In A Most Masculine State, Madawi Al- Rasheed argues that it is neither Wahhabi Islam nor tribal structures, but rather a particular interrelationship of gender, politics, and religion, that shapes and perpetuates the exclusion of Saudi women from public life and undermines their rights as citizens. She terms this configuration “religious nationalism,” and argues that it was the project of state-formation, not religious discourses, that deprived Saudi women of even the limited rights that women in many other Arab and Muslim societies attained due to their incorporation in secular nationalist projects of modernization and development. Further, rejecting the counter-posing of the modern Muslim state against obscurantist religious forces — a common strategy of feminists and women's rights advocates in many Muslim societies — Al-Rasheed argues that both liberal feminists and Islamic women rely on the Saudi state to advance their social, political, or Islamic rights. In putting their trust in the state, Al-Rasheed argues, both groups of women are making a mistake, as the modern Saudi state is less concerned with women's interest than co-opting women for its own gains.

Al-Rasheed’s book is important reading for all those concerned about the historical and contemporary nexus of gender, politics, and religion in post-colonial societies — in particular, feminists in the global North and South. This study supports the emergent literature, including my own work, which argues that we should not only be concerned about state misogyny but also suspicious of the “feminist” turn of states in the geopolitical “West” as well as some Muslim majority states. Post-colonial Muslim feminist scholars from a variety of contexts and regions have argued that modernizing reform projects have historically been enmeshed with class, gender, and nationalist ideas, and thus ultimately limited in their outcome for the majority of women. In the post September 11, 2001 era, critical feminist scholars call for sharper scrutiny of nationalist discourses invoking Muslim women, as these have acquired saliency among the justifications for a variety of military campaigns, missions, and air strikes in Muslim societies (as well the rallying cry of counter forces). Thus, some states' orchestrated commitment to women's rights after September 11, 2001 may reflect less a concern for women's advancement and more a quest for legitimacy in Western media and societies.

Al-Rasheed examines the origin and historical trajectory of the Saudi state-formation, its gender initiatives, and the responses of both men and women to urgent questions about women and their place in society, drawing on official statements, women's literary discourses, religious treatises, and men's opinions on women and gender relations. By tracing the continuities and discontinuities in the official policy toward women's education, Al-Rasheed demonstrates that the state may use the discourse of gender equality to boost its own purpose when it seems useful, and abandon it when not useful. For example, Al-Rasheed examines controversies surrounding mass education for girls, in which some early gains were made by women as the state wavered between its modernizing project and its commitment to the patriarchal agendas of religious nationalism. But in the 1980s, when economic and financial development linked with oil wealth became threatened by the conservatism of religious leaders, the state reversed its policy on women's education and began honoring strict religious interpretations. In the contemporary era, following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Saudi women are shown to be enlisted in boosting the state's international image through gender initiatives taken to enhance images of the “cosmopolitan woman.”

In addition to the state-gender-religion interrelationship, the book also seeks to offer an account of the complexity and diversity of Saudi women's lives in response to popular Western narratives that, Al-Rasheed argues, tend to simplify Saudi women as either superstars or victims of their culture. The author brings to light the gender discrimination that Saudi women experience as women and as members of Saudi society, but also underscores the differences of class, ethnicity, and religious affiliations among Saudi women who may have diverse experiences of discrimination. Al-Rasheed presents women's voices in literature and fiction, newspaper columns, and contributions in local media, as well as online and face-to-face interviews, to illustrate that Saudi women are not simply puppets of the state or religious agenda but aware actors in their struggle for rights and visibility. Thus, in the absence of a legitimate public forum or civil society, both liberal and Islamist women may seek royal patronage in order to compensate for individual men's failures or for the lack of social consensus on women's emancipation. This discussion fills an important gap in the literature on Saudi women, but also on the wider scholarship on citizenship and gender in the Arab world, by presenting women not only as objects of state projects but also as subjects who are actively engaged in the state-formation process.

