Scholars of Islamic law, gender, and Africa will be pleased with the arrival of two important new volumes that are bold in their bringing together of ethnographic data with legal history and analysis. Margot Badran's Gender and Islam in Africa: Rights, Sexuality, and Law, and Christina Jones-Pauly and Abir Dajanfi Tuqan's Women under Islam: Gender Justice and the Politics of Islamic Law collectively advance a movement in Islamic legal studies that focuses on interdisciplinary explorations into the ways particular constructions of Islamic law are foregrounded and reified in accordance with the existential impulses and demands of a particular society at a particular time, what we might call the “hermeneutic of experience.” I would argue that gender functions as the category that most regularly exposes the limitations of various historically situated concepts of orthodoxy, and these books bear out this claim.

Badran's book, in particular, which contains twelve articles by outstanding scholars and ethnographers in the fields of African studies and Islamic studies, delves deep into the societies studied to show the naturalizing microprocesses—be they political, social, economic, or, as is usually the case, a combination of these and others—by which conceptions of Islamic law are developed and propagated. Jones-Pauly and Tuqan's ambitious and lengthy volume steps away from the microdetail offered in Badran's text to give a sweeping political, legal, and intellectual history of the development of legal reforms (and in some cases setbacks) in four modern societies of longstanding interest to scholars: Pakistan, Tunisia, Egypt, and South Africa. This volume does a great service to students and advanced scholars alike who lack a specific background in either Islamic legal studies or the particular countries under analysis. These books provide important historical background and a sense of the important questions in these fields of study.

A broad criticism of both books is that they tend to take for granted that canonical texts like the Qur'an and hadith contain inherently liberatory agendas for women that have simply been lost in centuries of male-dominated interpretation and subsequent historiography. This, of course, is an assumption, and depending on one's reading of, and approach to, sacred Islamic texts (or texts of other religions), it is by no means self-evident. I take the authors' foregrounding of this generous interpretation of sacred texts as reflective of the attitudes of their ethnographic subjects—mainly women—who, in some contexts, are represented by the authors as having little choice but to hold on to the assumption of some concept of “primary” liberation as a matter of survival. This ethnographic fact is, by itself, of the utmost significance, but I believe such charitable interpretations should be understood as a function of societal needs and women's approach to Scripture—in other words, as an artifact of social history, rather than as a reflection of the texts themselves. I would argue that the assumption of a liberatory agenda is one very plausible one among many; however, the notion, found throughout both volumes but stated explicitly as the author's ideological approach in Jones-Pauly's text, is asserted without reflection. This caveat, however, does not detract from the utility of the outstanding scholarship to be found in both volumes.

Badran's introduction includes a welcome reframing of what constitutes Africa, which is commonly understood as a continent divided by the Sahara. Badran instead describes a complicated topographical space cut with rivers, which is an apt metaphor for the stunning range of subject matter and geographies covered by top ethnographers in the fields of Islamic studies and African studies. Among this book's strengths is the authors' willingness to take the reader under the surface of canonical texts and social conventions to reveal the ways women subvert and negotiate male physical and epistemological space. For example, Beverly B. Mack's opening essay, “Muslim Women's Knowledge Production in the Greater Maghrib,” conveys the creative means and genres by which women in West Africa have historically accessed and represented their own traditions. Mack gives a lucid account of one of the most important female intellectuals of African modernity: Asma'u Dan Fodio, daughter of ‘Uthman Dan Fodio, who was the founder of the Sokoto Caliphate (r. 1809–1900) in Hausaland. Mack underscores Asma'u Dan Fodio's emphasis on obedience to Islam and, I would argue, to the emerging Sokoto Caliphate, both spiritually and ethically. Asma'u's poem, “The Qur'an,” which compresses the names of all the chapters of the Qur'an into thirty verses, served such a pedagogical purpose in the context of empire building. Asma'u's intellectual activity, therefore, gives us insight into the inner workings and, perhaps, the boundaries of female revolutionary behavior of this time. Mack also addresses a critically important area of scholarship that has thus far been neglected: women in West African Sufi orders, especially the Tijaniyya and Qadiriyya. Importantly, the Tijaniyya and Qadiriyya orders make up the backbone of the Sufi tariqas in West Africa as they did the Sokoto Caliphate in Hausaland, whose leaders were proud Qaadiris. In addition to displaying the fact that Sufi learning was intended for women, at least in some circles, Mack illuminates the fluid interplay between Sufi mystical paths and adherence to sharia in the Hausaland of this period.

