Muslim Women in Contemporary North America: Controversies, Clichés, and Conversations, by Meena Sharify-Funk

In the last few decades, "Women and Islam" has become a highly charged topic of conversation and inquiry, featuring a variety of voices from both the general public and academia.Despite these many interlocutors, this conversation tends to reinforce a single narrative about women and Islam that is characterized by a prevalence of essentialisms undergirded by monolithic understandings of Muslim women and their identities, values, and struggles.In Muslim Women in Contemporary North America: Controversies, Clichs, and Conversations, Meena Sharify-Funk attempts to dismantle this popular "single narrative" by moving beyond clichs and stereotypical essentialisms towards a "greater apprehension of the multiple realities of Muslim women in North America" (7).Engaging public frames of reference in the United States and Canada, Sharify-Funk explores several controversial topics, including "clash" literature, dissident reformists, female religious leadership, and women's liberation efforts, to "enrich public dialogue" and destabilize "simplistic platitudes about the nature of 'Muslim'-'majority-culture' relations" (3).She employs a dialogical framework approach in her systematic analysis to investigate identity construction and negotiation among Muslim women, ultimately concluding that the "multitude of diverse Muslim women" unequivocally demonstrates that not only is there no "single narrative" but also no archetypal "Muslim woman" (207).Sharify-Funk begins her analysis by investigating the diverse experiences of contemporary Muslim women in America and Canada.She first observes great variance in the ways Muslim women seek sacred meaning, identifying salient differences based on specific