This book about Islam in Côte d'Ivoire is focused on Abidjan, the country's largest city and, until the 1990s, a major centre of economic activity and relative prosperity in sub-Saharan Africa. As is well known, after the death of President Félix Houphouët-Boigny in 1993 and after the Ivoirian economic ‘miracle’ came to an end, things in Côte d'Ivoire began to fall apart. The attempts to exclude and disenfranchise the country's northerners, immigrants, descendants of immigrants, and Muslims (most infamously via the noxious notion of ivoirité), the subsequent civil war, and its unresolved aftermath provide some of the background to this study. Given this highly charged recent history, Marie Miran's history of Islam in the country is especially timely and valuable. Although a historian using trusted methods for Africanist historical research, including extensive interviews and rich documentary and archival sources, she draws quite judiciously from the social sciences, deftly employs recent social theory, and brandishes an investigative journalist's acute sense of l'actualité to tell the long, largely unstudied history of Abidjan's demographically important Muslim population from the 1950s to 2000. Indeed, in a retort to those who would try to exclude Islam and Muslims from Ivoirian history, the author shows how Muslims have become the largest religious group in Côte d'Ivoire.

The book focuses in large part on the Muslim elites who have emerged and flourished in the francophone metropolis, as well as on the new modernist and reformist Islamic associations that they have founded and developed over the past few decades. The little-known histories of such socioeconomic and political elites, their Islamic associations, religious activities, and politics, particularly vis-à-vis the postcolonial state, are carefully researched and discussed in an engaging manner – albeit at much greater length and with less economy of expression than would be permitted by most British and American publishers today. We learn, for example, about the ways in which Ivoirian Muslims have interacted with the broader Muslim world and transnational Islamic institutions; how they have borrowed and appropriated from and emulated Christians and their organizational forms and techniques; and how they have developed new forms of proselytizing in which French, the country's official language and the language of modernity, plays a major role. Since Abidjan is quite an unusual place and arguably not representative of Islam in Côte d'Ivoire, it is useful to read this book alongside the work of scholars who have conducted research elsewhere in the country. Most notably, in ethnographic research in the north, Robert Launay and Marie Nathalie LeBlanc have concentrated on ordinary Muslims, and, in this way, offer ‘bottom-up’, more grassroots' views of Islam and being Muslim in Côte d'Ivoire than does this study of elites and their associations.

One criticism of this fine book is that it is too focused on one particular way of being Muslim, which the author glosses rather imprecisely as reformist, to the exclusion of others. The study seems to equate this reformist way of being Muslim with modernity (which is, of course, the internal discourse of such reformists) and therefore gives short shrift to other ways or traditions of being Muslim. Some of these are older – for example, various Sufi traditions, which are indeed alive and well in Abidjan, the author's invocation of such infelicitous neo-Orientalist tropes as the intellectual ‘decline’ and ‘stagnation’ among so-called traditionalist Muslims notwithstanding. Sufis, like some other Muslims – Shia, Tablighis, and so forth – are acknowledged, though much too hastily, as part of the country's plural Muslim landscape in the book's epilogue. But these other Muslims' engagements with modernity and the important transformations that they too have experienced, perhaps different from those of ‘reformist’ Muslims, also need to be considered. In addition, there are other, newer ways of being Muslim – not to mention radical or maximalist (read ‘uncivil’) ways – that also might not fit into the author's narrative about reform and modernity, in which all Muslims seem to be moving ineluctably toward the ways of being Muslim promulgated by the reformists studied here. Although in the latter part of the book the author disavows any such teleology, the trajectory of reform and the movement toward a particular kind of Muslim modernity are made to seem almost inevitable. These are, however, relatively minor criticisms of a major work that should be widely read. It will no doubt be appreciated for the thoroughness of the research, its seriousness of purpose, and its obvious relevance to debates about post-civil-war Côte d'Ivoire. Unlike most academic books published in French, this book actually has an index, and a very useful one.