LAUSR

reflects in-group expansiveness caused by high subgroup diversity (p. 109). This double descriptor combines the scale or vertical element (Axis) with the scope or horizontal element (Mundi). It is a term that the authors use with reference to other theorists, notably Mircea Eliade (pp. 172–74), when in the final part of the book they move beyond the Hajj to explain the Axis Mundi as applicable not only toMuslim actors in Europe and the United States (chapter 7) but also the Hispanic population of California (chapter 8). The contrast in the final chapter is between two institutions, LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens) and NCLR (formerly the National Council of La Reza and now UnidosUS). The former did not espouse in-group diversity until the 1980s when it grew in numbers, whereas the latter embraced in-group diversity from the outset, projecting what the authors call “the in-group identity-diversity synergy” (p. 179). Of special interest in this book are its antecedents. The review of previous scholarship is at once extensive and critical: other studies are adjudged to have been too normative or too political or too global or too essentialist or too policy directed (pp. 2–5). Yet the one study that is extensively praised is not fully explored (David Clingingsmith, Asim Ijaz Khwaja, and Michael Kremer, “Estimating the Impact of the Hajj: Religion and Tolerance in Islam’s Global Gathering,”Quarterly Journal of Economics, 124 [3], 2009). Later, in introducing the paths of the pilgrims’ paradox, the authors observe, “The Pakistan survey made two questions particularly important: Why was the paradox observed? And how we can observe the causal linkages, if any, between the Hajj experience and putative tolerance?” (p. 37). The reader would like to learn more about the Pakistan survey, especially because we are told that its conclusions are matched by a 2013 “ethnographic analysis of second-generation Bengali immigrants in London” done by Daniel Nilsson DeHanas (p. 78). Both works, but especially the 2009 Pakistan survey, underscore how other social scientists are tracking the pilgrims’ paradox; to wit, that “in-group pride (speaking to the logic of social identity) leads to out-group tolerance (speaking to the logic of social capital)” (p. 90). The difficulty is that neither of these earlier studies is adequately explained in the always detailed, but often dense, analyses of the Alexseev and Zhemukhov study. Alas, the highly technical language of this monograph, despite the evident labor and broad scope of its collaborators, is not likely to give it more traction in general scholarship on Islam or on the social consequence of ritual activities. One can dare to hope that future scholarship on the Hajj, from other sites and with other disciplinary perspectives, will confirm the authors’ general thesis: that in-group diversity can and does lead to outgroup tolerance through ritual acts that may be occasional and limited but have enduring consequences for not just the individuals involved but also the larger social groups they represent. The question of Islam and tolerance deserves to be a booming research agenda along with and, one hopes, ahead of the question of Islam and terrorism. Despite its flaws, this book is a welcome addition to that literature.