Given the state of the world over the last seven-plus years, it is worthwhile to hear from the voices in Belonging and Banishment, a new collection of essays edited by University of Ottawa law professor Natasha Bakht. Unfortunately, this particular collection mostly features the same handful of Muslim writers we regularly see in the Canadian media, and they don’t offer any new insights here.

Haroon Siddiqui, the Toronto Star columnist, and Sheema Khan of The Globe and Mail don’t stray from topics that have already been written about widely. Siddiqui’s essay, “Muslims and the Rule of Law,” bounces around from the sharia debate in Ontario to the battle over Mark Steyn’s offensive book excerpt in Maclean’s magazine. Khan, meanwhile, focuses on the Omar Khadr case, which, in the final throes of the Bush era, is another once-divisive issue on which public opinion has moved, finally, toward a consensus condemning those who have imprisoned the young Canadian. Kahn’s analysis seems outdated. An essay by Ausma Khan, the editor of Muslim Girl magazine, is a fairly dull recitation of the different stories covered in her publication.

These essays from prominent commentators don’t really offer any new insights into the lives of Canadian Muslims or even these particular controversies. The most interesting pieces in Belonging and Banishment are by less familiar contributors. For example, Arif Babul, a physics professor at the University of Victoria, offers a very thoughtful meditation on coming to terms with the inherent conflicts between a life in science and his faith.

But the best-written and most compelling essay is Syed Mohamed Mehdi’s “Bearing the Name of the Prophet.” The musician and philosophy professor at Oakton Community College in Illinois shows genuine humour as he works through the various, and sometimes conflicting, meanings of his name and the effect it has on how he is perceived by both himself and others. Miraculously, he is even able to find one of the “few positive consequences for Muslims” of the war on terror: at the same time that he has trouble crossing borders, he has “seen many who, as a result of their identification with Islam, have come to embrace a progressive political outlook, emphasizing the basis in Islamic beliefs for justice, equality, freedom, and pluralism.” Mehdi is more artful than the other writers in this collection in making the point that many of them attempt to articulate: that Muslims are diverse and dynamic.