata had supposedly passed provided German scholars with models for two things: 1) a convenient pseudo-history of Hinduism and Indian religions more generally; and 2) a platform from which to say whatever they wanted to about the origins, development, and corruption of the Mahabharata text. The book thus challenges contemporary scholars to recognize that the ''Brahmanic hypothesis'' (the thesis that Brahmanic religion corrupted an original, pure and heroic Aryan ethical and epical worldview), an unacknowledged tenet of much Western scholarship to this day, was not and probably no longer can be an innocuous thesis. The ''corrupting'' impact of Brahmanical ''priestcraft,'' the authors show, served German Indology as a cover under which to disparage Catholics, Jews, and other ''Semites.''

Throughout the history of Indian religions, the ascetic figure is most closely identified with power. Power is a by-product of the ascetic path, and is displayed in the ability to fly, walk on water or through dense objects, read minds, discern the former lives of others, see into the future, harm others, or simply levitate one's body. Using religio-philosophical discourses and narratives from epic, puranic, and hagiographical literature, Indian Asceticism focuses on the powers exhibited by ascetics of India from ancient to modern time. The discourses and narratives show ascetics performing violent acts and using language to curse and harm opponents. They also give rise to questions about how power and violence are related to the phenomenon of play. Olson discusses the erotic, the demonic, the comic, and the miraculous forms of play and their connections to power and violence. His focus is on Hinduism, from early Indian religious history to more modern times, but evidence is also presented from both Buddhism and Jainism, which provides evidence that the subject matter of this book pervades India's major indigenous religious traditions. The book also includes a look at the extent to which contemporary findings in cognitive science can add to our understanding about these various powers; Olson argues that violence is built into the practice of the ascetic. Indian Asceticism culminates with an attempt to rethink the nature of power in a way that does justice to the literary evidence from Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain sources.

Though many practitioners of yoga and meditation are familiar with the Sri Cakra yantra, few fully understand the depth of meaning in this representation of the cosmos. Even fewer have been exposed to the practices of mantra and puja (worship) associated with it. Andre Padoux, with Roger Orphe-Jeanty, offers the first English translation of the Yoginihrdaya, a seminal Hindu tantric text dating back to the 10th or 11th century CE. The Yoginihrdaya discloses to initiates the secret of the Heart of the Yogini, or the supreme Reality: the divine plane where the Goddess (Tripurasundari, or Consciousness itself) manifests her power and glory. As Padoux demonstrates, the Yoginihrdaya is not a philosophical treatise aimed at expounding particular metaphysical tenets. It aims to show a way towards liberation, or, more precisely, to a tantric form of liberation in this life--jivanmukti, which grants both liberation from the fetters of the world and domination over it.

It’s time to revisit the Kokoro Clinic for the Soul.

Though it is mysteriously located at an uncertain address, the Kokoro clinic can always be found by those who need it. And it has proven time after time that a prescribed cat has the power to heal the emotional wounds of all its patients.

This irresistible sequel introduces a new loveable cast of healing cats, from Kotetsu, a four-month-old Bengal who unleashes his energy by demolishing bed linen, to curious Shasha, who won't let her tiny size stop her, and lazy Ms. Michiko, who is as soft and comforting as mochi.

As characters from one chapter re-appear as side characters in the next, we follow a young woman who cannot help pushing away the man who loves her; a recently widowed grandfather whose grandson refuses to leave his room; and an anxious man working at a cat shelter who seeks to show how difficult cats can be the most rewarding.

In Bringing the Sacred Down to Earth, Corinne Dempsey offers a comparative study of Hindu and Christian, Indian and Euro/American earthbound religious expressions. She argues that official religious, political, and epistemological systems tend to deny sacred access and expression to the general populace, and are abstracted and disembodied in ways that make them irrelevant to if not neglectful of earthly realities. Working at cross purposes with these systems, attending to material needs, conferring sacred access to a wider public, and imbuing land and bodies with sacred meaning and power, are religious frameworks featuring folklore figures, democratizing theologies, newly sanctified land, and extraordinary human abilities. Some scholars will see Dempsey's juxtapositions of Hindu and Christian religious dynamics, many of which exist on opposite sides of the globe, as a leap into a disciplinary minefield. Many have argued for decades that comparison is an outmoded, politically troubled approach to the human sciences. More recently opponents, represented by a growing number of religion scholars, are ''writing back'' in comparison's defense, asserting the merits of a readjusted, carefully contextualized, new comparativism. But, says Dempsey, the inestimable advantages of the comparative method described by religion scholars and performed in this book are disciplinary as well as ethical. As demonstrated in this stimulating book, the process of comparison can shed light on angles and contours otherwise obscured and perform the important work of bridging human contingencies and perception across religious, cultural, and disciplinary divides.

