The title under review focuses on Nioro du Sahel, a small township in Mali, and examines how Islam and being a Muslim have been transformed ‘from the precolonial period, through French colonial rule, and in the postcolonial period’ (p. 9) in French West Africa. The book is divided into two parts. The first part (pp. 25–123) offers a historical overview of Islam in the region before colonialism, the effects of colonialism on the understanding and practices of Islam, and an account of the two dominant Sufi (mystic) orders, viz. the Tejaniyya and the Hamawiyya. The second part (pp. 127–256) discusses agencies and instruments of authority in the context of the use of esoteric sciences, which are ‘tied to the questions of power in Muslim West Africa’ (p. 130). Other issues discussed in this part are the prayer economy and the appropriation of new media technologies in a post-Gallicised cosmos.

Soares argues that it was not clear when Sufi practices first arrived in West Africa (p. 37). But we know that Timbuktu was already a notable commercial centre with some spiritual and intellectual colouring in the fourteenth century, and when Ibn Battuta visited the city in 1352, evidence of a toehold for mystical practices was not altogether lacking. Howevere, the extroversion and exclusivism exhibited by the Hamawiyya is to be ultimately attributed to its distrust of other Muslims (p. 102), and the culture of repression by the French to which Hamawiyya members were subjected.

The anti-Sufi posture of the reformist movement and the spirited defence of counter-reformism, the subject of chapter seven, confirms the universal tendency in contemporary religious waves, for instance, in Islam and Christianity, where efforts at returning the faiths to their ‘correct’ and ‘pristine’ forms have assumed a new vibrancy. But in spite of this new religious public, Soares attributes the lack of clamour for the operation of sharia (Islamic legal code) in the area to the dominant personalised authority of its living saints and the wide diffusion of secularist values amongst Western-educated Malians (pp. 213–14). Whereas the latter reason may be correct, the first seems to have overplayed the charismatic credentials of the religious experts. In reality, the absence of a campaign for sharia should be attributed to the absence of what, in social science discourse, are referred to as Gramscian counter-hegemonic institutions, namely, ideology, organisation and strategy.

The significance of prayer economy as an economy of religious practice in which substantial gifts are offered to religious leaders in return for blessings and intercessions with God is remarkably exposited. In the view of the author, the commodification of the prayer/gift economy has redefined the membership of the Islamic faith in Nioro as elsewhere in West Africa. Religious authority, hitherto identified with mystic confrères, has now become personalised and centred on saintly individuals with track records of miracles, large followership, and wealth. Since Taussig's (1980) exposition of commodity fetishism, the centrality of the gift economy to religious traditions has stimulated some attention in the social science and anthropological scholarship, and it is quite remarkable that Soares has shown how this has played out at an ‘intentional site’ of the Muslim society. Furthermore, the relationship of the prosperity doctrine and large followership to the new religious publics has also become exceedingly stimulating in contemporary discourse. There are, however a few infelicities. The translation of the ḥadith (p. 42) should better read ‘Whoever antagonises a wali (friend) of mine has invited my open war against himself’. Also, the interpretation of umm al-kitab (lit. mother of the Book) as ‘the original text of the Qur'an from which the revelation came’ (p. 136) is inaccurate: the phrase is another name for Surat al Fatiha, the first chapter of the Qur'an.

Contemporary Mali, the oldest centre of Islamic intellectualism in sub-Saharan Africa, continues to be an eloquent illustration of synergy between postcolonial ideologies and traditional religious hegemony. It is therefore instructive that Soares has confirmed this development with this work, which has furthered our understanding of change and what use is made of it under new dispensations. It will certainly be indispensable material for those interested in temporal and spatial transformations as induced by Islam in West Africa.