Ousseina D. Alidou, in her essay, “Rethinking Marginality and Agency in Postcolonial Niger,” takes up the life and pedagogy of Malama A'ishatu, another famous “A'ishatu” in postcolonial Niger. Readers will be delighted by the deft descriptions of Malama A'ishatu's move across the Niger border to northern Nigeria and her assimilation to Hausa culture. Aidou also provides an important discussion of Malama A'ishatu's approach to education. Western scholarship on Islamic learning in West Africa often assumes, with various degrees of subtlety, that something inherent in the epistemology of Arab-Islamic learning does not allow for critical thinking. Aildou's work provides an important corrective to this assumption, demonstrating that “Islamic learning” is a much broader epistemological category than is often assumed. It is clear from Aidou's essay, for example, that Malama A'ishatu knows when to employ rote learning and when to pause to elaborate on material. Alidou traces how particular sociological factors, such as indigenous patriarchal traditions and colonial modernity, marginalized Malama A'ishatu Hamani Zarmakoy Dancandu:

I wish that Alidou had expanded further on this last intriguing supposition, especially because much of the literature sees growing corruption and less opportunity as a result of “democratization,” especially in Nigeria. Is the situation different in Niger? What course has “democratization” in the 1990s taken there? The essay would benefit greatly from more elaboration on this point, as the vague assertion that young women are at the forefront “of the struggle to create an alternative modernity for Muslim women within indigenous traditions” (66) suggests an enterprise that is complex and contradictory enough in practice to warrant further, and more detailed, explication.

Raja Rhouni takes us into a more abstract category that is at the heart of both of these volumes and is, indeed, central to a great deal of scholarship on women in Islam generally: the question of what constitutes Islamic feminism. In her essay, “Deconstructing Islamic Feminism: A Look at Fatima Mernissi,” Rhouni looks critically at Fatima Mernissi, one of the most important Islamic feminists of at least the last two generations of scholars. Rhouni begins with the astute observation that previous scholarship has looked at Islam from a “secularist” perspective that compares it to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, arguing that “[t]he term ‘secular,’ conversely, refers to the position of scholars who reject the project of the ‘Islamic state’ but nevertheless engage religious issues in order to ‘discover’ and ‘invent’ means of women's empowerment” (69–70). Rhouni puts Mernissi's early work in this camp but traces how Mernissi shifted to an Islamist feminist position by the 1980s when Morocco, Mernissi's home country, witnessed “the growing popularity of Islamism as an oppositional discourse but also the failure of efforts to amend the Mudawana, or personal status code” (71).

I agree with Rhouni's tracing of Mernissi's career and emphases, and I would add that Mernissi's taking up of Islamist arguments reflects a shift in the sociology of knowledge, the contours of which should be examined at length by other scholars. Rhouni's essay considers what is meant by Islamic feminism, pointing out critiques by prominent Muslim feminist thinkers and highlighting problems with Islamic feminist hermeneutics by looking at Mernissi's book Le Harem Politique (1991), which investigates the authenticity of misogynistic hadith. Here, Mernissi introduces the modernist hermeneutic strategy of “gradualism,” which aims to contextualize the revelation of verses considered problematic for women in societies in which the situation was worse for women before Islam. Rhouni takes issue with Mernissi's methodology here, arguing that she is trying to create “new religious truths.” Her point is well taken and perfectly illustrates the pitfalls of turning from a secular strategy for advocating for human rights, to a strategy engaging textual/classical Islamic arguments that effectively affirm the principle of authenticity. Rhouni is particularly influenced by Qur'anic scholar Nasr Abu Zayd's nostalgia for ta'sil (foundationalism) in Islamic thought. Abu Zayd laments the turn from the method of ta'sil (seeking the “foundation” of Islamic thought as an interpretive strategy) to that of taqlid (imitation), which is referred to in Sunni Islamic thought as ighlaq bab al-ijtihad (the closing of the gate of independent research). This is an oversimplification of the history of ighlaq bab al-ijtihad, and I would argue that it reinforces the assumption that the “foundation” in the tradition—if only it could be “found” and accurately represented—is a liberatory one. In my opinion, to stake this liberatory agenda on some notion of the “essence” of the tradition is to frame the discussion in such zero-sum terms that the door is left open for more conservative forces to reassert their version of “orthodoxy,” which is supported by a plethora of texts.

Sa'diayya Shaikh, in her essay, “Embodied Tafsir: South African Muslim Women Confront Gender Violence in Marriage,” lays out two dominant possibilities for a Qur'anic conception of marriage: one that is based on a notion of fundamental equality before God, and one that upholds a patriarchal social structure. Shaikh argues that because of the high level of gender violence on an international level, Qur'an 4:34 “demands reinterpretation from the perspective of women's experience” (92). She thereby adds the hermeneutic of experience to the menu of interpretive possibilities.

