Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam by Akbar Ahmed

American Ethnologist Volume 38 Number 3 August 2011 judging, expressing, thinking, planning, and recording for the future—all of these being somehow fixed in the law of contract but drawn out over time with the gift, because the gift also entails sustenance toward ongoing self-realization in life, for both giver and receiver. We learn from Hyland’s analysis that “ingratitude” is one legally recognized condi- tion that links, as well as contrasts, contract and gift. A con- tract cannot be unilaterally revoked, whereas a gift may be taken back in some instances (and systems) because the identity of the giver remains actionable across conditions arising in the arc of life, such as impoverishment, indebt- edness, or the birth of new children (para 1072). Ingrati- tude is the “first legally recognized grounds for revocation” (para 1116), the first version of this being a former slave’s apparent ingratitude for manumission in ancient Rome. The exposition passes through some fascinating situations, from a donee’s subsequent “attempt to kill” the donor to the legal implication of the donor’s “forgiveness.” It should not be surprising, by the end, to find that revocation law con- tains many “inconsistencies,” some of them precisely tied to intersections between legal regularization and the unpre- dictable arc of life. This brief example of ingratitude and revocation shows how inspiring this book can be to anthropologists: to schol- ars of law and practice, for Hyland’s detailed exposition of the continuing tensions of incommensurability; and schol- ars of transactions, for his frame-by-frame—in historical context, in vernacular languages—tracing out of the phases and stages that make up the interactional processes to which we give such portmanteau analytical terms as “the gift.” For us, this is a book to read, and also a reference book to keep taking down from the shelf, as often as such prob- lems cross our paths . . . which promises to be increasingly often. Reference cited Mauss, Marcel 1990[1924–25] The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. W. D. Halls, trans. New York and London: W.W. Norton. Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam. Akbar Ahmed. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2010. 528 pp. KAREN LEONARD University of California, Irvine Well known before coming to the United States as an anthropologist and government servant in Pakistan, Ak- bar Ahmed’s book is billed, on the jacket cover, as “the most comprehensive study to date of the American Muslim community.” Professor Ahmed and several of his students traveled to some 75 U.S. cities in nine months, interview- ing Muslims and non-Muslims and visiting mosques and Muslim institutions; they received various grants and do- nations (incl. a generous grant from the Department of Homeland Security) to fund the trip. The resulting book is rather idiosyncratic, with the author’s views of U.S. history and society shaping the material. The team administered a questionnaire to 2,000 people, half of them Muslim, but the questionnaire is neither appended nor are any results presented quantitatively or even systematically. Because Ahmed’s and the team’s participant-observation and inter- view accounts are also presented anecdotally, the method- ology and findings cannot really be assessed. Ahmed sees himself as following in de Tocqueville’s steps, seeking to understand and explain the United States. He relies on certain touchstones as he reviews “American Identity” in part 1: the Mayflower, Plymouth Rock, and Jamestown; the Founding Fathers (particularly Jefferson); Scots-Irish culture; and then Darwin and Jesus. Yes, “Darwin versus Jesus” is the title of a subsection (p. 24), and throughout the book Ahmed sees U.S. identity as torn between these two, as he defines them: between competi- tiveness, or the struggle for survival of the fittest, and true Christianity, or compassion and universal love. He also pro- poses three basic “identities” defining U.S. society: primor- dial, pluralist, and predator, all three derived from the white settlers at Plymouth and Jamestown. These ideas form the “anthropological framework” for the volume. Toward the end of the book, it is clear that he believes that true Islam, also stressing compassion and love, can help bring calm- ness and peace to the United States. A very positive aspect of this book is the attention paid to African American Muslims, too often omitted from academic or journalistic accounts of Muslim Americans. Ahmed discusses racism at length, and, in part 2, “Islam in America,” he places African American Muslims as the first of three groups. The second group is immigrant Mus- lims, and the third is Muslim converts. In this third sec- tion, he mistakenly asserts that the gender ratio of converts is four females to one male (p. 304, footnoting to a single article); he highlights female converts, white and Latino. Actually there are many more men, African American men, converting to Islam in the United States, many of them do- ing so while in prison. Discussing female converts, Ahmed links “original American identity” to notions of modesty, shame, and honor as in Plymouth and Jamestown (p. 331), seeing this as analogous to the respect with which Islam treats women. (He did not seem to seek out or encounter U.S. Muslim women engaged in the “gender jihad” under- way in the United States and elsewhere.) He traces a de- cline of U.S. morality from early frontier society through the materialism and indulgence of the 1960s and 1980s (Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson) to the consumerism of the 1990s. To Ahmed and his team, Mardi Gras in New Orleans