This edited volume is inherently interesting as it represents an innovative collaborative effort to reassess, “what we know about Muslims in American political life and what we have yet to learn” (p. IX). Work on this book commenced with two National Science Foundation-supported workshops on the state of political science research on American Muslims, their attitudes, and behaviors. The scope of the book is ambitious—it aims to review the existing scholarship for the purposes of delineating potential future directions of research, while particularly emphasizing the value of quantitative and experimental research. As a whole, this volume makes important theoretical, practical, and methodological contributions. The considerable focus on experimental research is particularly innovative. While this manuscript was largely completed prior to the election of President Trump, it aims to explain the implications for what it calls the “Trump era” as well.

This book calls for developing new approaches to the study of American Muslims, more quantitative research in the process, and for the development of novel questions and utilization of new literatures when studying Muslims. All of these directions are very promising. The contributors’ reading of the extant scholarship suggests that the current relevant research has focused on: scrutiny of American Muslims as a perceived out-group; the existing diversity among American Muslims; and studies about the mix of political beliefs that American Muslims hold. The scope of their own edited volume includes, “topical areas of theoretical interest regarding Muslim identity, ethnic and racial diversity, relations with law enforcement, political attitudes and participation, and even reactions to commonly used survey measures of Muslim Americans” (p. IX). The historical overview chapter by Dana and Calfano (Chapter 2) elucidates the history of Muslims in the United States while reviewing relevant scholarship, providing data and (equally importantly) describing the problems with the existing data on Muslims in the United States. Mhajne and Calfano's chapter (3) on American Muslim women identifies three areas of research ripe for exploration through an experimental approach: Muslim women's devotedness and how that influences their political behavior; how different kinds of Muslim women identities affect their political identities; and the dynamics of how family life affects Muslim women and men differently.

Much of the book (Chapters 4–10) is comprised of different quantitative studies of American Muslims, followed by a chapter (11) by Barreto and Dana on best practices for gathering public opinion data and the conclusion by Calfano and Lajevardi. Lajevardi, Michelson, and Yacobian (Chapter 4) conduct surveys in California and use an online survey to test the hypothesis that Middle Eastern Americans who are racialized have distinctive sets of political attitudes and behaviors. They find that in recent years Muslim Americans have shown, “increased interest in politics but less political behavior” (p. 65). Tekelioglu (Chapter 5) conducts fieldwork in three major American cities to examine how the question of radicalization has become an integral part of how the government has viewed Muslims in the post-9/11 era.

Gillum (Chapter 6) utilizes a randomized survey experiment to assess Muslim views on how the police treats Muslims versus non-Muslims. Her use of experimental design allows measuring the beliefs that Muslims have internalized more precisely. The study finds that US-born and foreign-born Muslims hold different views toward the police: the US-born Muslims mostly tend to believe that the police's behavior toward Muslims will be discriminatory; while foreign-born Muslims do not think that the police will treat Muslims any differently than non-Muslims, and instead base their judgment about the behavior of law enforcement based on prior own experiences in their country of birth. Kalkan (Chapter 7) uses survey data to argue that the conflict over the 9/11 mosque was the beginning of disagreements between Republicans and Democrats regarding the relationship between Islam and terrorism. Calfano, Dincer, McLaughlin, and Sarfati (Chapter 8) conduct an Internet-based survey experiment to evaluate how priming and framing influences trust in religious out-groups. While the findings of this study are inconclusive, this study does advance our understanding of the different ways how priming religious/ethnic identity can influence intra-group perceptions and trust.

Calfano, Martinez-Ebers, Carey, and Beutel (Chapter 9) use both survey data and an experimental follow-up study on young Muslim adults to test, “how do American Muslims negotiate their religious identity when it is perceived to be in conflict with American identity?” (p. 155). This chapter outlines important methodological findings providing evidence that positioning questions about group identity early in surveys is related to different responses to political questions by the respondents, suggesting that expectations about identity can create performance expectations and response bias (p. 168, 176). Finally, Chouhoud (Chapter 10) utilizes a list experiment to study political intolerance among American Muslims toward groups perceived to be Islamophobic and finds that, “groups that are explicitly anti-Muslim elicit intolerance [among the Muslim respondents of this study] to a significantly higher degree than unspecified antireligionists” (p. 197).

Overall, this volume succeeds at its key goal of introducing novel ways to conduct research on Muslims in the United States. At the same time, it could have focused more on providing practical policy prescriptions. Additionally, some of the introductory chapters could have been more thoroughly grounded in existing scholarship on Muslims in America; for instance, while Chapter 2 asserts that anti-Muslim sentiment largely derives from “uneducated and prejudiced teachings and statements by…news sources, and academics,” it does not cite much evidence for these claims (p. 28).

The book identifies new themes that researchers should look at, calls for new approaches and more interdisciplinary work. Substantively, we learn new findings about Muslim identity, political behavior, policy preferences, and matters surrounding interactions between American Muslims and law enforcement. Importantly, this volume provides methodological insights on developing effective quantitative studies, and makes a strong case for why and how experimental research should be used. In fact, the most important contribution of this volume is that it will likely serve as a handbook on how to conduct experimental research on American Muslims (and other minorities), and as such it will be helpful to both graduate students as well as seasoned researchers alike.