The "Nations" are the "seventy nations": a metaphor which, in the Talmudic idiom, designates the whole of humanity surrounding Israel. In this major collection of essays, Levinas considers Judaism's uncertain relationship to European culture since the Enlightenment, problems of distance and integration. It also includes essays on Franz Rosenzweig and Moses Mendelssohn, and a discussion of central importance to Jewish philosophy in the context of general philosophy. This work brings to the fore the vital encounter between philosophy and Judaism, a hallmark of Levinas's thought.

Madhyamaka and Yogacara are the two principal schools of Mahayana Buddhist philosophy. While Madhyamaka asserts the ultimate emptiness and conventional reality of all phenomena, Yogacara is idealistic. This collection of essays addresses the degree to which these philosophical approaches are consistent or complementary. Indian and Tibetan doxographies often take these two schools to be philosophical rivals. They are grounded in distinct bodies of sutra literature and adopt what appear to be very different positions regarding the analysis of emptiness and the status of mind. Madhyamaka-Yogacara polemics abound in Indian Buddhist literature, and Tibetan doxographies regard them as distinct systems. Nonetheless, scholars have tried to synthesize the two positions for centuries, as in the case of Indian Buddhist philosopher Santaraksita. This volume offers new essays by prominent experts on both these traditions, who address the question of the degree to which these philosophical approaches should be seen as rivals or as allies. In answering the question of whether Madhyamaka and Yogacara can be considered compatible, contributors engage with a broad range of canonical literature, and relate the texts to contemporary philosophical problems.

Echoes of Enlightenment: The Life and Legacy of Soenam Peldren explores the issues of gender and sainthood raised by the discovery of a previously unpublished "liberation story" of the fourteenth-century Tibetan female Buddhist practitioner Soenam Peldren. Born in 1328, Peldren spent most of her adult life living and traveling as a nomad in eastern Tibet until her death in 1372. Existing scholarship suggests that she was illiterate, lacking religious education, and unconnected to established religious institutions. That, and the fact that as a woman her claims of religious authority would have been constantly questioned, makes Soenam Peldren's overall success in legitimizing her claims of divine identity all the more remarkable. Today the site of her death is recognized as sacred by local residents. In this study, Suzanne Bessenger draws on the newly discovered biography of the saint, approaching it through several different lenses. Bessenger seeks to understand how the written record of the saint's life is shaped both by the specific hagiographical agendas of its multiple authors and by the dictates of the genres of Tibetan religious literature, including biography and poetry. She considers Peldren's enduring historical legacy as a fascinating piece of Tibetan history that reveals much about the social and textual machinations of saint production. Finally, she identifies Peldren as one of the earliest recorded instances of a historical Tibetan woman successfully using the uniquely Tibetan hermeneutic of deity emanation to achieve religious authority.

This study contributes to the new approach to the problem of the authority of the Bible and religious authority in general known as canon criticism, and will at the same time promote better understanding and cooperation between Christian and Jewish biblical scholars. The author considers the Hebrew canon, and especially the juxtaposition of law and prophecy within it, not as a component of Christian canon, as is usually done, but as a historical and theological problem focusing on the issue of religious and sociological implications of the claims that underlie the formation of the tripartite canon, particularly the claims staked by the authority of the Bible and how this bears on the self-understanding of Judaism-and Christianity. Joseph Blekinsopp has traveled and studied extensively in the Middle East and Europe. Among his many books are A Sketchbook of Biblical Theology, Sexuality and the Christian tradition, Gibeon and Israel, and Scripture Discussion Commentary: Pentateuch. He is presently professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame. Prophecy and Canon is the third publication based on research sponsored by the University of Notre Dame Center for the Study of Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity.

