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Aminah Beverly McCloud, . Transnational Muslims in American Society . Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. 161 pp. $39.95 (cloth).

The Journal of Religion M C C LOUD , A MINAH B EVERLY . Transnational Muslims in American Society. Gaines- ville: University Press of Florida, 2006. 161 pp. $39.95 (cloth). Aminah McCloud pioneered in writing about African American Muslims, and here she publishes an eloquent, indigenous, African American Muslim view of immigrant Muslims in the United States. She includes short overviews of five immigrant Muslim groups to introduce African American Muslims and other Americans to Muslim diversity in America. Save for an introductory discussion of Islam and some brief comparisons between Sunni and Shi’i Muslims, there is little on religion or theology in this book. Indeed, McCloud’s point is that culture has supplanted religion, blinding immigrant Muslims to the essential teachings of their own faith and to the potential contributions of African American Muslims to Islam. It is an angry book, angry at American intolerance of Islam and Muslims and even angrier at immigrant Muslims for being, not immigrants on the path to assimilation, but “diasporan Muslims who are transnationals,” whose “alle- giances are to family and country of origin, rather than to this country” (4–5). Lumping together all immigrant Muslims in the introduction, McCloud alleges that “few know much of the cultural history of any country outside of the ‘home’ country” (5), a point repeated throughout the book as she insists that much of what the immigrants believe to be Islamic is really cultural and should be discarded or adapted to the United States. In addition to acquiring citizen- ship and doing well in one’s profession, she believes that transnational Mus- lims need to learn how to compete in “the public spaces of a multicultural, multireligious, multiethnic democratic society” (5–6). McCloud sees “an ever expanding chasm between transnational and indigenous Muslims on issues of foreign and domestic policy as well as the definition of Islam” (9). McCloud reviews the American context in chapter 2, discussing the nature of citizenship (the positives of individual autonomy and opportunity vs. the negatives of racial discrimination) and the common American equation of Muslims with Middle Eastern Arabs. Chapter 3 offers a useful introduction to Islamic beliefs and practices, emphasizing that Arab culture sometimes pre- vailed despite Islamic religious teachings, for example, with respect to the treatment of women (35, 40). The chapter ends by generalizing that “corrupt rulers have kept vast portions of the Muslim world oppressed and illiterate since the eighteenth century” (36) and that “those seeking better education, more freedoms, and wealth make up the majority of immigrant Muslims in America” (40). McCloud then moves to tell the stories of transnational Arabic-speaking, South Asian, Iranian, Chinese, and Somali Muslims; she aims to provide insight into the differences in behavior of diasporan Muslims. She relies on material she has used in teaching over the years, adding some recent references and carrying out some interviews (6–7). Unfortunately, the background chapters on modern Arab, South Asian, and Iranian history are full of dubious inter- pretations and overstatements. I have space here to illustrate only from her ten-page overview of South Asian history, my own subject, where her numerous errors are based on misconceptions about Brahmin or high caste societal dom- inance in terms of both numbers and values. For example, “the changes Islam brought to the predominately [sic] Hindu land were deeply resented. Islam brought shrines, cemeteries, and meat eating to a society that cremated its dead, was vegetarian, and had its own shrines” (44). Attributing strong South