Sacred Precincts: The Religious Architecture of Non-Muslim Communities across Islamic World. Edited by Mohammad Gharipour. Arts and Archaeology of Islamic World, vol. 3. Leiden: Brill, 2015. xxxviii + 542 pp. $249.00 (cloth).Printed on heavy stock, laden with over two hundred photographs (many in color), and featuring an attractive cover, Sacred Precincts is a volume beautiful enough to adorn my coffee table, yet useful enough to merit a place on my office bookshelf. Mohammad Gharipour has assembled twentyfive essays by a roster of authors, including both seasoned and emerging scholars hailing from (or now studying or working in) United States, Portugal, Iran, Scotland, Austria, Italy, Canada, England, Malta, The Gambia, Nigeria, Syria, Palestine, Mali, Iraq, Cyprus, and Morocco.The books underlying principle is that sacred architecture-defined as the visible and invisible sites, complexes, structures, and spaces (natural and built) where members of a community manifest their devotion and summon divine presence by performing recitations, rituals, and processions that distinguish them as adherents to a particular set of beliefs (p. xi)- offers unique insights into complex interactions between Islam and other religious and spiritual traditions (p. xi). Use of architecture as a window into interreligious interaction requires a cross-disciplinary approach. Thus this book is informed by historical, sociological, anthropological, and even theological methods, but does not sit entirely within any of these disciplines. A pleasant surprise, given large number of contributors and variety of their disciplines, is how smoothly book reads as a whole. Particularly helpful to non-specialist, and no less useful to specialist, is provision of a comprehensive glossary, even though foreign terms are defined on first mention in each chapter.Essays are grouped in four parts: Identity, Design, Construction, and Re-use. Part 1 offers an exploration of mutual relations between religious, social, and ethnic identities; formation and development of nonMuslim religious sites in Islamic contexts; and ways in which architecture has been an implement for reflecting identity. Part 2, which opens with an essay on Devotional and Artistic Responses to contests between Christians and Muslims over a particular worship space in thirteenth-century Cairo, considers formal, material, and spatial elements of designed and built environment (p. 3)-particularly contextual issues and approaches to selfexpression by minority groups. …