In his splendid new book, Teaching Humanity: An Alternative Introduction to Islam (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023), Vernon Schubel makes a compelling case for taking seriously the foundational importance of humanity and moral pedagogy to the venture of Islam, especially in relation to introductory books on this topic. Through a finely layered yet always engaging and accessible examination of a panoply of Muslim intellectual traditions and lived practice, Schubel offers an alternative to introductory textbooks on Islam limited in their conceptual purview to Islamic law, theology, and the textual sources of the tradition. One of the hallmarks of this book is that it focuses substantively on Shi‘i Islam and Sufism, especially in contexts like the Alevi-Bektashi tradition that might be relegated to the margins of Islam in dominant introductory surveys of Islam. Indeed, among the major achievements of this beautifully written book is that it fundamentally reorients our understanding of the center and the margins of Islam.

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