Carol Salomon dedicated over thirty years of her life to researching, translating, and annotating this compilation of songs by the Bengali poet and mystical philosopher Lalan Sai (popularly transliterated as Lalon) who lived in the village of Cheuriya in Bengal in the latter half of the nineteenth century. One major objective of his lyrical riddles was to challenge the restrictions of cultural, political, and sexual identity, and his songs accordingly express a longing to understand humanity, its duties, and its ultimate destiny. His songs also contain thinly veiled references to esoteric yogic practices (sadhana), including body-centered Hathayogic techniques that are related to those found in Buddhist, Kaula, Natha, and Sufi medieval tantric literature. Dr. Salomon's translation of the work is the first dedicated English translation of Lalan's songs to closely follow the Bangla text, with all of its dialectical variations, and is here produced alongside the original text. Although her untimely death left her work unpublished, the editors have worked diligently to reconstruct her translations from her surviving printed and handwritten manuscripts. The result is a finished product that can finally share her groundbreaking scholarship on Baul traditions with the world.

A koan is a narrative or dialogue used to provoke the "great doubt" and test a student's progress in Zen practice. The Mu Koan consists of a brief conversation in which a monk asks master Zhaozhou Congshen whether or not a dog has Buddha-nature. The reply is Mu: literally, ''No.'' This case is widely considered to be the single best known and most widely circulated and transmitted koan record of the Zen school of Buddhism. The Mu Koan is especially well known for the intense personal experiences it offers those seeking an existential transformation from anxiety to spiritual illumination. Steven Heine demonstrates that the Gateless Gate version, preferred by Dahui and so many other key-phrase advocates, does not by any means constitute the final word concerning the meaning and significance of the Mu Koan. Another impact version has been the Dual Version, which is the ''Yes-No'' rendition to the Mu Koan. Like Cats and Dogs offers critical insight and a new historical perspective on ''the koan of koans.''

Constructive interreligious dialogue is only a recent phenomenon. Until the nineteenth century, most dialogue among believers was carried on as a debate aimed either to disprove the claims of the other, or to convert the other to one's own tradition. At the end of the nineteenth century, Protestant Christian missionaries of different denominations had created such a cacophony amongst themselves in the mission fields that they decided that it would be best if they could begin to overcome their own differences instead of confusing and even scandalizing the people whom they were trying to convert. By the middle of the twentieth century, the horrors of the Holocaust compelled Christians, especially mainline Protestants and Catholics, to enter into a serious dialogue with Jews, one of the consequences of which was the removal of claims by Christians to have replaced Judaism, and revising text books that communicated that message to Christian believers.
Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, many branches of Christianity, not least the Catholic Church, are engaged in a world-wide constructive dialogue with Muslims, made all the more necessary by the terrorist attacks of September 11. In these new conversations, Muslim religious leaders took an important initiative when they sent their document, ''A Common Word Between Us, '' to all Christians in the West. It is an extraordinary document, for it makes a theological argument (various Christians in the West, including officials at the Vatican, have claimed that a ''theological conversation'' with Muslims is not possible) based on texts drawn from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Qur'an, that Jewish, Christian, and Muslim believers share the God-given obligation to love God and each other in peace and justice.
The Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies brought together an international group of sixteen Jewish, Catholic, and Muslim scholars to carry on an important theological exploration of the theme of ''learned ignorance.''

This volume outlines the author's scepticism about the veridity of some Old Testament history and provoked an open dispute with Samuel Chandler. Many of the theological ideas presented here are embedded in innovatory and persuasive ideas about ethics, language, anthropology and epistemology.

