Norman Anderson's life spanned major changes in the world – political changes with two world wars and the breakup of colonialism, secularisation in the West and the resurgence of Islam, and the rethinking of Christian mission in the light of these changes. During this time Anderson served as a Christian missionary in Egypt, a university professor of Islamic law at the University of London, a British intelligence officer during World War II and the subsequent transition of colonised countries to independence and an advisor to these rising Muslim, Hindu and other non-Christian majority nations in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia as well as wrestling with the implications of all these transitions for Christians and Muslim-Christian relations in Muslim majority contexts.

His position as an insider in these various contexts, which were often in conflict with each other, gave him a breadth of understanding and the ability to facilitate workable solutions. As an Evangelical, he had the motivation to share the transformation of the Gospel. As a colonial officer during World War II and the subsequent transition of the colonies to independent states, he wrestled with the problems of Muslim laws and the rights of religious minorities. As a professor of Islamic law at the University of London, he taught and advised students from both the colonial powers and the rising independent states. And he supplemented his teaching by frequent travels to the emerging nations at the invitation of their new leaders. The extent of his experience and the variety of those who sought it bear witness to his breadth.

He helped emerging nations work out their legal systems when they included Muslims and non-Muslims in an era of rising secularism internationally, but this gave an increased opportunity for Muslim majorities to enact Muslim laws. This proved to be a major challenge. Anderson anticipated that political changes in the nature of the states would change the Islamic tradition, transforming the understanding of religion as it had in much of the West. Instead in recent years we have seen such events as the Khomeini Revolution in Iran, the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) and only briefly the ‘Arab Spring’.

Anderson started his professional career as a missionary with the Egypt General Mission from 1932 to 1939. He had grown up in an Evangelical family and became active in the Cambridge Intercollegiate Christian Union in his university years. Key influences toward mission service besides individual concerns were yearly attendance at the Keswick Convention and reading missionary biographies, especially of Temple Gairdner and William Borden of Yale. Gairdner referred to missionary service among Muslims as the most strenuous challenge that the Christian could face in spiritual and intellectual terms. Douglas Thornton, another of Anderson's heroes, stressed strategically, ‘Who converts Egypt, converts the Muslim world’ because of its political, intellectual and educational importance. Anderson said that ‘if Arabia is the Cradle of Islam, Egypt is its University; if Arabia is the heart of Islam, Egypt is it head’, and he worked with university students in Cairo.

Following World War II Christians again focused on Islam. Previously in Cairo in 1906 and Lucknow in 1911 Samuel Zwemer and others organised conferences on Islam emphasising ‘The Evangelization of Islam in this generation’. By the 1950s, however, there was not a breakthrough, and nationalist movements indicated the declining power of the West in the Muslim world.

Anderson affirmed the work of the Holy Spirit outside of the Christian Church in that persons of another religion could, by the work of the Holy Spirit, realise that they were sinners and cast themselves on the mercy of God and be saved by Christ through his death on the cross even as those in the Old Testament were, since the moral law is known to all. They, hence, can be convicted of sin. Subsequently this insight was important in the later development of contextualisation among Evangelicals in the 1970s.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s Anderson was a respected authority on Islamic law and in mission thought. And, as an Evangelical, he was active in the broader context of the Anglican Church in social and political concerns and dialogue as well as evangelism. He objected to viewing mission as primarily a movement from the Christian West to the heathen East but noted the rise of autonomous Churches in independent nations and encouraged partnership in mission. During this period there was increased cross-fertilisation with Fuller Theological Seminary and the World Council of Churches and the development of contextualisation.

Anderson died in 1994, less than a decade before 9/11, when a more militant form of nationalism became prominent in the Muslim world, but his broad influence is still evident. This reviewer first encountered it personally when in the 1970s Anderson was invited to the Indian subcontinent to offer political advice but extended his trip to Afghanistan to offer encouragement to some of us Christians who were serving there at the time. The present book shows the breadth of his influence.