1 Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online http://membr.uwm.edu/review.php?id=10 Muslim Worldviews and Everyday Lives By: El-Sayed el-Aswad Lanham, MD: Altamira Press , 2012. 248pp. $85.00. ISBN: 0759121214. Review by Susanne Olsson, PhD Södertörn University Sweden Muslim Worldviews and Everyday Lives examines how religiously constructed images of the world influence “ordinary” people’s everyday lives. The book is divided into six main chapters with case-studies from Egypt, the UAE, Bahrain and the U.S., including informants from the Sunni, Shi‘a, and Sufi sects. The material is mainly gathered ethnographically and the approach is a welcome contribution to contemporary studies on Islam. As el-Aswad observes, many studies on Islam and Muslims are politically oriented and focus on ideology, while he makes a conscious choice of separating “worldview” from “ideology”, focusing on ordinary Muslims and their everyday lives. Worldview relates to belief systems and symbolic actions, while ideology is defined as related to more worldly orientated power. A worldview includes assumptions concerning how the universe is structured, which may go largely unquestioned, and are often unsystematized. For example, it is manifested in images and stories as well as beliefs, shared meanings and practices that render social life possible and plausible. The separation between ideology and worldview does not mean that worldviews are apolitical since they may be of importance to grass-root activity. As a part of a larger trend among scholars of religion, this approach to lived religion is an important contribution to the scholarship of religion in general, and illustrates how religion is apprehended and practiced among ordinary people.