While academic and popular studies of Buddhism have often neglected race as a factor of analysis, the issues concerning race and racialization have remained not far below the surface of the wider discussion among ethnic Buddhists, converts, and sympathizers regarding representations of American Buddhism and adaptations of Buddhist practices to the American context. In Race and Religion in American Buddhism, Joseph Cheah provides a much-needed contribution to the field of religious studies by addressing the under-theorization of race in the study of American Buddhism. Through the lens of racial formation, Cheah demonstrates how adaptations of Buddhist practices by immigrants, converts and sympathizers have taken place within an environment already permeated with the logic and ideology of whiteness and white supremacy. In other words, race and religion (Buddhism) are so intimately bounded together in the United States that the ideology of white supremacy informs the differing ways in which convert Buddhists and sympathizers and Burmese ethnic Buddhists have adapted Buddhist religious practices to an American context.
Cheah offers a complex view of how the Burmese American community must negotiate not only the religious and racial terrains of the United States but also the transnational reach of the Burmese junta. Race and Religion in American Buddhism marks an important contribution to the study of American Buddhism as well as to the larger fields of U.S. religions and Asian American studies.

Anne Murphy offers a groundbreaking exploration of the material aspects of Sikh identity, showing how material objects, as well as holy sites, and texts, embody and represent the Sikh community as an evolving historical and social construction. Widening traditional scholarly emphasis on holy sites and texts alone to include consideration of iconic objects, such as garments and weaponry, Murphy moves further and examines the parallel relationships among sites, texts, and objects. She reveals that objects have played dramatically different roles across regimes-signifers of authority in one, mere possessions in another-and like Sikh texts, which have long been a resource for the construction of Sikh identity, material objects have served as a means of imagining and representing the past. Murphy's deft and nuanced study of the complex role objects have played and continue to play in Sikh history and memory will be a valuable resource to students and scholars of Sikh history and culture.

According to historical teaching, a Jewish man should give thanks each day for ''not having been made a gentile, a woman, nor a slave.'' Yoel Kahn's innovative study of a controversial Jewish liturgical passage traces the history of this prayer from its extra-Jewish origins across two thousand years of history, demonstrating how different generations and communities understood the significance of these words in light of their own circumstances. Marking the boundary between ''us'' and ''them,'' marginalized and persecuted groups affirmed their own identity and sense of purpose. After the medieval Church seized and burned books it considered offensive, new, coded formulations emerged as forms of spiritual resistance. Owners voluntarily carefully expurgated their books to save them from being destroyed, creating new language and meanings while seeking to preserve the structure and message of the received tradition. Renaissance Jewish women ignored rabbis' objections and assertively declared their gratitude at being ''made a woman and not a man.'' Illustrations from medieval and renaissance Hebrew manuscripts demonstrate creative literary responses to censorship and show that official texts and interpretations do not fully represent the historical record. As Jewish emancipation began in the 19th century, modernizing Jews again had to balance fealty to historical practice with their own and others' understanding of their place in the world. Seeking to be recognized as modern and European, early modern Jews rewrote the liturgy to fit modern sensibilities and identified themselves with the Christian West against the historical pagan and the uncivilized infidel. In recent decades, a reassertion of ethnic and cultural identity has again raised questions of how the Jewish religious community should define itself. Through the lens of a liturgical text in continuous use for over two thousand years, Kahn offers new insights into an evolving religious identity and recurring questions of how to honor both historical teaching and contemporary sensibility.

A radically hopeful exploration of faith, identity, morality, and purpose grounded in timeless Jewish principles, captured in a series of profound conversations between Nikki Goldstein and the man who saved her life and became her spiritual mentor, Rabbi Eli Schlanger—whose teachings and wisdom endure beyond his tragic killing in the December 2025 Bondi Beach Chanukah terrorist attack in Sydney, Australia.

Conversations with My Rabbi is an unforgettable true story and a profound book of wisdom, offering timeless teachings for living well in an uncertain world.

In September 2022, Nikki Goldstein was comatose, near death in a Sydney ICU when her daughter spotted Rabbi Eli Schlanger in the hallway. Nikki’s husband asked the rabbi to come pray for her. Standing beside her bed, he blew the shofar and whispered ancient prayers over Nikki.

One day later, Nikki began recovering from the life-threatening infection. The doctors called it a miracle. As she regained her health, this secular Jewish woman and the devout rabbi formed an unlikely and beautiful friendship. Coming from profoundly different worlds—one grounded in religious tradition, the other in temporal modernity—they discovered they were seeking answers to the same essential questions.

