Masooda Bano's book poses the following questions: Why have the ulama (religious scholars) of Pakistan set themselves on the course of armed struggle against the state when they have not done so previously? What explains their choice of adopting a course that was not in their obvious interest insofar as it involved the potential loss of their lives, not to mention of their standing with the state and the broader public? She poses these questions with respect to the Red Mosque incident of 2007, during which the state first tried to negotiate the end of a barricade of the mosque by ulama with their students, and then stormed the premises, which led to innumerable deaths. While questions have been raised about the ethicality and efficacy of the state's actions, few have posed such questions about the ulama themselves or their students and supporters; it is as if their motivations for the barricade are transparent.

Bano disagrees with the commonplace understanding of madrassa education as religious indoctrination, and she set out to elicit the complexity and rationality of motivations through extensive fieldwork involving interviews, participant observation, surveys, and group discussions in no fewer than 110 madrassas in eight districts of Pakistan. In selecting her research subjects Bano sought diversity in terms of region, ethnicity, sectarian affiliation, and rural-urban divides. In the end, this diversity is diluted when she represents her subjects as simply the ulama, students, parents, jihadists, sympathizers, and so forth. Yet she is nonetheless able to draw out and bring together ordinary desires for bringing up moral and hardworking children with more emergent goals of criticizing the state and seeking justice—a concept that crops up insistently in her interviews with jihadists and radicalized ulama.

In other words, Bano grounds the explanations for why Pakistani ulama do what they do, and garner the sympathy they receive, in both discursive formations and an analysis of structural realities. Her commitment to the rational actor model of political theory leads her to jump through hoops to show how certain actions undertaken in the expectation of divine rewards still fall within rational choice and decision-making, but her focus on how both formal and informal institutions craft actors and their actions mitigates the excessive emphasis on individual calculations within the rational actor model. Historians will wish Bano had given more attention to the deep historical record of ulama activism in the region (to which she refers, albeit briefly). Anthropologists will wish that she had dispensed with her tortuous efforts to account for the rationality of the ulama, since the anthropological record has richly demonstrated the place of reasoning and disputation within the Islamic tradition and everyday life.

That said, this book has much to offer: its perspectives on contemporary Pakistani society and key religious institutions such as the waqaf; its on-the-ground reportage of the Red Mosque incident; its brief but useful contextualizing of madrassas in the South Asian context by bringing in the case of India and Bangladesh; and a curious comparison of the foundation of Oxford University with that of key madrasas within the Islamic world. Beyond these contributions, Bano's book provides a lively introduction to the political, theoretical framing of issues around Islamic movements, and enables a critical engagement with that framework.