Charrad seeks to understand the ways that state formation was influenced by and in turn shaped particular perspectives on women's status in society. She contends that in the Islamic world in general and in the Maghrib in particular, “women's rights as defined in family law are the crux of the matter” (p. 5). Her central argument is that “the process of state formation, especially the pattern of integration of tribes or tribal kin groupings in each nationstate, has been critical in shaping the state and its family law policy” (p. 2). In order to make this point, she reviews the histories of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia from the precolonial period through the 1970s. In so doing, she shows similarities and differences in the system of central authority before colonization, in the strategies of colonial rule, and in the process of state building following independence in all three states. All the while, she focuses on two interrelated factors: the relationship of tribes to central authority and the articulation of family law as a way to mediate gender relationships.

In the first part of the book, Charrad examines the common heritage of the Maghrib. State formation in all three countries took shape within kin-based societies, which emphasized patrilineal kinship ties: “Politics involved a tension between central authority attempting to expand its control over large territories and tribal grouping struggling to escape it” (p. 83). Furthermore, all three societies share a Sunni Islamic heritage, within which the Maliki school of Islamic law has predominated. The author analyzes Maliki Islamic family law, arguing that “the thrust of Islamic law in general is to permit the control of women by their male relatives and to preserve the cohesiveness of patrilineages” (p. 31).

In the following section, Charrad explores the historical differences in the three Maghribi states in the precolonial and colonial eras. Again, she argues, the process of centralization was related to the nature of tribal structures and the status of women in a key period of North African history. She finds that Tunisia experienced a greater degree of state centralization coupled with a weakening political role for tribes. In Algeria, on the other hand, tribes remained powerful while the state was quite weak. In Morocco, the tribes were in “a constant state of tension with the center” (p. 103). These political differences were reflected in the legal sphere as well. While Tunisia had a more homogenous legal system based on Islamic law, customary law mingled with Islamic law in Algeria and Morocco. As Charrad argues, the three Maghribi nations also underwent different colonial experiences, which affected both tribal structures and family law.

In a final section of the book, Charrad shows that calls for changes in family law were heard throughout the Maghrib beginning in the 1930s, but that the different histories of each country resulted in divergent approaches to family law after independence. In Morocco, the new state was formed through a coalition between the monarchy and the tribes. The approach to family law in that state, then, was to protect tribal order that was critical to the maintenance of the monarchy. Throughout the colonial period and in the early stages of independence, there were calls for changes in family law by some nationalists. Charrad's study would have been enriched by a more detailed discussion of the period in which the nature of family law was debated among the various factions involved in the nationalist struggle in Morocco. An analysis of the role of the press in shaping the gendered dimensions of the nationalist discourse, for example, would have been of great interest. In the final analysis, she argues that the alliance between the monarchy and the tribes ensured a more conservative outcome. Family law was codified in 1957–58 in a manner that remained faithful to Maliki Islamic law and did not fundamentally change the status of women.

Following a long war of independence in Algeria, the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) produced the Charte Nationale in which it articulated “the necessity to improve women's legal conditions” (p. 187). But, Charrad asserts, the FLN's position on women's rights was an ambivalent one, since the desire for reform and the importance of Islamic law were both seen as central to the formation of a new nation-state. Algerian women had been important to the nationalist cause and notions of gender equality were part of the socialist political discourse following independence in 1962. However, an organized women's movement that asserted gender equality as a central feature of the new state failed to materialize; activist women still saw the nationalist struggle as overriding women's liberation (p. 187–89). Between 1962 and 1984, the issue of family law became a contested factor in the larger competition for power among various political factions in Algeria. Finally, in 1984 the government issued the Algerian Family Code. By putting in place this conservative legal code, “the Algerian state catered to the social and political forces with a vested interest in the preservation of the extended patrilineal kinship structure sanctioned by Islamic family law” (p. 200).

By contrast, in Tunisia, the state viewed reforms as a means to unify the country through institution building. In 1956, shortly after independence, “the state promulgated a sweeping family law reform” (p. 215). Charrad argues that the Tunisian Code of Personal Status was set forth by the urban elite who came to power after independence as part of a larger strategy to emancipate “Tunisian society from the effect of colonialism and archaic forms of social organization” (p. 220). In other words, in Habib Bourguiba's approach to nation building, gender became a marker of modernity. Changes in Tunisian women's legal status were a top-down stateinitiated reform.

Charrad's ambitious study sets forth a comparative framework for understanding the relationship between state formation, the struggle for power, and women's rights in the Maghrib. Ultimately, the relationship between the state and “kin-based solidarities” affected the nature of family law reforms, which she argues set the parameters for women's rights. Thus, States and Women's Rights makes important contributions to the larger body of literature that examines the question of gender and power in the colonial-nationalist struggle. In some ways, however, she may be limited by the conceptual framework of her study. She equates women's rights with family law, thus seeing agency and power only when they are deployed in the struggle to control and define the structure of the family through the state's legal system. In this narrative, the triumph of Islamic law inevitably means a defeat for women's rights. A greater engagement with recent studies, such as the work of Ziba Mir-Hosseini, that examine Islamic law as a somewhat more porous system in which both theory and praxis are contested and in which women find room for maneuverability would have enriched Charrad's discussion. And anthropological analyses of women's agencies in tribal societies, such as the work of Lila Abu Lughod, would suggest that the posited rigidity of a patrilineal system may indeed leave space for women's voice and agency in ways that are not readily apparent in studies focused on the state.

Still, Charrad's important analysis should be of great interest to scholars of gender studies, nationalism, and state formation. The book offers a multilayered and complex analysis that shows the importance of such factors as gender relations and tribalism in the process of state building throughout the Maghrib; its conclusions are all the more compelling because of its comparative and historical perspectives.