Shaikh illustrates this “hermeneutic of experience” through the results of her qualitative research project based on interviews with eight Muslim women between the ages of twenty-eight and forty-three. She calls her approach an alternative to the standard exegesis that dispassionately engages Scripture (and is, she argues, characteristic of male scholars), with interpretations based on women's experiences and geared toward the interpretations of Islam that they seek as a result. Shaikh's interviews with women who were in abusive marriages are quite harrowing to read, and they emphasize that the need to challenge prevailing gender ideologies becomes especially clear when examining marital experiences. This is fascinating work based on a small, but still representative and revealing, sample, and I found myself continuously asking whether and how the abusive men mentioned in these ethnographic vignettes justified their abuse through the Qur'an.

Continuing the presentation of “the experiential” as formative of social categories, such as gender, which are often described as “natural,” is Lidwien Kapteijns, whose essay, “Changing Conceptions of Moral Womanhood in Somali Popular Songs, 1960–1990,” takes up the social and political history of the construction of “proper” womanhood. Kapteijns describes a movement called soomaalinimo, a form of oral poetry that conveys how to be a “proper” Somali and that emerged during the colonial period. In particular, she looks at a form of oral poetry described as “utilitarian” and intended “to inform, persuade or convince,” and which takes up the theme of how to be a “modern yet moral” Somali. One poem of this type is a dialogue between a man who is lamenting how modern women have changed, and a woman who responds to him by saying:

Kapteijns highlights how this poem represents a “clash of epistemologies,” in which Somali women respond to powerful Islamist voices that attempt to refashion them.

Marloes Janson and Corinne Fortier give us similar looks at the clash of epistemologies in their essays. Janson's essay, “Guidelines for the Ideal Muslim Woman: Gender Ideology and Praxis in the Tabligh Jama'at in the Gambia,” examines in evocative ethnographic detail the clash of epistemologies between Islamists—in this case, the Tabligh Jama'at in Gambia—and older cultural forms. Janson describes, for example, how life-cycle events such as weddings, which have traditionally been the purview of women, are now being taken over by men who emphasize austerity and performance in accordance with the sunna. Corinne Fortier's essay, “Women and Men Put Islamic Law to Their Own Use: Monogamy versus Secret Marriage in Mauritania,” also explores the interaction of a newly refashioned idea of Islamic law. Fortier's study shows that although religious sources, chiefly the Qur'an, hadith, and fiqh, serve as the foundation of social and religious organization for various Muslim societies, those sources are put to use in ways that are often tied to local custom, as shown by the insistence on monogamy in Moorish society.

Several of the essays map the sociological means by which Islamic law is reformed in various contemporary African societies. Margot Badran's essay, “Shariʿa Activism and Zina in Nigeria in the Era of Hudud,” examines the reintroduction of hudud in Northern Nigeria. Through an excellent overview of the history of Islamic feminism in Nigeria that situates it in a transregional context, Badran examines how women's activism concerning zina (illegal sexual activity) made important contributions to articulating and implementing Islamic feminism in Nigeria. Julie Pruzan-Jorgensen does something similar in her strong essay, “Islam, Gender, and Democracy in Morocco: The Making of the Mudawana Reform,” in which she considers how, according to the 2004 Mudawana (the personal status code of Moroccan law), Moroccan women are no longer to be regarded as inferior but as formally equal to their husbands within the family. Pruzan-Jorgensen interviews people involved in the reform of the Mudawana, including civil society actors, politicians (including former and present members of the government), judges, lawyers, ‘ulama, ‘adoul, members of the royal Mudawana commission, as well as academics and journalists who followed the process closely, and she gives readers a useful and thorough overview of the sociological process by which the Mudawana was reformed. Benjamin F. Soares's article, “Family Law Reform in Mali: Contentious Debates and Elusive Outcomes,” traces the same process in Mali. Soares's discussion of the difficulties in arranged marriages between Malian youth is lucid. He states:

Soares, I believe, is right to frame the problem this way. Moreover, I contend that we, as scholars, still do not have a proper methodology to account for what I have called elsewhere “indigenous forms” of patriarchy without falling into the trap of what feminist scholars have called “colonial feminism.”

