When popular publications discuss the crossroads of Islam, gender, and democracy, they are often content to report deficiencies and failures or worse. Inevitably, it seems, the focus gravitates toward the violence against women in Cairo's Tahrir Square, or on the Arab Spring and its subsequent Winter. Systematic connections to other regions are rare, as if all, or even most, of the world's Muslims lived in the Middle East. Furthermore, women's rights are often treated as one block. The introduction of this admirable volume makes an important distinction between women's economic, political, and social rights on one side, and women's rights in the realm of family and divorce on the other. In many countries—Iran and Malaysia, for instance—women are well represented in education and leadership positions, but starkly disadvantaged in the realm of family law.

The most significant achievement of this new volume edited by Jocelyne Cesari and José Casanova is its broad scope, both in terms of regions as well as disciplinary outlook. Written by a wide range of area specialists and theorists, the individual chapters are sharp case studies that treat a wide range of subjects: the retreat of the Catholic church from formal politics as opposed to the politicization of Muslim identity in many societies; the secular “civilising mission” towards religious women in France; changing Islamic moral registers and explicitly Islamic feminism in Indonesia; Personal status and family law are compared among India, Bangladesh, and Senegal, as well as between Greece and Israel, and the intertwined struggles for democracy and women's rights are compared among Iran, Morocco, and Tunisia, with a separate study treating Malaysia. The geographical choices are a refreshing widening of the scholarly optic beyond the familiar Arab-centric takes on these topics.

In Part 1 of the book, chapters on particular religio-political trajectories orient readers among several bodies of literature: anthropology, sociology, and history. Each of chapter is written with an eye to questions of (liberal) democracy and, together with some theoretical remarks on secularism in the introduction, they serve as an all too rare effort to link between these disciplines, and to connect with the concerns of political science. For political scientists particularly, many of the insights on Islam and democracy, as well as Muslim feminism in the case of Indonesia, will be new. The chapters by Robert Hefner and Susanne Schröter are excellent introductions to the world's largest Muslim population—Indonesia.

Part 2 of the book is dedicated to the varieties of personal law in several legal systems and offers in-depth understandings of the double discrimination that many women living under group-specific family law experience. Katherine Marshall shows how separate personal status laws for Bangladesh's Muslims, Hindus, and Christians “discriminate in overlapping but distinct ways.” Yüksel Sezgin's comprehensive comparison of family laws in Greece and Israel traces the various sources of hindrances and advances for political reform. The comparative chapters on Bangladesh and Senegal, as well as Greece and Israel, dismantle simplistic notions of homogenous majorities and minorities. Instead, the chapters emphasize the power of those few who successfully claim to represent a particular community.

Vrinda Narain's study of legal pluralism in India neatly summarizes the problem of allocating rights within the state's framing of diversity in terms of “groups”: “In postcolonial India,” she writes, “pluralism can be seen as a form of governmentality understood as managing difference based on religious status, which set up elite, male religious leaders as group representatives in control over group membership and with authority over women and minorities within the group” (197). This point captures some of the key problems that liberal democracies, but also international organizations and regimes, face in their attempts to cater to and regulate religious difference. Maila Stiven's detailed case study of women's rights movements in Malaysia raises the similar point but also analyzes the tensions that Muslim activists face when they employ the language of rights in an authoritarian system that couches its modernization project in a language of piety and progress. She also connects the Malaysian case to general trends of professionalization within women's rights movements across Asia, which runs the risk of undermining its political force, partly due to accusations of detachment from grassroots activism. Interconnections like this turn the book into a cohesive collection, both despite and because of the diversity of its cases.

The type of interdisciplinarity on display in this volume perhaps inevitably comes at the cost of some analytical depth. In this case, the price is mainly paid in the introduction, which struggles to integrate the diversity of the volume's case studies. Broad-sweeping claims of “the academic consensus” (2), “the Western experience” (5), “the Islamic tradition” (7), and one-sided criticism of imposing Islamic dress (without pointing at European examples of banning that same dress) obscure some of the finer detail and argumentation of the case studies themselves. The claim, for instance, that “the nexus of women's rights, Islam, and democracy has been little analyzed” (2), overlooks decades of scholarly and activist work on that very topic, from Fatima Mernissi to Zainah Anwar, and from Margot Badran to Amina Wadud. These names appear in the index, but the references to these scholars come at fleeting moments in the chapters rather than forming part of the book's orienting framework. The volume also avoids engaging with several of the most significant theoretical works in gender studies and feminist theories of democracy, without justifying these omissions. One may disagree with—to only mention a few theorists—Judith Butler, Seyla Benhabib, Jane Mansbridge, and Chantal Mouffe, but to avoid any engagement with their work is puzzling for a volume that is interested in moving the theoretical discussion forward. Nancy Fraser's work on rethinking Jürgen Habermas' Public Sphere and on the tensions between recognition and redistribution is again only cited by authors of individual chapters. The missed chance of weaving connections between these major theoretical departures and the case studies is particularly unfortunate, especially as the editors succeeded in bringing together such an impressive collection of authors, disciplines, and regions.

Perhaps most regrettable is the book's cover. It shows a blurred blue burqa and a finger marked with orange ballot-casting ink, photographed in Kabul in 2014. One of the widest spread journalistic clichés, the image encapsulates the stereotype of the faceless Muslim woman and her liberation through externally-provided elections. The volume does not even contain a case study involving Afghanistan, and surprisingly little is made of the literature of democratization. Whether or not the cover was imposed on the editors by the publisher, its reductiveness does not reflect the remarkable scope of this very useful collection.