Jocelyn Cesari begins What is Political Islam by referring to two seemingly extremely ambitious questions posed in recent debates about Islam and politics: Is ISIS Islamic? And is Islamic law compatible with the modern state? In the rest of the book, however, she seeks not to answer these two questions but to suggest that they misdirect our attention towards Islamist groups and normative theory. Instead, she views political Islam as “a multifaceted religious nationalism.”

As in her 2014 book, The Awakening of Muslim Democracy (New York, 2014), Cesari probes what happens inside existing national states. This version of political Islam operates not on the level of social movements or abstract theory but instead through real authoritative structures, seeking to uncover how religion is molded into existing states. But while that previous book focused largely on the state, What is Political Islam also directs great attention to national cultures.

Using these prisms leads Cesari a bit off the beaten path in the scholarly treatment of political Islam. The Muslim Brotherhood is mentioned—in passing. Siyasa sharʿiyya (governance in accordance with Islamic legal precepts) similarly gets a passing mention. Schoolbooks, curricula, Ministries of Education, and universities get extended treatment. Likewise, Sufi brotherhoods, toleration, and treatment of apostasy are examined at length.

Cesari's decision to concentrate on state structures and prevailing norms leads her to orient her findings around two distinct patterns in Muslim societies. The first is “hegemonic Islam” which she describes in terms of political culture but seems most clearly manifested in state structures that fold religious structures into the state so thoroughly that a religion is given strong and privileged official status but also placed under the domination of senior leaders and official structures.

Civil Islam, by contrast, has a clearer distinction between state and religion (though hardly a full separation; indeed, civil Islam might be state-sponsored). In such societies, religion can still infuse societal norms and practices and can help foster integrative bonds within societies.

Cesari's explicit argument ties these forms of Islam to regime type, building on her analysis in her earlier Awakening of Muslim Democracy with more quantitative and causal analysis. Hegemonic Islam lays down obstacles to democracy; civil Islam is friendlier. But “civil Islam” is not merely a fuzzy and friendly phrase; Cesari notes that in Indonesia civil Islam includes state toleration of religious diversity but also displays intolerance in intrareligious terms, allowing what she calls “rampant sharia” at times at the local level.

Besides regime type, Cesari explicitly examines globalization, a seemingly anomalous subject given her insistence that Islam is politically expressed in national contexts. But she seeks to show even here that themes so clearly operating at a transnational level now (such as jihadism and even the idea of an Islamic umma) are still deeply shaped by (and sometimes originated in) national contexts.

For all these bold explicit arguments, some of the more interesting and original aspects of What Is Political Islam lie in its themes that are often more implicit. In order to understand the relationship between Islam and politics, Cesari seems to suggest, we need to insert more politics into our inquiry and to have a broader sense of what politics is. And we need to redirect our historical gaze a bit away from seventh century Hijaz, ninth-century Baghdad, or medieval academies, and toward the formation of modern and large national states over the past century or so.

Cesari leads us mostly by example rather than by explicit argument in these areas, but her general message is clear: political Islam does not require strong Islamist parties or parliamentary balloting to be significant; the ways that modern states have been built in the Muslim world knit Islam and politics together in a variety of ways that are a bit more far flung and diffuse than we have noted but are just as significant, sometimes arising in fields far from the sort of political struggles over elections, parties, and movements that have attracted so much attention.

The guidance is helpful particularly if it is not treated as exhaustive (and she makes no such claims). Islam and politics are intertwined even in societies with apparently limited political spheres. Cesari does not treat Saudi Arabia in any detail, but her example could be followed even there. The Saudi National Museum in Riyadh lays out its exhibits in two floors. On the lower level, visitors walk through displays on geology, paleontology, archeology before ascending a long ramp, to the second floor where the treatment of Islam begins. Walking down a long hallway surrounded by battle scenes, visitors enact the hijra. Subsequent exhibits tell the story of the emergence of the Saudi state, sometimes showing its military triumphs—without mentioning that those defeated were also ancestors of current Saudi citizens.

The museum's didactic displays blend history, religion, nation, and state in ways that are all the more powerful because they are unspoken. What is Political Islam does not examine museums, but scholars who follow Cesari's example will likely wander far away from electoral campaigns and ideological tracts by autodidact religious leaders in this and other directions to pursue their inquiry.