While Badran's volume provides sophisticated ethnographic detail for a number of African societies’ interactions with the categories of gender and Islamic law, Christina Jones-Pauly and Abir Dajani Tuqan's, Women under Islam: Gender Justice and the Politics of Islamic Law, complements Badran's volume by providing a detailed historical edifice and an intellectual history of legal reform in four societies whose postcolonial/postmodern journeys through Islamic law have been models (or cautionary tales) for other contemporary Muslim-majority societies: Tunisia, Egypt, Pakistan, and South Africa. This book professes a more intimate mandate, describing its completion as “the realization of a dream, a dream of an ijtihad of Islamic law” (xiii). With this overt reference to ijthihad, which, strictly speaking, is a jurisprudential method, the volume suggests that the sacred texts themselves hold an essential liberatory power, such that the scholar's task is merely to rediscover them. To this end, the book seeks to ascertain whether Islamic law “has such deep roots in the Dark Ages that it cannot extricate itself, or whether politics and die-hard cultural customs have overwhelmed Islam, or whether modern courts of law are assuming the evolution of Islamic law” (xvii). This ideological tinge is captured by the assertion, on the same page, that “[w]e have gone back to ancient Islamic precedent to find justice. Islam was revolutionary in its gender relations for the time” (xvii). The four case studies that are assembled take a long historical view, offering readers pages of intellectual and social history that contextualize the development of Islamic law in the case studies' modern histories. In so doing, the case studies focus on intellectual figures who have sought out readings of Islam and Islamic law that conform to the liberatory agenda described in the book's introduction. Though the book describes these readings as “authentic” Islamic interpretations, the fact is that several interpretations of Islamic law could be posited as “authentic.” I believe that acknowledging this fact, rather than asserting a particular notion of “true” Islamic teachings, would make this book stronger. At times, the book moves too fluidly between political developments, readings of classical or medieval Islamic legal texts, and the rulings of courts to offer explanations for specific historical developments. For this reason, though I would recommend this volume as an excellent starting place for students and scholars interested in studying the issues of Islam, law, and gender in contemporary societies, I would encourage further reading on the topics of canonical Islamic law and the particular legal systems treated here.

The first chapter, “Tunisia—The Ideal Islamic Reform,” is primarily concerned with the life and legal activism of Abdelaziz Taalbi, born in Tunis in 1874. The chapter focuses on Taalbi's 1904 book, written in French and Arabic, L'esprit libéral du Coran/Ruh al taharrur fi'l Qur'an, which explored how his journey with the Tunisian legal powers interacted with social issues such as the face veil. Turning to Taalbi's successor, Tahar Haddad, the next chapter looks at the evolution of issues such as polygamy. This chapter also provides fascinating ethnographic tidbits and cultural explanations for how family law could have been reformed, including the oft-repeated assertion that “Tunisian men are generous” (2) as an explanation for how liberal legal reform has succeeded. In their chapter on Egypt, “Conservative Incremental Reform,” the authors describe the interaction of political developments with Islamic legal reform, focusing on marriage and divorce law. Pakistan, to which the book turns after Egypt, is so complex and fraught a case that one would have hoped for greater elaboration on the words that make up the chapter's title: “Orthodox Modernity” (207). On the other hand, the chapter offers a broad and well-elaborated historical overview that moves from the colonial period to the all-important struggle between Pakistani president Zia Ul Haq and Islamist forces in the 1980s, which granted Islamists legal gains that have been difficult to recover. The strongest section of this chapter is its description of the zina ordinance and its history; the description fluidly tackles subjects ranging from cultural factors in accounting for a woman's honor to the ways in which societal instincts are cynically manipulated by Pakistan's political forces. This chapter outlines the process by which the effort to control women's bodies as a means of consolidating power is codified in the Islamic legal system. The volume then takes a turn with its chapter on South Africa, “Constitutional Challenges for Islamic Law,” which focuses on Islamic law's interaction with a multicultural society.

Both of these books offer heartening and refreshing evidence of strides forward in both Islamic studies and African studies. The former field has been dominated by textual legal approaches and positivist methodological approaches to texts, and Badran's work, with its assemblage of extremely bright anthropological minds, corrects for this over-reliance on texts to make abundantly clear that micro-sociological forces drive and affect Islamic legal emphases and outcomes at the textual and epistemological levels. Jones-Pauly and Taqan's volume provides a rich historical and legal tapestry spanning four Muslim societies, including three in Africa, and thus moves African studies beyond the timeworn, binary struggle between a supposed, sudden cleavage in syncretic traditions and the adoption of an austere, textual Islamic law. Together, these volumes help to deliver future scholarship to the altogether more complex task of excavating the interface between particular societies and textual traditions of Islamic law, and of doing so in a quickly changing and increasingly compressed postmodern context.