As the colonial system fractured in the mid-twentieth century, some Europeans tried to continue the civilizing mission by helping new nations modernize, but others began to lose confidence in their cultural and religious superiority. At the same time, many Muslim-majority countries in Africa and the Middle East shook off their colonizers in the name of national independence and began to create legal and political frameworks with which to rule those countries. Norman Anderson was in the thick of the conversation, advising governments across the region in an effort to, in his view, modernize Islam. But while Anderson sought to make Islam more “western,” his own Christian views were radically altered from his evangelical missionary days to a more “modern” Christian belief, accepting that Islam holds value and even some element of truth. Thus, Thompson clearly shows how Christianity and Islam “modernized” alongside one another.

Norman Anderson's life (1908–1994), including his personal religious views and his political and legal influence throughout the Middle East, provides a fascinating lens through which to see such changes unfold. Thompson picks up Anderson's biography during his early studies at Cambridge and describes in detail the legal and theological atmosphere that helped shape Anderson's beliefs throughout the century. The college provided an opportunity for Anderson to develop a personal evangelical faith through participation in the Christian Union, among other student organizations. College also enabled him to explore the meaning and merits of civilization, modernity, and social evolution, academic debates that unfolded between the two world wars while the colonial world system was under scrutiny and would soon collapse completely. Explaining Anderson's intellectual background provides Thompson with a basis on which explain Anderson's multifaceted career as a missionary in Egypt, a military intelligence in Libya during World War II, and eventually his more formal career in Islamic legal studies.

It was through Anderson's legal efforts that he sought to “modernize Islam,” Thompson describes Anderson as a legal scholar who was at times both traditional and progressive in his understanding of Islam. He, like many of his contemporaries, was under the impression that in Islam there is no division between religion and state. Thus, the only way to soften the sharp edges of Islamic law was to work within the Islamic system. Anderson's deep knowledge of Arabic and the detailed workings of Islamic law earned him the respect of Muslim scholars, an important and rare feat at that time. Yet like many of his contemporaries in western academia, “his idea of modernisation depended on a reified notion of traditional ‘classical’ law that had become widespread amongst Muslims and non-Muslims” (254). He did, however, embrace the secularizing nationalist movements, which he believed provided the best opportunity for universal equality before the law. He was also a strong proponent of incorporating both formal classical Islam as well as local cultural practices into the codification process. He also held the uncommon belief that Islam was not static but adapted to political and cultural circumstances.

Though the book claims to describe efforts to modernize Islam, the author spends much time explaining the modernization of Christianity and Christians’ understanding of the world. Anderson first joined the mission field as part of the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union in 1932, a group which opposed social missions. Rather, it sought to convert Muslims to Christianity and based its theological underpinnings on a clear belief in the atoning power of Jesus's crucifixion. Yet by the 1960s, when Anderson was still engaged with mission work while also serving as a British legal advisor to governments in Nigeria and elsewhere, his views had changed. Instead of a narrow focus on conversion, Anderson embraced the idea that “evangelism and social and political concern were inseparable in missionary work” (214). Thompson shows throughout the book how mid-century theological debates, as well as Anderson's son's activist views, changed this stalwart evangelical. Anderson was not progressive in the twenty-first century meaning of the word, but the transformation of his understanding of Islam provides a map through which one can begin to understand the way mainstream Protestant thought shifted.

The greatest strength of the book is the detailed background and complete life story of a figure who could, at various points in his life, exemplify missionary zeal, British imperial arrogance, or conservative Anglicanism. Instead, the complexities of his story ensure that Anderson is an illustration of the many changes that affected wide swaths of European thinking as the old order collapsed and a new, nationalist world order, emerged. The pace can dawdle occasionally due to the level of detail, and at times I wished the author highlighted his argument more clearly, though careful readers will not miss it. Despite those concerns, this blend of intellectual, political, and religious history offers a compelling examination of the modernization of both Islam and Christianity in the twentieth  century.