Together, they turned to ancient Jewish teachings for guidance on living more ethically, compassionately, and spiritually. In January 2025, they began to record their conversations as a book. But just weeks before they were to write the final chapter, Eli was murdered on Sydney’s Bondi Beach in Australia’s second deadliest mass-casualty shooting. He died before lighting the menorah at his annual Chanukah by the Sea celebration, an event he’d run for eighteen years. Devastated by shock and grief, Nikki refused to be silenced by terror. She vowed that Eli’s legacy and his mission to bring light, love, and moral clarity to the world would not die, because his teachings were more necessary than ever.

Reflecting the dialogue-driven Jewish intellectual tradition, the question and answer format of Conversations with My Rabbi invites readers to ponder, to question, and to define their own beliefs as they follow Nikki and Eli’s real, raw, tender, sometimes funny, sometimes fierce, yet always deeply human conversations centered around the timeless ethical teachings known as the Noahide Laws, tied to the biblical Noah: universal principles rooted in Jewish wisdom that speak to all who seek meaning, moral clarity, and hope in their lives.

Questions include

• Tell Me Why I Should Believe in God?
• Why Are We So Afraid to Talk About God?
• What If People Are Just . . . Terrible?
• Do Animals Have Souls?
• Is Stealing Really That Bad?
• What’s So Scary About Sex?
• What Does Justice Look Like?

Conversations with My Rabbi is a repudiation of the madness we are experiencing today. It is Rabbi Eli’s eternal gift—a guide for all, regardless of faith, who struggle to live with integrity, compassion, and courage in a divided and uncertain world.

How can we order the world while accepting its enduring ambiguities? Rethinking Pluralism suggests a new approach to the problem of ambiguity and social order, which goes beyond the default modern position of 'notation' (resort to rules and categories to disambiguate). The book argues that alternative, more particularistic modes of dealing with ambiguity through ritual and shared experience better attune to contemporary problems of living with difference. It retrieves key aspects of earlier discussions of ambiguity evident in rabbinic commentaries, Chinese texts, and Greek philosophical and dramatic works, and applies those texts to modern problems. The book is a work of recuperation that challenges contemporary constructions of tradition and modernity. In this, it draws on the tradition of pragmatism in American philosophy, especially John Dewey's injunctions to heed the particular, the contingent and experienced as opposed to the abstract, general and disembodied. Only in this way can new forms of empathy emerge congruent with the deeply plural nature of our present experience. While we cannot avoid the ambiguities inherent to the categories through which we construct our world, the book urges us to reconceptualize the ways in which we think about boundaries - not just the solid line of notation, but also the permeable membrane of ritualization and the fractal complexity of shared experience.

Amidst the growing forums of kinky Jews, orthodox drag queens, and Jewish geisha girls, we find today's sexy Jewess in a host of reflexive plays with sexed-up self-display. A social phantasm with real legs, she moves boldly between neo-burlesque striptease, comedy television, ballet movies, and progressive porn to construct the 21st Century Jewish American woman through charisma and comic craft, in-your-face antics, and offensive charm. Her image redresses longstanding stereotypes of the hag, the Jewish mother, and Jewish American princess that have demeaned the Jewish woman as overly demanding, inappropriate, and unattractive across the 20th century, even as Jews assimilated into the American mainstream. But why does "sexy" work to update tropes of the Jewish woman? And how does sex link to humor in order for this update to work? Entangling questions of sexiness to race, gender, and class, The Case of the Sexy Jewess frames an embodied joke-work genre that is most often, but not always meant to be funny. In a contemporary period after the thrusts of assimilation and women's liberation movements, performances usher in new versions of old scripts with ranging consequences. At the core is the recuperative performance of identity through impersonation, and the question of its radical or conservative potential. Appropriating, re-appropriating, and mis-appropriating identity material within and beyond their midst, Sexy Jewess artists play up the failed logic of representation by mocking identity categories altogether. They act as comic chameleons, morphing between margin and center in countless number of charged caricatures. Embodying ethnic and gender positions as always already on the edge while ever more in the middle, contemporary Jewish female performers extend a comic tradition in new contexts, mobilizing progressive discourses from positions of newfound race and gender privilege.

