The author explores questions of citizenship and loyalty from the point of view of Muslims living under non-Muslim rule and non-Muslim governments trying to engage with them. He draws on the historical contexts of Muslim minorities living under British and French imperial rule in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and looks at how shari'a functioned within the context of imperial civil codes. This book draws important comparisons between the French and British approaches to their Muslim minorities, which illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of both, and engages with current debates about the compatibility of Islamic law with civil law in non-Islamic societies.

The book highlights the fraught and ambivalent situation of Arabs/Muslims in the Americas, where they are at once celebrated and demonized, integrated and marginalized, simultaneously invisible and spectacularly visible. The essays cover such themes as Arab hip-hop's transnational imaginary; gender/sexuality and the Muslim digital diaspora; patriotic drama and the media's War on Terror; the global negotiation of the Prophet Mohammad cartoons controversy; the Latin American paradoxes of Turcophobia/Turcophilia; the ambiguities of the bellydancing fad; French and American commodification of Rumi spirituality; the reception of Iranian memoirs as cultural domestication; and the politics of translation of Turkish novels into English.

Studying how journalists work in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Ramallah, and Nablus, and on the tense roads that connect these cities, the author demonstrates how the production of U.S. news about Palestinians depends on multifaceted collaborations, typically invisible to Western readers. She focuses on the work that Palestinian journalists do behind the scenes and below the bylines—as fixers, photojournalists, camerapeople, reporters, and producers—to provide the news that Americans read, see, and hear every day.

The book offers a critical and systematic survey of the study of religion and new media. It covers religious engagement with a wide range of new media forms and highlights examples of new media engagement in all five of the major world religions. From cell phones and video games to blogs and Second Life, the book considers the theoretical, ethical and theological issues raised.