Given the dearth of scholarship on women in the oil-exporting Arab Gulf region, Al-Rasheed's study offers important insights into the significance of national economic prosperity, in this case oil wealth, for gender equality. While oil wealth provided employment and salary-earning opportunities for Saudi men, it led to women's undermining in both the formal economy and in the domestic sphere, due to the ability to hire foreign domestics. Not only did the oil economy confine women mostly to education, journalism, and writing, it also facilitated state funding for gender-segregated schools and workplaces, thus overturning the modernist aspirations of liberal women for freer mixing of men and women in society. A particularly interesting and engaging section of the book is Al-Rasheed's discussion of the subjectivities of young Saudi women novelists who have become feminist celebrities both in their own society and the West. Al-Rasheed acknowledges the successes of these young writers but also probes their complicity in boosting Western cultural dominance over Arab societies. Eventually, Al-Rasheed is pessimistic about the prospects for gender equality in Saudi Arabia due to the lack of societal support for this project and also because of the wide divide between liberal and Islamist feminists.

Overall, Al-Rasheed's book is a notable contribution to critical scholarship on gender, state, and Islam that rejects simplistic causal associations of “Islam” with Muslim women's oppression by examining Islamic traditions in interactions with other political, economic, and social factors. Indeed, Al-Rasheed's historicizing of Wahhabism within Saudi society, her underscoring this tradition's distinctiveness in the place of its origin, and her illumination of its political, social, and gendered impact on Saudi society are striking. These validate the concerns of many Muslim feminists in the global South, including myself, who bemoan the unravelling of their societies' centuries old Islamic traditions and practices due to the global dissemination of narrow doctrinal interpretations by the Saudi state. Acting as the defender of Sunni orthodoxy, the Saudi kingdom is an active participant in the global projects of United States liberal capitalism directed at the “Third World,” evinced in Afghanistan and Pakistan against the Soviet Union in the 1980s and later in other regions. Al-Rasheed highlights the idiosyncratic interpretation of the Quranic injunction of Amr bil Maruf wa nahi Anil munkir (Commanding Good and Forbidding Wrong) by Wahhabi scholars as an organizing motif of individuals and groups of Muslims who appropriate for themselves the duty of moral regulation of fellow Muslims. Women, sexual and religious minorities, and the poor bear the brunt of this regulation in Saudi society as well as other Muslim states that are tied to Saudi official and private aid and ideological discourses. Given this, some reflexivity on the part of the author regarding the damaging effects of Saudi state nationalism on the global Muslim world would have boosted support for Saudi women's emancipation projects among the larger group of Muslim women, who suffer the impact of Saudi-funded social and cultural engineering of their societies.

Many of Al-Rasheed's insights about the complex interrelationship of gender, religion, state, and nationalism resonate in my study of Jamaat-e-Islami, a movement for religious reform in South Asia that is deeply enmeshed with the nationalist project of the Pakistani state. Where our analyses diverge is the overly state-centric approach of Al-Rasheed's text. In the attempt to identify the state rather than religion as the cause of women's oppression, Al-Rasheed does not analytically separate “Islam” from those subjects who claim the monopoly to speak for “Islam” and thus may have their own political aspirations vis-a vis the modern state. For example, my study demonstrates that the Jamaat's religious discourses were not simply co-opted by the state, but that control of the state was central to the political Islamic vision of the movement. Engaging the political dimensions of Wahhabism would take Al-Rasheed's analysis beyond the state-versus-religion framework and allow a more richly-textured account of social and cultural power, in addition to the structural factor, in the oppression of women. Further, if, as I understand, the text seeks to disrupt the religious/secular dichotomy in relation to Muslim women's emancipation, its objective would be boosted by a more robust account of the political investments of modern Islamist movements in the post-colonial Muslim state. In treating the state as “the political” and ulema as “the religious” and therefore external to one another, the religion-political dichotomy is analytically re-inscribed rather than dismantled. Furthermore, in this process “the state” acquires a unitary character, despite the author's stated intention to avoid such a conceptualization.