With Reconfiguring Islamic Tradition, Samira Haj has come into her own, producing a sophisticated piece of scholarship that sheds light on vexed questions about Islamic reform in the modern age. Using current theoretical debates to interpret the textual work of two of the most vital thinkers of the 19th century, Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab and Muhammad ʿAbduh, Haj breathes life into ideas that continue to inspire Islamic revivalism of the current age. A fine piece of scholarship investigating complex philosophical concepts with primary sources and archival research, the book also works as a terrific teaching tool. I have used it in no fewer than three courses (Islamic Awakening: Revival and Reform, Egypt: Mother of the World, and Human Rights in Islam). In an engaging and informative way, the book helps students to question their own unconscious assumptions about the place not only of Islam but also religion in the modern world.

Haj's research explores an Islamic modernity both on its own terms and in relationship to colonial secularism and its handmaiden, liberalism. This book makes clear—for scholars and students alike—this relationship's ineluctable historical relevance for our time. Haj's spirited and insightful arguments help explain the palpable vitality of Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab and ʿAbduh for current configurations of the Islamic revival. Haunting her argument are scholarly projects (such as those of Albert Hourani, Leonard Binder, and Charlie Kurzman) that examine contemporary Islamic thought's relationship to liberalism. Much like the work of Partha Chatterjee, the book revisits the dilemma of indigenous intellectual traditions’ conflictual relationships to the colonial (and postcolonial) discursive formations to which they were subjected. In her analyses, Haj brokers no influence from Western liberalism. Her stance is a welcome corrective—less to the prior scholarship—than to the relentless attempt over the last decade to bend Islamic societies to an imperialist liberalism deployed in inflammatory, dishonest, and hypocritical ways.

Reconfiguring Islamic Tradition focuses on “the coherence of Islamic concepts as principles of an ongoing Islamic tradition” (p. 210, n. 17) and the use of Islamic texts, language, and disciplinary techniques to formulate an Islamic modernity. Haj explores what Omnia El Shakry calls a genuine desire to formulate a “national nonsecular modernity” independent of colonial formations (Omnia Shakry, “Schooled Mothers and Structured Play: Child Rearing in Turn-of-the-Century Egypt,” in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod [Princeton, N.J,: Princeton University Press, 1998], 128). There is clearly a creative synergy between these two historians, both of whom are forging vibrant currents of new research in Middle Eastern studies. Both women firmly situate Islamic reform, and Egyptian cultural production, in the Islamic intellectual tradition. As Haj states in the first sentence of the book, she approaches her topic through analytical frameworks that do not measure modernity in Islam with a Western barometer. Her approach, she argues, allows her to move away from the “counterposition of Islamic tradition and liberalism in conventional literature” (p. 5). Yet this counterposition structures the book, veering toward reproducing the Islam/West, religious/secular, nonliberal/liberal binaries that liberalism itself sets up, partly by defining Islam as its absolute other. As Haj puts it, Islamic reform positioned itself as an alternative to Western secularism (p. 153).

Similar to Saba Mahmood's work on the women's “mosque movement,” Haj interprets ʿAbduh's revivalism as “nonliberal.” A recent article in Jadaliyya by Samah Selim challenges Mahmood's understanding of the mosque movement as “nonliberal,” instead situating the revival in its historical context of neoliberal reforms under Sadat. Similarly, the set of issues that Haj deals with at the center of the book, about family, love, marriage, and “woman's liberation,” arose in a context not only of Islamic tajdīd and iṣlāḥ but also of colonial predations and capitalist expansion. Haj builds part of her arguments on a set of writings originally published in Qasim Amin's Tahrir al-Marʾa, writings that have long been rumored to have been written by ʿAbduh. In 1972, the Islamist intellectual Muhammad ʿImara “revived” the idea of ʿAbduh's authorship of the text in al-ʿAmal al-Kamila li-Muhammad ʿAbduh (1972), though he never substantiated the claim with real evidence. As such, the assertion remains a revivalist legitimization of “the liberation of woman” via the stamp of ʿAbduh's considerable scholarly authority. The truth of the claim is perhaps less important, however, than the reality of intellectual Islam's advocacy of Amin's bourgeois family form for the ṣaḥwa (the Islamic revival). Before these texts can be attributed to ʿAbduh at face value (as so many, like Leila Ahmed, have done), they need closer scrutiny. Even though this new “private sphere” was fashioned “within the parameters of a historically constituted Islamic discursive tradition,” Shakry asserts about ʿAbduh's writings, it was also shaped by liberal secular assumptions about the nature of modern society (Ibid.).

