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Islam: A Mosaic, Not a Monolith. By Vartan Gregorian, Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2003. xi + 164 pp. $19.95 (cloth).
This is a little book with a big mission. Its goal is to build bridges between the Islamic and Western worlds by raising the standards of understanding of Islam and Muslims. Its author, Vartan Gregorian, born in Iran, is a scholar-administrator who has had a stellar career as the president of Brown University and the New York Public Library. Gregorian is currently the president of Carnegie Corporation of New York.
According to the author, the book was originally written as a brief report to the trustees of Carnegie Corporation in 2001. It was then turned into its present form with the idea of "promoting American understanding of Islam as a religion, the characteristics of Muslim societies, in general, and those of American Muslim communities, in particular" and to "promote intergroup and interfaith understanding within our pluralistic democracy-and especially among the three Abrahamic faiths." In spite of its small size and inevitable generalizations,...