Shari ʿa Law and Modern Muslim Ethics is an impressive collection of essays produced through the Pardee School of Global Affairs at Boston University. The point of departure for the creation of this edited volume was the perception held by the editor and contributors of a historical moment wherein certain movements tried to purge Muslim societies of non-sharia ethical systems in the name of religious purity (10–12). The study of this moment is a continuation of a trend within the study of Islam in recent decades that has seen a move away from strictly textualist analysis toward a more wholistic understanding of Muslims’ religious behaviors. This volume comes as a reinforcement of that trend in its attempt to better understand the global shift toward purist ethicolegal stances in Muslim societies.

While the collection features contributions by well-known authors of diverse disciplinary backgrounds, the anthropological training of the editor, Robert W. Hefner, shows in the anthropological bent to the theoretical elements of his introduction. Hefner's introduction provides several important contributions to the study of Islam more narrowly and the ethicolegal aspects of religion more broadly. Hefner's theoretical insights are particularly important to the study of Islamic law as it is often undertheorized, though remarkably rich in evidence. By showcasing the multivalence of ethicolegal understandings at popular and scholarly levels in a wide variety of historical contexts, Hefner characterizes this evidence-rich body of work, with some justification, as expanding a discussion that is often reductionist despite its many insights.

Hefner provides what he calls four “keys” to understanding ethicolegal change and world building, the ways in which people build ideas of the way the world should be and how that construction changes with time (8–9). The entire process derives from what Hefner calls “Muslim legal and ethical plurality” (8), meaning the diversity of views that contribute to the world-building process. The first theoretical key to understanding this process is to keep in mind that fiqh (Islamic law) and other forms of Islamic ethical discourse are contingent upon society. They emerge and evolve with reference to societies insofar as the scholars involved in fiqh discourse make decisions and arguments with reference to their broader societies. Despite their education and immersion in Islamic scholarly traditions, these scholars are also members of societies that have their own, distinct ethical frameworks. These social ethics inform the scholarly ethics and the resulting discussions of morality.

These social forms of ethical production are, themselves, the second key to understanding ethicolegal world building for Hefner. Non-scholars and scholars alike participate in a wide variety of cultural performances that generate their own form of ethics. Contrary to the position of many observers, it is not that these cultural performances are not “Islamic” (that is, they are unrelated or antithetical to Islam), but that they are cultural products distinct from the scholarly discourse of Islamic ethics. This second theoretical key can be seen in the increasingly common maxim that, before the modern period, “everyone was a Sufi,” which is to say that effectively all Muslims, including scholars, took part in rituals like shrine culture that would be considered Sufi or Shia rituals today. These rituals are among the cultural performances that produce a form of ethics among participants. Hefner reforumalates this maxim with a reminder that what this key notion actually means is that there was no firm boundary between what was Sufi and what was Sunni and many scholars were both, so that it is not that everyone was a Sufi but that the lived experience of Islam was rooted in Sufi rituals rather than, for example, sharia-oriented legalism.

Scholars knew of and participated in the popular ethical practices, but the reverse was rarely true—non-scholars rarely knew the scholarly conceptions of ethics. Hefner's third key to ethicolegal world building, then, is that scholarly knowledge is available to lay Muslims only through specific insights. A fatwa, for example, is a method by which a lay Muslim might petition a scholar for access to the scholarly ethical tradition on a specific topic or they could consult an imam at a mosque. This key means that there are modes of communication between various ethicolegal registers, although as the first two keys indicate, that communication was severely limited.

The fourth and final key to ethicolegal world building is that a single person or group will have many “moral registers” (that is, modes in which to understand the morality of the world around them) in which to process ethical concerns. As in the examples of fiqh and Sufi shrine rituals, these registers vary in levels of codification—fiqh being highly codified and shrine rituals being preserved in practice with little or no codification—but the levels of codification have little or no relation to the importance of that register to understanding Muslim ethicolegal stances. Hefner draws attention to the fact that ethicolegal frameworks overlap one another in a given time and place, so that while one register may (or may not) be internally consistent, any given individual or group will experience several different “moral registers” that may compete and conflict with one another. Hefner hopes that these keys will form the bases for any number of future studies of the interaction between humans as polyvalent ethical subjects on the one hand and positive state law on the other, a theme that informs a significant portion of the rest of the book.

