A young female client presents with anorexia nervosa and believes that her problem has its roots in magic; parents are helpless in the face of their son's substance abuse issues; an interracial couple cannot agree on how to discipline their children. How would you effectively help these clients while balancing appropriate interventions that are sensitive to religious, cultural, social, and gender differences? This handbook answers these difficult questions and helps behavioral health practitioners provide religio-culturally-competent care to Muslim clients living in territories such as North America, Australia, and Europe. The issues and interventions discussed in this book, by authoritative contributors, are diverse and multifaceted. Topics that have been ignored in previous literature are introduced, such as sex therapy, substance abuse counseling, university counseling, and community-based prevention. Chapters integrate tables, lists, and suggested phrasing for practitioners, along with case studies that are used by the authors to help illustrate concepts and potential interventions. Counseling Muslims is also unique in its broad scope, which reflects interventions ranging from the individual to community levels, and includes chapters that discuss persons born in the West, converts to Islam, and those from smaller ethnic minorities. It is the only guide practitioners need for information on effective service delivery for Muslims, who already bypass significant cultural stigma and shame to access mental health services.

Within the broad contours of Islamic traditions, Muslims are enjoined to fast during the month of Ramadan, they are invited to a disciplined practice of prayer, and they are offered the Quran as the divine revelation in the most beautiful verbal form. But what happens if Muslims choose not to fast, or give up prayer, or if the Quran's beauty seems inaccessible? When Muslims do not take up the path of piety, what happens to their relationships with more devout Muslims who are neighbors, friends, and kin? Between Muslims provides an ethnographic account of Iraqi Kurdish Muslims who turn away from devotional piety yet remain intimately engaged with Islamic traditions and with other Muslims. Andrew Bush offers a new way to understand religious difference in Islam, rejecting simple stereotypes about ethnic or sectarian identities. Integrating textual analysis of poetry, sermons, and Islamic history into accounts of everyday life in Iraqi Kurdistan, Between Muslims illuminates the interplay of attraction and aversion to Islam among ordinary Muslims.

For many Americans, questions, concerns, and misunderstandings surround the world's fastest-growing religion-Islam. Abraham Sarker, born and raised a devout Muslim, knows Islam and understands Muslim people. While Sarker was being trained as an Islamic leader, God miraculously opened his eyes and touched his heart with the gospel of Jesus Christ. He shares his story, then provides a clear description of the history, beliefs, and practices of Islam. Sarker concludes by giving us a better understanding of the Muslim mind-set and offers practical strategies Christians can use to engage in productive dialogue with Muslims.

More than 70 percent of Muslims worldwide practice folk Islam, a syncretistic mix of theologically orthodox Islam and traditional religious beliefs and practices. The Muslim Majority is unlike many published works on evangelism to Muslims, which argue for either apologetic or contextualized “bridge” approaches. These approaches are often ineffective in reaching adherents of popular Islam. Instead, author and missiologist Robin Hadaway outlines a contextual approach that addresses the unique perspective of popular Islam. Hadaway explains the differences between folk Is­lam and orthodox Islam and explores best practices for reaching the vast majority of Muslims with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Abdullah An-na'im offers a pioneering exploration of American Muslim citizenship and identity, arguing against the prevalent emphasis on majority-minority politics and instead promoting a shared citizenship that both accommodates and transcends religious identity. Many scholars and community leaders have called on American Muslims to engage with or integrate into mainstream American culture. Such calls tend to assume that there is a distinctive, monolithic, minority religious identity for American Muslims. Rejecting the closed categories that determine the minority status of a particular group and that, in turn, impede active, engaged citizenship, An-na'im draws attention to the relational nature of identity, emphasizing a common base of national membership and advancing a legal approach to a public recognition of a person's status as citizen. Rather than perceive themselves or accept being perceived by others as a monolithic minority, he argues, American Muslims should view themselves as American citizens who happen to be Muslims. As American citizens, they share a vast array of identities with other American citizens, whether ethnic, political, or socio-economic. But none of these identities qualify or limit their citizenship. An-na'im urges members of the American Muslim community to take a proactive, affirmative view of their citizenship in order to realize their rights fully and fulfill their obligations in social and cultural as well as political and legal terms. He shows that the freedom to associate with others in order to engage in civic action to advance rights and interests is integral to the underlying rationale of citizenship and not something that must be relinquished to become an American citizen. What Is an American Muslim? provides acute insight into the nature of citizenship and identity, the place of religious affiliation in American society, and what it means to share in a collective identity.

Why does a country with religious liberty enmeshed in its legal and social structures produce such overt prejudice and discrimination against Muslims? Sahar Aziz’s groundbreaking book demonstrates how race and religion intersect to create what she calls the Racial Muslim. Comparing discrimination against immigrant Muslims with the prejudicial treatment of Jews, Catholics, Mormons, and African American Muslims during the twentieth century, Aziz explores the gap between America’s aspiration for and fulfillment of religious freedom. With America’s demographics rapidly changing from a majority white Protestant nation to a multiracial, multireligious society, this book is an in dispensable read for understanding how our past continues to shape our present—to the detriment of our nation’s future.

The fast-consolidating identities along religious and ethnic lines in recent years have considerably ‘minoritised’ Muslims in India. The wide-ranging essays in this volume focus on the intensified exclusionary practices against Indian Muslims, highlighting how, amidst a politics of violence, confusing policy frameworks on caste and class lines, and institutionalised riot systems, the community has also suffered from the lack of leadership from within. At the same time, Indian Muslims have emerged as a ‘mass’ around which the politics of ‘vote bank’, ‘appeasement’, ‘foreigners’, ‘Pakistanis within the country’, and so on are innovated and played upon, making them further apprehensive about asserting their legitimate right to development. The important issues of the double marginalisation of Muslim women and attempts to reform the Muslim Personal Law by some civil society groups is also discussed. Contributed by academics, activists and journalists, the articles discuss issues of integration, exclusion and violence, and attempt to understand categories such as ‘identity’, ‘minority’, ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘nationalism’ with regard to and in the context of Indian Muslims. This second edition, with a new introduction, will be of great interest to scholars and researchers in sociology, politics, history, cultural studies, minority studies, Islamic studies, policy studies and development studies, as well as policymakers, civil society activists and those in media and journalism.