Mark Fathi Massoud's book, Law's Fragile State: Colonial, Authoritarian and Humanitarian Legacies in Sudan, may be the second text in the new studies in the field of law, religion and the state in the Sudan.Footnote ¹ But as the author claims, his book represents the first study of legal politics in ‘a country as battered and chaotic as modern-day Sudan’ (p. 14). Massoud's book is a product of 15 months of fieldwork in the Sudan and driven by an urge to learn more about a homeland his family fled from when he was a boy in 1983. He said he wrote the book to understand the Sudan. However, one of the virtues of the book, as the author successfully stakes out his claim, is that ‘the case of the Sudan … reveals how a multitude of legal spaces flourish in conflict settings, however weak the political apparatus remains’ (p. xiii).

But, whatever the weakness of that apparatus, the political and religious developments of the legal order in the Sudan since the colonial period (1898–present) first stands as an important example of how the colonial and post-colonial state, separately but continuously, colonised religion from the time of Sir F. Reginald Wingate, Governor-General of the Sudan 1898–1916, to the time of General Omer Al-Bashir, 1989–present. The major aspect of colonising religion – the author did not use the term – in general, and Islam in particular, during the colonial period and after was that the state created in and of itself a new religious entity via its monopoly, regulation and control over the Sudanese open religious space by enforcing social, political and religious fragmentation and according to that turned different invented Islamic and secular law related apparatus into appendages of the state. The Sudanese Islamists, who came to power through a military coup in 1989, presented another form of colonisation of religion through the claim that al-Islam howa al-hal (Islam is the solution), turning the coercive-intensive state to a coercive-only state.

Second, the book presents the case of how different authoritarian regimes from the colonial period to the present developed complex systems and structures to incorporate law into political violence to take on new roles, articulations and significance, or what the author describes as lawfare and warfare in the Sudan. Successive Sudanese states have used their legal capacity to enforce political stability as the author argues that ‘law can be a tool to impose order wielded by a repressive authority – law as the “command of the sovereign”’ (p. 21).

Hence, Law's Fragile State could be better read as an important example of a sociology of law that traces the one hundred and forty years in the Sudan not as two different experiences but as an accumulation or development of an undergoing legal legacy and human involvement that cannot be separated. The insightful and sophisticated analysis of extensive data here contributes to a complex and important story and a significant addition to law studies in general.