The four keys in Hefner's introduction emerge from the work of the contributing authors in the volume, the chapters of which are organized into three parts. The first part, “Shariʿa Pluralities,” deals with less-discussed understandings of sharia. Anver Emon forcefully and convincingly asserts that discourses of sharia operate in many different registers or social imaginaries and that none of these can be ignored if one is to understand the discourse either as a whole or its participants. Reminding the reader that the premodern discourses of fiqh were doctrinal and almost entirely created for a fictional utopia, Emon discusses ways in which this premodern understanding of fiqh becomes distorted within the modern context of positive law, with particular attention to the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS. Ziba Mir-Hosseini examines the birth of a new discourse of gender among Muslims who confront the inherently patriarchal nature of the premodern fiqh tradition in the context of Enlightenment ideals such as universal human rights and equality. She posits that issues of gender equality are simply nonexistent in the premodern tradition and these issues thus require a new Muslim ethical discourse in order to deal with them and avoid the patriarchal assumptions of the past. Zakia Salime examines ethical debates about and within the new arena of the internet. She examines the outcry both on- and offline surrounding the suicide of Amina Filali after she was forced to marry her alleged rapist at the age of fifteen. This examination is done in the context of the ethical conflict between feminism and Islamism in the Moroccan cultural arenas. The two discussions of gender and feminism, combined with the examination of the mismatch between positive law and the Islamic legal tradition, highlight two developing directions for the study of Islamic thought.

The second section of the book contains a series of case studies that, taken together, illustrate the great changes and challenges faced by the projects that began in the twentieth century to bring the Islamic ethicolegal tradition in line with the emerging nation state and universalizing concepts such as human rights. This second section, “Islamic Law and the State,” deals with specific cases of nation states interacting with Islamic law. Malika Zeghal discusses the Tunisian constitutional drafting process. Specifically, she discusses the debate over what it means to be a Muslim state and to be a democratic one as separate but not inherently contradictory identity markers. Zeghal's primary concern is how the debate over the role of religion in and around the state unfolded and reached consensus on a broad set of issues, divorcing the chapter from issues of the true nature of an Islamic polity. Clark B. Lombardi and Connie J. Cannon discuss the evolution of the concept of forbidding wrong within the context of the Egyptian state. While the Qu'ranic injunction to forbid wrong has historically been viewed as an individual and interpersonal matter, certain Islamist groups in Egypt attempted to use state structures, particularly courts, to compel others to follow their interpretations of Islam. While this legalist impulse eventually died out, it nonetheless produced a new understanding of the ways in which individual humans and the sharia interact. Ahmet T. Kuru recants his own optimism about Turkey as a model democracy for other Muslim-majority countries and discusses the historical reasons for the optimism among scholars and the crisis that soured the optimism. He concludes by saying that Turkey must learn more about the structure of Western governments if it wishes to maintain its democracy. Muhammad Qasim Zaman examines what he calls “Islamic modernism” (e.g. 179) in Pakistan—the effort to recover or uncover the spirit of Islam and enact it in a way that is in line with modernity, particularly in terms of ethics. In so doing, he illustrates how this sort of project contains within itself contradictory impulses, particularly in the confrontation of ethical ideals with the pragmatism of politics, compounded by authoritarian governance.

The third section, “New Ethical Imbrications,” deals with the moral registers Muslims and how those registers overlap with one another. Dorothea Schulz's discussion of Islamism in Mali is directed toward undermining the persistent narrative of Islamist politics as an outside imposition, wherever they arise. Rather than assuming that the sudden emergence of and coup by Islamists in Mali can be attributed to outside factors such as unrest in Libya, Schulz directs her attention to the emergence in the preceding decades of a new discourse about the role of Islamic ethics in public and private life. This emergence occurred during a time in which Mali was viewed widely as a model democracy. Islamist political discourse thus emerged in a complicated and overlapping relationship with discourses of democracy and modernization. Michael G. Peletz provides a long-term study of Malaysian religious courts stemming principally from an ethnographer's detailed knowledge of a single court that he had the opportunity to study twice, three decades apart. He provides a narrative of continuity at the level of discursive content, especially relating to discourses of gender and power. Simultaneously, his narrative demonstrates a great deal of change at the level of institutional practice and structure from the late 1980s to the early 2010s. Robert W. Hefner looks at a longer time period than most of the authors in this volume, from the late nineteenth century until the early twenty-first century. He examines the historical circumstances that have led to a “relatively reformed understanding of Islamic law and ethics” (260), one that has informed and interacted with women's rights movements in Indonesia. He then posits that the case of Indonesia, properly understood, could provide insight into how other Muslim countries could strive towards a simultaneously Islamic and “gender-equitable” form of Islamic ethics (260). The chapters in this third section deal with the many and varied ways in which discourses of Islamic ethics emerge in relation with other ethical modes and the chapters deal with the complex interplay of their overlapping claims on public and private life.

In sum, this volume contains a great deal of detail about a diverse set of issues relating to the modern understanding and practice of sharia. However, its enduring contribution to the study of Islam will be in its assertion of the overlapping moral fields through which all humans move and the various registers we all have for expressing our ethical subjectivities. This observation is impossible without a shift from text to practice, and this point is well taken. This said, text reemerges as important in the context of the nation state's positive law and its interaction with the Islamic ethicolegal tradition.