At the turn of the millennium, Nepal was the world's last remaining Hindu kingdom: even the most skeptical of observers could hardly imagine that the institution of the monarchy could ever be in jeopardy. In 2001, however, Nepal's popular King Birendra was killed in the royal palace. The crown passed to his brother Gyanendra, but the monarchy would never fully recover. Nepal witnessed an anti-king uprising in April 2006, and over the course of two years, an interim administration systematically took over all the king's duties and privileges. Most decisively, beginning in the summer of 2007, the government began blocking the king from participating in his many public rituals, sending the prime minister in his place instead. Demoting Vishnu argues that Nepal's dramatic political transformation from monarchy to republic was contested-and in key ways accomplished through-ritual performance. By co-opting state ritual, the king's opponents were able to attack the monarchy's social identity at its foundations, enabling the final legal dissolution of kingship in 2008 to take place without physically harming the king himself. All once-royal rituals continue to be performed, but now they are handled by the country's President-a position created in 2008 to take over state ceremonial functions. Ex-King Gyanendra Shah continues to live in Nepal, is permitted to move about the country and abroad, but is no longer king in any respect. Mocko's book theorizes the role of public ritual in producing Nepal's state ideology. It examines how royal ritual once authorized kings to serve as the privileged apex of national governance and how, in the 21st-century, those rituals stopped serving the king and began instead to authorize rule by a party-based 'head of state.' Demoting Vishnu illustrates how upheaval in ritual contexts undermined the institutional logic of the monarchy, demonstrating in very public ways that kingship was contingent, opposable, and ultimately dispensable.

The promise of land and progeny to the patriarchs-Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob-is a central, recurring feature of the Pentateuch. From the beginning of the story of Abraham to the last moment of Moses's life, this promise forms the guiding theological statement for each narrative. Yet literary and historical inquiries ascribe the promise texts to a variety of sources, layers, and redactions, raising questions about how the promise functioned in its original manifestations and how it can be used to understand the formation of the Pentateuch as a whole. Joel S. Baden reexamines the patriarchal promise in its historical and contemporaneous contexts, evaluating the benefits and drawbacks of both final-form and literary-historical approaches to the promise. He pays close attention to the methodologies employed in both documentary and non-documentary analyses and aims to bring source-critical analysis of the promise to bear on the understanding of the canonical text for contemporary readers. The Promise to the Patriarchs addresses the question of how the literary-historical perspective can illuminate and even deepen the theological meaning of the Pentateuch, particularly of the promise at the heart of this central biblical corpus.

Conflicts and controversies at home and abroad have led Americans to focus on Islam more than ever before. In addition, more and more of their neighbors, colleagues, and friends are Muslims. While much has been written about contemporary American Islam and pioneering studies have appeared on Muslim slaves in the antebellum period, comparatively little is known about Islam in Victorian America. This biography of Alexander Russell Webb, one of the earliest American Muslims to achieve public renown, seeks to fill this gap.
Webb was a central figure of American Islam during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A native of the Hudson Valley, he was a journalist, editor, and civil servant. Raised a Presbyterian, Webb early on began to cultivate an interest in other religions and became particularly fascinated by Islam. While serving as U.S. consul to the Philippines in 1887, he took a greater interest in the faith and embraced it in 1888, one of the first Americans known to have done so. Within a few years, he began corresponding with important Muslims in India. Webb became an enthusiastic propagator of the faith, founding the first Islamic institution in the United States: the American Mission. He wrote numerous books intended to introduce Islam to Americans, started the first Islamic press in the United States, published a journal entitled The Moslem World, and served as the representative of Islam at the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago. In 1901, he was appointed Honorary Turkish Consul General in New York and was invited to Turkey, where he received two Ottoman medals of merits.
In this first-ever biography of Webb, Umar F. Abd-Allah examines Webb'slife and uses it as a window through which to explore the early history of Islam in America. Except for his adopted faith, every aspect of Webb's life was, as Abd-Allah shows, quintessentially characteristic of his place and time. It was because he was so typically American that he was able to serve as Islam's ambassador to America (and vice versa). As America's Muslim community grows and becomes more visible, Webb's life and the virtues he championed - pluralism, liberalism, universal humanity, and a sense of civic and political responsibility - exemplify what it means to be an American Muslim.