Devotion to the Administrative State argues against a broad consensus on the hegemony of the modern state in recent scholarship on law, religion, and society, offering instead a new way to understand the enduring and widespread appeal of legal recognition for minority communities. Oraby elaborates this general argument in the context of Egyptian minority religious communities, exploring a “yearning for distinction” that mutually reinforces majoritarianism (4). This mutual reinforcement, Oraby argues, opens up new analytic avenues for rethinking the relationship between law and religion, one which explains why minority communities, far from resisting state regulation, pursue it, often at significant cost. This is careful, original, and provocative legal anthropology, whose materials and perspectives raise new questions for debate across the fields of law and society, religious studies, minority politics, secularism and the secular, and majoritarian Muslim governance.

As an analytic starting point, “devotion,” understood here as practices aimed at the maintenance of status and belonging within a cosmology, allows Oraby to elaborate “why the nation-state’s authority to decide what is religion/religious remains desirable…to reconceptualize the tight association between freedom and equality, take seriously the inequalities that people pursue when they are free, and imagine what social relations these inequalities assure within a specific milieu” (24). The central dynamic in this analysis is not, therefore, the administrative imperialism of the modern state, but of simultaneous regulatory work among multiple institutions, state and nonstate, whose genealogies extend beyond the modern. Oraby argues that recognition of difference is essential to collective life, and emphasises the motive power of ensuring the “spatiotemporal continuity” of that collective life (251). The story that emerges is distinct from that of modernity and the modern state as rupture, insisting instead that the key logic of minority devotion to the administrative state is precisely the opposite: “devotion aims to ensure the continuity between who we are already and who we will become” (252).

The four-part structure of the book: Ephemera, Inscriptions, Covenants, and Ethics, navigates alongside the experiences, strategies, and meaning-making of members of Egypt’s minoritized religious communities. Oraby combines a range of established ethnographic, archival and textual methods to tease out new understandings of minoritized religion and its entanglements with the modern administrative state. In the second part: Inscriptions, the book follows Coptic Christians through the institutional hallways and administrative forms of the Egyptian state, illustrating incomplete but simultaneously indispensable registers of belonging documented through paper, records, documents, crosses, tattoos. In the third part: Covenants, Oraby illustrates a further analytic divergence from recent critical scholarship which posits the radical incommensurability of law and religion (eg, Sullivan 2005), tracing instead “a collaborative horizon between two normative orders – the administrative order of the nation-state and the administrative order entailed in Bahá’í theology and practice” (137). Here, Oraby integrates analysis of minority strategies for recognition within Muslim majoritarian regimes, with a broader consideration of Baha’i transnationalism and its logics of belonging and distinctiveness. The final part follows both Copts and Baha’i across distinct spaces of devotion and its practices: firstly, lawyers, attorneys by training and Copts by confession, exploring how their devotion to the state elaborates a “Coptic legal ethic” (192). Secondly, Baha’i convenings within private households and study circles, in Egypt and at a global Baha’i youth conference in Turkey.

Oraby’s account of minoritized religious communities’ devotion thus posits a new reading of what the entanglement between the state and minority recognition consists of, how it is sustained, and for whom it functions. “Devotion to the administrative state names the practice of seeking attachments based in the truth of one’s social position and that advance a cosmology. This truth does not originate from administrative states but one that they nevertheless arbitrate and secure” (250). Those of us still predisposed to suspicion of the state might reflexively seek to be more persuaded that the reading Oraby has produced overwrites the violence of state sovereignty at critical inflexion points – in the archives, in the courts, in prisons and in documents. Here, perhaps more sustained engagement with the materials offered in the book – a rich seam of documentary forms (Part II), maps and certificates (Part III), pamphlets (Part IV) – would have been welcome. Yet, for Oraby, the motivating question of the book: “How will we know who we are?” (22), marks a shift in orientation away from an account of law and religion as that of winners and losers, towards one in which each iteration of the question, each move towards belonging and distinctiveness, marks a further step in the direction of an answer.