By examining “how the relationship between Islam and democracy is constructed in practice” (5; italics in original), Brandon Kendhammer's Muslims Talking Politics: Framing Islam, Democracy, and Law in Northern Nigeria provides new leverage on understanding the opportunities and tensions present in democratic societies with a Muslim majority. His big takeaways include the ideas that “public religious discourses … far more than abstract theology or doctrine [influence] how ordinary Muslims think about and evaluate democracy” (14) and that paradoxically, the more ordinary people participate in these debates, the more they tend to “read the pluralism out of the past, producing a religious vision that portrays sharia as a fixed, predetermined structure to be enforced by state action” (39). Kendhammer develops these arguments through a case study of Sokoto — one of the 12 Nigerian states to adopt sharia — in which he identifies the frames that elites use to argue for sharia by examining newspaper publications and carries out group interviews to understand how those frames are processed by citizens. Along the way, he also shows that colonialism played a part in politicizing religious leaders, and in creating an idea of indigenous and non-indigenous populations which has been adapted in sharia states to effectively exclude non-Muslims from debates over sharia.

Three of the most common frames that elites used in promoting sharia are that it would lead to economic development and social justice, would protect the rights of Muslims, and would hold governing elites accountable. Each of these made the instrumental case that sharia would work with democracy to help produce the benefits people hoped to receive from a government by the people (and incidentally, each of those are goods that liberal democracy seeks to promote and thus are hardly sharia specific). In Kendhammer's group interviews, he found that ordinary citizens processed these elite frames in different ways. They frequently suggested that proper implementation of sharia would lead to better economic development and social justice, and would help hold elites accountable for their use of power even though they did not think the sharia their state had passed into law did this, blaming this on its failed implementation instead of on sharia itself. In contrast, interviewees were less inclined to mention the elite frame that sharia preserved their rights as Muslims.

While this book is not primarily about the compatibility of Islam and democracy, a work that examines how the relationship between the two is constructed cannot avoid this question. Kendhammer lauds the fact “that the vast majority of Nigerian Muslims now seem to believe that it's possible to embrace both sharia and democracy, even if the results haven't been entirely promising” (232), but argues that they then undermine their support for both through “their continued belief that public morality can best be instilled by the long arm of secular state power … a move that places singularly misplaced trust in a set of institutions (the Nigerian state) that have earned none at all” (233). In short, it turns out that the relationship constructed between Islam and democracy in northern Nigeria leads to an impoverished understanding of democracy and a problematic understanding of sharia. For example, after explaining that none of his 95 interviewees suggested Christians should have a say in whether their state implemented sharia, Kendhammer comments that: “Whatever this vision of government is, it isn't exactly liberal democracy” (203). Likewise, with sharia the imposition of “an unprecedented level of order, self-consciousness, and consistency onto the Islamic past” (53) overlooks the real tradition of sharia in which different schools of interpretation engage in an ongoing discourse “embedded in social, legal, economic and political institutions” (43).

In summary, Kendhammer's innovative research question and group interview methodology produce results that show that Muslims in Nigeria — much like citizens in other democratic societies — are often inconsistent in their aims. He applies Tip O'Neil's famous dictum that “all politics is local” to sharia, and in the logical shortcomings seen in his interviews, readers will recognize the problems democracies continually face with citizens who are sub-optimally informed. Nigerian democracy is much less institutionalized than democracies in the global north, but its problems are not wholly different.

The weaknesses of this book are those common in any work seeking to conduct rigorous social science research in a primarily oral culture in which one is a cultural outsider. Kendhammer uses newspapers to discover the elite frames for obvious practical reasons, even though the primary way ordinary Nigerians would encounter such frames would be through radio and television. Similarly, the interviews had to be conducted indirectly through local facilitators trained by Kendhammer and he admits that “despite our best efforts to create a comfortable environment, most of the interviews were marred by their artificiality” (187), though he remains confident that “it's very possible to trace interviewee reasoning and their use (or challenging) of media frames throughout” (237).

Overall, Kendhammer's Muslims Talking Politics is a well written and researched work that makes three key contributions to the literature. First, in moving away from a more traditional content analysis to focus on a discursive approach, it is able to effectively identify different elite frames and get a sense of how those influence ordinary citizens. Second, it provides a new angle on the Islam and democracy debate by focusing on a more answerable question (how did the relationship develop in practice?) instead of a less answerable one (are they compatible in theory?). Third, it provides important background to explain the problem of Boko Haram. Since citizens continue to support sharia even while believing its implementation has failed, “Boko Haram's core ideological commitments … have a measure of resonance with many ordinary Nigerian Muslims” (229). Kendhammer argues that few Nigerian Muslims actually believe that Boko Haram's radical solution is the answer, but he does show that they want a stronger solution, even if that solution is in tension with both democracy and sharia.