In her book, Deanna Ferree Womack of Emory's Candler School of Theology set out to encourage American Christians to rethink how they view Muslims and how they relate to them. Throughout, although her focus is on Christian-Muslim relations in the United States, she refers when appropriate to her thesis in other contexts both historical and contemporary. She aims to help Christians move beyond hostile, negative views of Muslims, beyond the confrontational approach that has often characterized Christian-Muslim relations to forge a “neighborly commitment to working together.” The book's nine chapters are divided into three parts: “When our Neighbors have a Different Religion,” “Christian-Muslim Encounters,” and “From Neighborly Commitment to Working Together.” There are also two appendices. The first appendix gives a timeline of Muslim empires, and the second is a discussion guide. Each chapter begins with questions for reflection that, with the second appendix, make the book an ideal resource for group study. Questions are also encountered within chapters. Unlike many books that aim to offer Christians a truer story about Islam and Muslims, Womack does not give a lengthy description of Islam's teachings and practices but summarizes this in a couple of pages (47–48). Other books are written as primers on Islam with perhaps a chapter on improving relations on the ground. This book is primarily about forming relations. There is, though, information on negative stereotypes of Muslims (see 146–148), on how assumptions of gender endanger relations with Muslims (100–104), media bias (98–100), and a whole chapter on American Muslims. Womack describes what she calls the “old model of confrontation” between Christians and Muslims as one based on “rivalry and exclusionary actions” (33). She cites the reconquest of Spain, the Crusades, and other examples of conflict. She also gives information on Middle Eastern Christianity that challenges “the myth of an innate tensions between Muslims, Christians and Jews” (63). Her sketch of American Islam shows that the religion has deep roots in North America dating from colonial times. As she moves through her chapters, she demonstrates that conflict has not always characterized Christian-Muslim relations by also describing periods of harmonious, even cooperative, coexistence (see 60–64). Womack wants her readers to develop a new mentality, which she calls “interfaith understanding.” She provides very useful diagrams to illustrate the movement from confrontation to empathy and positive engagement. There are many other tables and diagrams to assist readers’ understanding scattered throughout the book.

This book is almost certainly unique in what it sets out to achieve, how it does so, and what in the process it offers its readers. Closest in terms of aim are A Common Word: Muslims and Christians on Loving God and Neighbor by Miroslav Volf and Ghazi bin Muhamamd (William B. Eerdmans, 2010) and Todd H Green's The Fear of Islam (2nd ed.; Fortress Press, 2019), but neither use the practical, manual-like format that Womack utilizes. Both of these books could, though, be profitably read by church or interfaith study groups. Clinton Bennett's In Search of Understanding: Reflections on Christian Engagement with Muslims After Four Decades of Encounter (Wipf and Stock, 2019) includes a concluding chapter on how Christians and Muslims can cooperate in peace and justice advocacy and in social and community development, but Womack's whole book is designed to encourage such collaboration with very practical advice on achieving this.

Occasionally, in her enthusiasm to challenge negative stereotypes and a selective view of history, Womack overstates the case. For example, the period of Christian-Muslim scholarly collaboration in Baghdad did not continue until the Mongol conquest (156) but ended earlier with the effective sideling of the Abbasid caliphs by the early tenth century. Nor did convivencia in Iberia last until Granada's fall in 1492 (62) but ended with the fracturing of the Umayyad caliphate in 1031. Similarly, reference to Caliph Umar refusing to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher because this would imply that Muslims could commandeer and repurpose churches (169) is found only in Christian sources and is almost certainly apocryphal. However, her aim of challenging a selective reconstruction of history nonetheless challenged what Stephen O'Shea described as an “agenda-driven amnesia that has settled over the subject of ‘Christian-Muslim encounter’ among some of the religious chauvinists of our own day” (Sea of Faith: Islam and Christianity in the Medieval Mediterranean World [Walker, 2006], 9).

These examples of overstatement do not compromise the overall value of the book as a text that ought to replace such earlier guides to Christian-Muslim encounter as William St. Clair Tisdall's The Religion of the Crescent, which, although written in the late nineteenth century, is still in print (Wentworth, 2020) and is available online on various Christian sites. I do not hesitate to commend this book to anyone, especially church study group leaders, interested in improving their relations with Muslims. It will also interest academics who try to place their scholarship at the service of congregations and communities as a guide to the process of translating ideas from the ivy tower into pragmatic advice.