Jocelyne Cesari is Professor of Religion and Politics at the University of Birmingham and Senior Research fellow at Georgetown University's Berkley Center where she directs the Islam in World Politics Program. She is an adjunct Professor at the Harvard Divinity School and directs the interfaculty Program on Islam in the West at Harvard University. Her publications include The Islamic Awakening: Religion, Democracy and Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and Why the West Fears Islam: An Exploration of Islam in Western Liberal Democracies (Palgrave, 2013). She is also the editor of The Oxford Handbook of European Islam (Oxford University Press, 2015). José Casanova is Professor at the Department of Sociology at Georgetown University, and heads the Berkley Center's Program on Globalization, Religion, and the Secular. He has published works in a broad range of subjects, including religion and globalization, migration and religious pluralism, transnational religions, and sociological theory. He is the author of Public Religions in the Modern World (University of Chicago Press, 1994).
Its engagement with a broad range of comparative literature, providing rich topics, issues, and debates, makes it a fascinating read. * Ravza Altunta¸s ¸Cakır, Insight Turkey * [T]he book succeeds in problematizing the simplistic association of women's equality with secularism. Its essays present a wide swath of experiences which are diverse enough to demonstrate why the targeted bifurcation is too simplistic (as it is in Malaysia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Senegal) without ignoring contexts in which it sometimes appears applicable (as it does to varying extents in Iran, India, Morocco, and Tunisia)... It would work well as a supplement in undergraduate or graduate sociology, anthropology, or political science courses that discuss religion and gender, although instructors should select chapters judiciously to ensure representation of the breadth of perspectives from its case studies that is necessary to problematize its target simplifications. * Rachel Jonker, Reading Religion *