Islam & Muslims ― A Guide to Diverse Experience in a Modern World

While many books are devoted to the study of Islam, and dozens more to specific Muslim societies (usually Arab ones), this is the first to bring together both, explaining Islam in theory and in practice across the diverse Muslim world. Readers learn not just what Islam says about everything from the nature of God to marriage to politics, but also how individual Muslims (traditional or modern, devout or barely observant) apply teachings in everyday life.

After studying history at Oxford University, Mark Sedgwick moved to Cairo, Egypt, where he taught rhetoric and worked on a doctorate on Sufi history, which he received from the University of Bergen in Norway. After his doctorate, he worked as an adjunct professor at the department of Arabic Studies at the American University in Cairo, and was briefly a visiting professor at the University of the Sorbonne in Paris. Now associate professor of history at the American University in Cairo, Sedgwick specializes in the history of Islam. Over the years, his research has taken him all over the Muslim world and to countries where there are Muslim minorities, from Singapore to Europe and America. As well as many articles, he has published three books, two of which have been translated into several languages.