Until not so long ago, questions such as ‘What is “proper” Islam?’ or, maybe more subtly, ‘What is truly Muslim?’ were epistemologically plausible and used to elaborate religious catalogues, shopping lists of the items that, in culture A or B, were ‘purely’ Muslim as opposed to those that were less so (labelled as ‘syncretistic’, ‘pagan’, ‘survivals’, et cetera). Today, most anthropologists working on Islamic contexts tend to agree that it may be more fruitful to document the ways in which communities that see themselves as Islamic fight to accommodate this perception and to be faithful to it, even if this means being critical of their own social settings.

Following this epistemological shift, Adeline Masquelier has written a fresh and engaging ethnography of West African women. The book is a major breakthrough on three different fronts. In the first place, it documents this ‘discursive’ view of Islam in a West African rural setting. Second, it shows that women have something to say about it. Local debates about Muslimness do not take place only among imams and other male voices of learning. Women are important agents in the weaving of a Muslim community. In the third place, the book shows us the internal diversity of what from outside might wrongly seem uniform. In this case: Islam in rural African contexts.

In the small town of Dogondoutchi, several discourses claiming to be Islamic coexist. First, we have traditional Muslims – families who have been Muslim since the arrival of Islam in the region, many of whom belong to one Sufi brotherhood or another. Second, we find the Yan Izala, reformist Muslims entering from the north of Nigeria with the aim of ‘purifying’ Islam in Niger. Last, we meet the followers of a charismatic Sufi leader (and, most importantly, the holy man himself) who, in a synthetic bricolage characteristic of many charismatic leaders all over the world, has created a version of Islam that is, particularly in regard to women's behaviour, at odds with both the traditionalists and the sartorial pronouncements of the reformists. This case study will force some readers, who may have concluded that Sufism has been overshadowed in West Africa by mainstream Sunni forms of Islamic knowledge and practice, to think again.

Although the book announces itself as eight chapters of equal weight, in my reading it is divided into three overlapping parts. The first one historicizes both Islam in the region of Niger and the relationship between Islam, colonial power and gender. This part of the book includes a theoretical chapter on the anthropology ‘of’ Islam that will be very useful to scholars beyond West Africa. The second part of the book describes the arrival of new heralds of Islam in the last decade and a half. A chapter describing how Islam is materially inscribed in the landscape closes this part. The third part is a series of ethnographic case studies in which we can see the agency of women at play, sometimes determining events, sometimes accommodating ideological pressures. These case studies turn on the intertwining of notions of womanhood and of proper Islamic behaviour in the symbolic areas where the fights between different understandings of Islam are more violent: dress codes relating to the veil, ‘bridewealth’, notions of intimacy and of public space, uses of contraception. The chapters are written with a rare combination of ethnographic empathy and rigour. The last chapter describes, from the women's perspective, the failure of Malam Awal, who after some years of charismatic effervescence faded away and disappointed many of his initial followers. In all these chapters, Masquelier successfully conveys the female experience which she has accessed through years of friendship and collaboration with old and young Nigérien women.