Understanding World Religions

A book that goes beyond mere description to engage real, and often controversial, issues. All university teachers grappling with these issues will find it of great use. Unlike most texts of this nature, it has an extensive section on African traditions that ought to interest scholars teaching African politics. It is a highly commendable piece of work. * HENRY SREBRNIK, Professor of Political Studies, University of Prince Edward Island *An ideal, clear, and lively introduction to world religions for North American students that also briefly deals with their modern developments, e.g. in the field of Buddhism. * MICHAEL HAHN, Professor of Indology and Tibetology, Philipps-University, Marburg, Germany *Hexham offers an introduction to the study of religions based on his years of teaching the subject, an impressive multicultural knowledge of various religious traditions, and in a style that is readable and engaging. Not another boring catalogue of religious beliefs and practices looked at from a pseudosophisticated afar, Hexham’s book conveys something of the diversity and controversies involved in the academic study of religions. * LARRY HURTADO, Professor and Director of the Centre for the Study of Christian Origins, The University of Edinburgh *I enjoyed the chapters on Indian religions enormously. They are enlightening and fascinating for anyone who has brushed the surface of India and its religious traditions. The author has produced a work that is very readable and thought-provoking, but, more importantly, one that brings the religions to life in a practical way. * BILL WARDEN, Canadian Ambassador to Pakistan (1981–1983) and High Commissioner to India (1983–1986) *Many Western presentations of Islam merely pass on selected remarks from unreliable tertiary sources. Irving Hexham’s chapters on Islam are unique in that they reach beyond library versions, Muslim polemic, and Western politically correct advocacy to the actual discourse of devoted Muslims around the world today. Hexham takes seriously the sourcebooks through which Muslims understand their faith and practice, and the perspectives of recent authors whose influence shapes modern Muslim views. He rightly relies on some of the strongest scholarly studies of Islam for his analysis and evaluation, which sheds light on a subject that remains confusing for many Westerners. * GORDON NICKEL, author of Narratives of Tampering in the Earliest Commentaries on the Qur’an and Peaceable Witness Among Muslims *

Irving Hexham is professor of Religious Studies at the University of Calgary and adjunct professor of World Christianity at Liverpool Hope University. He has published twenty-seven academic books, including The Concise Dictionary of Religion, Understanding Cults and New Religions, and Religion and Economic Thought, plus eighty major academic articles and chapters in books, numerous popular articles, and book reviews. Recently he completed a report for the United Nations’ refugee agency on religious conflict in Africa and another for the Canadian Government’s Department of Canadian Heritage on Religious Publications in Canada. He is listed in Who’s Who in Canada and various scholarly directories. In 2008, he was honored at the historic Humboldt University in Berlin with a Festschrift, Border Crossings: Explorations of an Interdisciplinary Historian (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag).