Reviews
Handbook of Islamic Sects and Movements. Edited by Muhammad Afzal Upal
and Carole M. Cusack. Brill, 2021. 794 pages. $299.00 hardcover; open
access ebook available.
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The Handbook of Islamic Sects and Movements is published in the Brill
series of Handbooks on Contemporary Religion, and joins volumes that are of
obvious interests for scholars of alternative and emergent religions.
These include the Handbook of East Asian New Religious Movements and
books that are aimed at a broader audience within the study of religion,
such as the Handbook of Global Contemporary Christianity. The Handbook of
Islamic Sects and Movements falls somewhere between these two examples.
While some of the movements considered are (relatively) new and alternative, others are many centuries old. It is as much a handbook of global
contemporary Islam as of sects and movements.
This Handbook is written for an audience with little or no background
knowledge of Islam, and therefore explains basic matters that many
readers will find helpful, and that more knowledgeable readers can
safely skip. It consists mostly of chapters devoted to individual movements, covering origins, development, and distinctive beliefs. In addition, two chapters cover wider themes. The introductory chapter by
Ronald Geaves discusses “Sectarianism in Sunni Islam,” providing a good
summary of the ongoing debate about to what extent it is appropriate to
use the term “sect” in an Islamic context. Eva F. Nisa contributes a chapter on “Women and Islamic Movements.”
Some of the many movements discussed in the Handbook might be
seen as sects and some might not, but this does not really matter, as all
are interesting and important. Sensibly, the Handbook does not aim at
comprehensive coverage of all the very many Islamic and post-Islamic
movements in existence, but rather presents “an overview of the wide
variety of religious movements that have their origins in the Islamic
world” (2). Most of these fall under the heading of “Islamic” in that they
self-identify with Islam, but three are post-Islamic in the sense that their
origins lie in Islam but they no longer self-identify as Islamic.
In order to present this overview, the Handbook divides Islamic movements into five groups. It starts with the classic distinction between Sunni
and Shi‘a, a distinction that corresponds with the distinction between
Catholic and Orthodox in Christianity, and then has further sections on
“Fundamentalisms and Extremists,” “Sufism and Its Influences,” and “In
Between and On the Fringes of Islam.” This last section deals with
Reviews
Mark Sedgwick, University of Aarhus
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post-Islamic movements (the Druze, Yezidis, and the Bahá’ı́ Faith) and
with some other movements that are often seen as lying beyond the
boundaries of Sunni and Shi‘i Islam (the Nation of Islam and related
groups, and the Ahmadiyya). The distinction between Sunni and Shi‘a
makes sense, but the other distinctions might be questioned. Most of the
fundamentalists, extremists, and Sufis are in fact Sunni, and some of the
movements in the opening Sunni section are seen by some as extremist—itself a difficult term. At least one of the movements “on the fringes
of Islam,” the Ahmadiyya, would, if asked, place itself more centrally
than the Handbook does.
This said, the Sunni and Shi‘i movements discussed, including those
classed as extremist, do provide a good overview of contemporary movements, though a full study of the movement associated with Ruhollah
Khomeini would have been a useful addition, as would a full study of
Islamic feminism, mentioned but not fully investigated in Nisa’s chapter
on women. There is a certain bias towards the west, however, in the
sections on Sufism, where two of the four movements discussed are
western (Traditionalism and Gurdjieff) and the other two (the
Nimatullahi Sufi Order and Subud) have an important presence in the
west. This also occurs in the section on “In Between and On the Fringes
of Islam,” where three of the seven movements discussed are North
American. It is easy to think of many Sufi movements in the Islamic
world, especially, that might usefully have been discussed and would
have provided a more balanced overview.
The point with a handbook such as this, however, is more what is
included than what is not. Many will use individual chapters in isolation,
which is one of the points of a handbook. Few people will read all 794
pages. The individual chapters are generally of a high quality, clearly
written, and logically presented. They are a useful supplement to existing resources such as the Encyclopedia of Islam, relevant entries in which
are short and usually not very reader-friendly, and to book-length treatments of individual movements. They do not, however, speak to each
other in a way that explicitly deepens our understanding of Islamic and
post-Islamic religious movements.
Three chapters are available only in the expensive hardcover version of
the Handbook, not in the open-access pdf ebook. All three are reprinted
from earlier publications. Unfortunately, the ebook does not give the references to the original publications for these chapters. Moreover, the pdf
book does not adjust pagination for the chapters that are omitted, so that
the “go to page” command does not work properly for most of the book.
These drawbacks aside, the book is a valuable reference work and, in
some cases, a valuable addition to our knowledge of aspects of global
contemporary Islam.