Muslim Youth in the Diaspora: Challenging Extremism through Popular Culture, Pam Nilan, New York : Routledge, 2017

Book review. Pam Nilan’s latest work Muslim Youth in the Diaspora presents a thought-provoking argument around the meta-narrative of radical Islamism. Nilan’s argument is not about the way this narrative oppresses and limits agency, but rather how it is reworked, challenged and taken up by diasporic Muslim youth. The differing relationships to this narrative are placed on a continuum from the near-secular to piety through a range of neo-theo-tribalisms. The latter are theological identity groupings. Nilan examines how these groupings are shaped and remade through a range of competing discourses found in popular culture, in particular a discursive binary of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Muslim identities.