Author Garbi Schmidt is a Danish woman “trained in the history of religions and Islamic studies and acquainted with anthropology and sociology” (p. 13, emphasis added). Anthropology and sociology are established disciplines with methodology and theory. Scholars trained in area, women’s, religious, or Islamic studies receive a very different kind of training that does not qualify them to do anthropology or sociology. Being acquainted with the latter two is a meaningless statement.

After Schmidt visited New York, her interest shifted from researching “the relationship between Muslims and Manicheans ... in eighth-century Baghdad ... [to] refocus on Muslims living in the United States today” (p. 13). She discovered “Islam in America … a topic that few researchers had yet investigated" (p. 13) and decided to go to Chicago to study Muslims. Her observation about the dearth of research on Islamic America is not accurate and is contradicted in her notes, which reference many works on Muslims in the United States.

The study stresses Muslim American schools and universities and the national Muslim Student Association (MSA), which has active chapters at many university campuses in the United States. This relative emphasis on Muslim American education is worthwhile because it fills a real gap, as opposed to the one the author identified. A systematic look at education for Muslims is relatively neglected in scholarship on Muslim Americans.

The book has six chapters: Introduction, The History of Muslims in Chicago: An Overview; Muslim Children in Chicago; Muslim Colleges and Students' Associations; Understanding Islam; Islamic Identities; and Islamic Authority among Adults and Muslims in America. The front book cover has a collage of Chicago images of high-rises with two highlighted photos: one of Muslim men and women praying behind a male imam on what seems to be a public lawn and the other of what seems to be a mosque with a minaret. No mention of authorship or basis of selection is made for these visual images.. Neither are readers given context for them. Visual anthropology has been painstakingly working on raising the level of awareness and education about the responsibility of images and how they are employed in books and print materials. Images send messages often more powerful than words but cannot explain themselves except in art.

The book mentions two factors affecting the research: Schmidt’s Danishness, by which she means she is “sharing foreignness with immigrant Muslims,” and her gender, which seems to account for (or perhaps excuse) her greater focus on women than men. She begins her “story” with “it is time to enter the American Medina, and encounter the many faces and voices of Muslims in Chicago” (p. 15). Story is the term Schmidt uses to describe her descriptive account. She describes certain aspects of Muslim life in Chicago. She borrows the Arabic notion of “medina,” which refers to a traditional (in contrast with modern) town in the Muslim urban landscape and which, as Schmidt points out, has religious historical significance as it is what the town of Yathrib in Arabia came to be called on the establishment by the Prophet Muhammad of the Islamic community in the seventh century. This storytelling device is consistent with her romantic application of the notion of Medina to Islamic Chicago.

Yet, this is an interesting descriptive account with many original observations by someone who seems to have put much personal effort in trying to understand Muslims on their own terms and whose participation allows readers entry into their lives. The author gives remarkable details, recording what many would consider mundane, even dry, events, such as Islamic classroom behaviors and encounters between teacher and student. Many examples show tensions between American-raised Muslim youth who reject “Old World” forms of teaching and even interpretations. Herein lies the value of the book—a detailed descriptive record of aspects of Sunni Muslim life in Chicago. In this account readers can see how some very ordinary situations become special, how daily behaviors reveal issues of wide relevance to problems that are on the minds of Muslims and non-Muslims today in the United States. One striking example is the observation that “science [is] an argument for Islam” (p. 127) and that “science, point by point, proved the Qur’an to be right” (p. 127). This significant point describes a side of Muslims that is in stark contrast with fundamentalist, evangelist U.S. Christians who are in direct collusion with science, something that is not shared with Christians in most of the industrialized world.