This volume, the proceedings of a 2016 conference at the University of Chester, is an important collection of chapters about Shi‘a minorities. Bringing together scholarship inclusive of contributions from emerging scholars, Scharbrodt and Shanneik have also facilitated a cross-regional dialogue about Shi‘a minorities in the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, Eastern and Western Europe, North America and Latin America among regional experts who would not normally be in conversation with one another. These diverse case studies provide evidence for just how widespread Shi‘a Islam is globally. Furthermore, this volume enables some comparison of the similarities faced by Shi‘a minorities, but also, significantly, their differences, depending on the local contexts in which they are based, and their varying positions as migrant communities or indigenous religious minorities. I have regularly faced surprised reactions – sometimes verging on doubt – that Shi‘a Islam is prominent in Africa from those who encounter my scholarship or hear about my research. Recent interest by journalists and policy-makers in Africa as another geographical playground for Saudi Arabian–Iranian tensions similarly mischaracterises the local variations of Shi‘a Islamic history and depicts Shi‘a minorities as pawns of Iran who lack their own agency. This volume is an important step towards correcting some of these misconceptions.

I was invited to reflect on these contributions through the lens of my own research on Shi‘a cosmopolitanisms in Africa. Doing so will also bring in the African context, which is lacking as an additional chapter case study in this volume. My book (Leichtman 2015) outlines a theory of Muslim cosmopolitanism for Shi‘a communities. I argue that the prominent approach of transnationalism had too many limitations (see also Leichtman 2005), with a focus – at least in the earlier literature – on first-generation immigrants primarily located in North America and Europe, without comparison to other world regions. Importantly, this scholarship also ignores the impact of colonialism. I stress that transnationalism cannot be limited only to sending and receiving countries as relationships between migrant, home country, host country and tertiary countries are key factors in the creation of a transnational community. For Shi‘a communities, as evidenced in this volume, and as I will describe below, Iran and Iraq are important tertiary focal points.