Jeremy Menchik’s kind and thoughtful review does a very fair job of summarizing what I hope are the key contributions of Muslims Talking Politics to research on Islam and democracy. Inspired by a wide range of literatures that rarely end up in conversation with one another, the main goal of my project was to test the deceptively simply hypothesis that Nigerian Muslims reason about politics in more or less the same ways as people everywhere else, namely, by relying on a combination of personal values, beliefs, and experiences and heuristics provided in the public sphere. When put this way, discovering that the answer is “yes” is hardly surprising. However, my book also suggests that more traditional approaches to exploring the “compatibility” of Islam and democracy do not really capture how politics actually works in Muslim communities.

The critical point in Menchik’s review that bears responding to is that in describing the middle chapters of the book as a historical overview on the way to my empirical findings, he misses their broader significance to the theory and approach I am attempting to articulate. Although it is not exactly an original argument in Islamic Studies or sociology, relatively few political scientists interested in contemporary Islamic revivalism (Iza Husain’s work is a notable exception) have looked to colonial transformations in law and legal authority as influences on the discourse of today’s Sharia advocates. In those chapters, I argue that the demands and expectations of Nigerian Muslims who support Sharia today are deeply marked by the shift to direct state control of Islamic legal institutions under colonial rule, and the resulting politicization of Sharia’s administration by indirect rule authorities.

As a result, contemporary efforts to revive Islamic law (in Nigeria, but also in most other places where they have occurred) have inevitably been run through the very state institutions whose dysfunction and corruption served as their inspiration in the first place. Not surprisingly, the outcomes have satisfied almost no one. The terms of Sharia’s “return” in Nigeria have also been shaped by postcolonial political processes, including the extraordinary politicization of ethnic identity and the efforts of religious activists to find a resonant language for making their demands on the state. And, of course, this history also played at least some role in the rise of Boko Haram, a Salafi-jihadi group whose leadership dabbled in various government-led Sharia implementation committees in northeastern Nigeria before rejecting the entire process as tainted and corrupt. Certainly, this is a highly local, contingent story, but the basic outlines (colonial co-optation of Islamic law, growing political conflict in the postcolonial state) are actually quite common, and have a lot to say about global patterns of Islamic revivalism.

Whatever our differences in approach, I think that both my book and Menchik’s testify to the need for a new generation of political science research on religion and politics that moves away from rational actor assumptions, excessive attention to elite-articulated “political theologies,” and the political culture tradition. Albeit in different ways, both of our books are challenges to these older approaches in that both seek to center actual religious experiences and practices in political life, and explore the normative consequences of that centering. What I think we both provide is a plausible description of (and a theoretical framework for understanding) what nonsecular support for democracy might look like in the Muslim world, while our differences reflect the role of historical contingency and local experience in shaping our case countries’ experiences. Together, and with more research to come, I believe that they add up to a real improvement in how political scientists think about religion and democracy in the Muslim world.