Book Review: The Women’s Mosque of America: Authority and Community in US Islam by Tazeen M. Ali

Abstract

author is careful to note that they migrated with legal documents, making them unusually protected in Italy. Enríquez offers many causal explanations throughout the book to place the smaller events of her participants’ lives in a larger social context. However, she gives significant weight to the Nicaraguan revolution for mitigating structural violence and providing these women with “a new sense of possibilities for the future” (p. 204) that made migration one of the futures that became both thinkable and possible for these four women. The book likely has broad appeal for undergraduate courses. Many of us teach introductory courses to sociology in which we ask students to read selections from C. Wright Mills and engage with the concepts of personal issues of milieu, public issues of social structure, and the sociological imagination. In those courses, we often ask students to apply these concepts to their own lives and use them to think about their life chances given their larger historical and social contexts. The situated stories of Andrea, Silvia, Ana, and Pamela can help students cultivate a new lens for making sense of the world and spark their sociological imaginations.