A slew of important scholars like Lila Abu-Lughod, Margot Badran, Mervat Hatem, and Sherine Hafez have explored how revivalist discourses in Egypt draw on liberal secular assumptions and ideology, especially with respect to modern conceptions of gender and the family. At the core of Haj's book are arguments about transformations in the conception and structure of morality, family, companionate marriage, polygamy, sex segregation, divorce, family law, and interior subjectivity. At the turn of the century, when ʿAbduh was publishing his writings, these categories became sites in which the colonial government vested religion, mainly through the generation of the laws of personal status. As grand mufti of the “native tribunals,” ʿAbduh was at the helm of these laws. Secular governance conflated these categories—of indigenousness, personal status, family, gender, and religion—as contingent. In an essay on these laws in Formations of the Secular, Talal Asad describes how this “legal formation of the family gave the concept of individual morality its own ‘private’ locus” and as a result, became “the expression of a secular formula, defining a place in which ‘religion’ is allowed to make its public appearance through state law.” (Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003], pp. 230–31). The political importance of Haj's project to analyze Islamic reform through reference to the Islamic intellectual tradition cannot be overemphasized. Yet the deployment of “rights talk” about liberty and equality, the construction of a bourgeois family sphere, and the formulation of modern citizen subjects with faith based in emotion (wijdān) were formulated in the shadow of colonial modernity and the secular state, as much as with reference to the Islamic intellectual tradition, Islamic texts, and Islamic scripture. Just as secularism depends on religion for its definition, modern religion likewise defines itself in the shade of the pervasive—and often invasive— specter of secular governance.

ʿAbduh's understanding of submission to God as freedom from earthly authorities has become a staple of revivalist discourse, via Sayyid Qutb's reinterpretation of the concept in his own writings. ʿAbduh's elucidation of ʿubūdiyya (servitude) as the first pillar of the ʿibādāt (ritual worship) in Risalat al-Tawhid is deeply rooted in the Islamic discursive tradition, as well as inflected by Ibn Taymiyya's revivalism and his own treatise al-ʿUbudiyya. ʿAbduh's interpretation of ʿubūdiyya as liberating integrates a new dimension into this concept of worship and submission. These ideas about liberation were formulated under nondemocratic forms of authoritarian secularism—first by ʿAbduh under British imperialism, then by Qutb under Nasserian socialism, and later by revivalists under Sadat and Mubarak's “semi-liberal” economic and political reforms. Recent work by Asef Bayat in Making Islam Democratic and Carrie Rosefsky Wickham in Mobilizing Islam explores how revivalism has operated within the parameters of the secular state to produce a “civil Islam,” an “Islamic public sphere,” and democratic mobilization. These political forms associated with liberal secularism are not necessarily un-Islamic, un-Egyptian, or even irreligious. Instead, these liberal political tactics have been harnessed as a critique of secular authoritarianism under different historical instances. In the face of an all pervasive—and invasive—liberalism, Haj's reorientation of Islamic thinkers in the Islamic intellectual tradition is an important political move. The deployment of liberal concepts, however, does not automatically signal an Islam shaped to imperialist political forms. On the contrary, these revivalist intellectuals epitomize a resilient and malleable Islam flourishing even under the most brutal forms of repression. “Like we have said a thousand times,” writes the revivalist thinker Muhammad Jalal Kishk, “liberalism does not grow under the wing of colonialism but begins in the clash with it, the struggle against it, and demanding freedom from it.” (Muhammad Jalal Kishk, Jahalat ʿAsr al-Tanwir: Qiraʾat fi Fikr Qasim Amin wa ʿAli ʿAbd al-Raziq [Cairo: Maktabat al-Turath al-Islami, 1990], 78).