Today, Hirsi Ali argues, the world's 1.6 billion Muslims can be divided into a minority of extremists, a majority of observant but peaceable Muslims, and a few dissidents who risk their lives by questioning their own religion. But there is only one Islam, and as Hirsi Ali shows, there is no denying that some of its key teachings--not least the duty to wage holy war--inspire violence not just in the Muslim world but in the West as well. For centuries...

In Islam: A Short Guide to the Faith, editors Roger Allen and Shawkat M. Toorawa have assembled fifteen chapters by fifteen noted scholars, each of which provides a lucid description and exploration of an aspect of Islam, its institutions, doctrines, and interactions, notably with Christianity, Judaism, and the modern world.

"As Muslims grow in numbers, and as Islam's role in world affairs becomes larger, we've begun to see the breakdown in a united fellowship among believers. Certainly the misunderstandings and friction between Islamic civilization and the modern West continue. But even within Islam, Iran's clerics are split, militant fundamentalists clash with students from Islamic universities, moderate Muslim-Americans look nothing like wahhabis from Saudi Arabia....

"In a thrilling dramatic narrative, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Joby Warrick traces how the strain of militant Islam behind ISIS first arose in a remote Jordanian prison and spread with the unwitting aid of two American presidents. When the government of Jordan granted amnesty to a group of political prisoners in 1999, it little realized that among them was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a terrorist mastermind and soon the architect of an Islamist movement...