It has been a few years since I had delved into reading about the Sudan. The last time was back in 2015 when I reviewed Abdullahi Gallab's (2014) most recent study of the Islamist State. Thus, I picked up this book with some excitement and on the whole it did not let me down. I wasn't completely persuaded by one of the principal arguments made in this book by Noah Salomon that the state is not the site of coercion or the expression of raw power. Given the regularity and the brutality of the exercise of violence by Sudanese regimes, especially the Inqadh regime that came to power in 1989, I find it hard to accept an argument that because the Islamist project has been socialised the state is somehow redeemed. That said, the theorising of the state and the detail of the analysis makes this book required reading for Sudanists, and others interested in the lessons drawn from an analysis of the Sudan regime's Islamic ‘civilising’ project.

Salomon opens the study with a reminder of the crises that have faced the Sudan including those that remain unresolved today. Sudan is a fragile polity has been wracked by civil wars, famine and poverty, military coups, debt and international ostracism for much of its post-independence existence. Most scholarship of the Sudan locates, in one way or the other, the structures and power relations for understanding the myriad of problems the country has faced in the legacies of colonialism. Salomon recognises this and dedicates Chapter 1 to just such an analysis. In this chapter he makes the argument that the religious programme of the Inqadh government that came to power in 1989 resembles the one the British instituted as part of their colonial control over a state that they conquered, in part in 1898, and entirely by 1916 when Anglo-Egyptian rule was extended to Darfur. Salomon contends that rather than the commonly held description of the British colonial approach in Sudan as one of secularisation, the British, first under Kitchener (1898–1901) and then under the Governorship of Wingate (1901–16) pursued a policy of state sanctioned Islamisation. Faced with what they believed to be the persistent threat of Mahdism and Sufi inspired religious fanaticism more broadly, the British responded by supporting the establishment of a single orthodox Islamic order closely aligned with the interests of the state. This argument is persuasive on one level but in another is also lacking. A very important missing piece from the analysis of the colonial regime is the absence of the way that Sudan was racialised by the British. Salomon dedicates this book to the Islamist project. However, the Arabist project, in my view, is equally significant. The two are inseparable and to almost entirely ignore the construction of the Sudan as an Arab state as well as an Islamic one is problematic. The chapters that follow do little to bring the state project of Arabisation into the analysis.

One other argument of this book is that the failure of the Islamist state resulted from its own successful Islamisation policy, especially from the way that the Islamising mission created a terrain in which Islam became the vehicle for critiquing the regime, and also for opening spaces by which non-state actors were able to pose innovative answers to the myriad of problems the regime was unable to resolve. Much of Chapters 3–5 explain the productive power of the Islamic state. However, in these chapters, the ongoing repressive power of the Islamic state remains consistently visible even when the author describes the strength and vibrancy of civil society.

If asked what the major contribution of this book is to the literature on Islamic politics, my response would be that it is as an investigation in the Sudanese context what ‘everyday practitioners of Muslim politics [are] saying and doing as they respond to the social realities …’ (p. 175) they face including, or especially, those emanating from the Inqadh regime. However, there is one contradiction that consistently arose and which I could not overlook, even though the analysis of the biopolitics of the Sudanese Islamist project was compelling. That contradiction was the claim made in the opening of the book that the Islamic state was nowhere to be seen and then repeated by the author on page 5 when he claimed that the Islamic state had not been reproduced in the institutions of the state. The evidence provided throughout the book suggested otherwise, from the Islamisation of the judiciary, legal system, to the media and the language of government, the Islamic state was everywhere to be seen. What might be interesting to note is that in many states of the Middle East and North Africa, even those ruled by nominally secular regimes, the hegemony of Islamic discourse may not differ that much from the Sudanese experience described so richly in this book. The Islamisation of Sudan has also occurred within a global and regional context. The cold war and the US–Saudi led intervention in Afghanistan, the Iranian Revolution and the impact on state-society relations wrought by neoliberalism have converged to create the conditions for a wave of Muslim politics. In the epilogue, far too late from my perspective, Salomon asserts that the Islamic solutions put forward by the regime have failed to deliver. However, without wanting to absolve the Inqadh regime at all, most governments of post-colonial states, from right across the ideological spectrum, have struggled to overcome the legacies of colonialism and the inequities of the global political and economic system.

These criticisms do not negate the value of this work, especially the way that it is shown throughout the study that the division between state and society is so opaque that analysing them as separate spheres is a heuristic exercise. It is how Salomon demonstrates the ways that the Sudanese Islamist state has infiltrated the everyday practices of the Sudanese people that is the most important contribution of this book.