Over the past 20 years, a wave of political openings across the Muslim world has generated demands for the codification and application of Islamic law. Nigeria, Mali, Egypt, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia have all been home to campaigns to extend Sharia-inspired law. These movements are not blips in the postauthoritarian landscape. Rather, they are a persistent feature of electoral politics and civil society. As a result, they raise hard questions for scholars. Are demands for Sharia compatible with religious pluralism? How do these movements affect the interreligious bonds and social capital that is necessary for a strong civil society? If successful, is state codification and application of Islamic law compatible with the differentiation of state and religion that is essential for making democracy work?

These movements also raise questions about the applicability of the Western European model of political development to postcolonial states. While the creation of Christian Democratic parties in Western Europe hastened a process of declining religious observance, the decreased influence of churches, and a gradual differentiation of the state from religion, political development has occurred along different lines in the Muslim world. In the 1950s and 1960s, postcolonial states struggled to reform institutions that were built for the purposes of colonial rule and resource extraction, rather than domestic economic development and social welfare. During the Cold War, these states were often sites for divisive proxy wars between the United States and the Soviet Union, who chose sides in domestic political struggles in order to advance their influence abroad. The decreasing appeal of the Soviet model for economic development led many Muslims to look not toward the United States for ideological inspiration but, rather, to their own traditions, accelerating the Islamic revival of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In other words, political and religious development in the Muslim world has followed a markedly different track, leaving scholars scrambling for productive lines of comparison that will help us to understand future trajectories.

Brandon Kendhammer tackles these concerns in his impressive first book, Muslims Talking Politics. While much of the literature on Islamist movements examines campaigns for Sharia from the normative and rather tendentious question of whether Islam and democracy are compatible, Kendhammer investigates how ordinary Muslims talk and reason about Islam and democracy in public life. His informants’ answers shed light on ordinary Muslims’ vision for their political future in Nigeria, a country with one of the world’s largest Muslim populations as well as considerable religious diversity.

Along the way, Kendhammer does the heavy intellectual work of synthesizing disparate and complicated academic literatures that are too infrequently in conversation. For example, Chapter 2 delves into the interdisciplinary literature on Islamic social movements in order to put that scholarship in serious conversation with democratization theory. His interlocutors include the anthropologists Hussein Agrama, Robert Hefner, and Charles Hirschkind, as well as Islamic Studies scholars like Ebrahim Moosa and social theorists like Craig Calhoun and Seyla Benhabib. The author does so in order to interrogate the similarities and differences between his informants’ political and religious vision and the heterogeneous democratic tradition. On this issue alone, Kendhammer sets a high bar for future scholars to follow. Political scientists ignore the high-quality research on Islam and politics in anthropology and Islamic Studies to their detriment.

Similarly, Chapters 3, 4, and 5 are a detailed chronology of Sharia politics in Northern Nigeria from the mid-fifteenth century through British rule in the early 1900s and into the contemporary period. Two of the book’s six empirical chapters focus on history, showing a commitment as much to African Studies as political science and Islamic Studies. The result is that this book speaks not just to the politics of the moment but will endure as a foundational work in African Studies.

Chapters 6 and 7 are the theoretical meat of the book and draw from Kendhammer’s previously published article, “The Sharia Controversy in Northern Nigeria and the Politics of Islamic Law in New and Uncertain Democracies,” (in Comparative Politics, 45(3), 2013). These chapters present an overview of how Muslims frame their demands for Sharia and the way that these demands are a result of media framing. Media frames structure debates, providing social actors with a set of arguments and logics. Drawing not just the book’s title but a certain ethic of empathy with William Gamson’s Talking Politics (1992) and Kathy Cramer’s Talking about Politics (2004), Kendhammer uses original data from focus group interviews and open coding of Nigerian media to explain how those frames structure and give meaning to Nigerians’ demands for Sharia.

The respondents view Sharia as part of their larger social and political goals. Their most common frame is that Sharia will fix the problems of economic inequality, elite corruption, and underdevelopment that plague Nigeria. In this view, Sharia will hold accountable those leaders who violate Islamic values and engage in corruption. The second most common frame is that Nigeria is a multireligious state and that Sharia will help unify the Muslim population behind a single identity and political cause. In this reading, a unified Muslim community would be best able to work with the unified and influential Christian community. Sharia would help unify an interreligious pious public to better combat prostitution, alcoholism, and the other vices brought on by secularism. The third and final frame focuses most directly on the material benefits of democracy and religious revival. The respondents believe that Sharia will lead to the development of infrastructure, improve the welfare of the poor, improve education, and support mosques and their staffs. In sum, ordinary Nigerian Muslims feel that the implementation of Sharia is not just compatible with democracy but even a benefit of democracy.

As with any book that synthesizes disparate fields into a single narrative, Muslims Talking Politics faces some trade-offs. Kendhammer’s commitment to Nigerian history is laudable, but it does not leave as much room for discourse and content analysis as the reader expects on the basis of the title and motivating questions in the preface. It is only halfway through Chapter 5 that we hear from ordinary Muslims, and the relatively spartan use of original data makes it difficult for Kendhammer to make full use of Gamson’s and Cramer’s approach. The reader is left wondering, for example, whether men and women frame Sharia differently. Likewise, in what ways are ordinary Muslims’ visions for Sharia similar to and different from the vision of Islamic law scholars? Islamic law is not a single text but, rather, an immense field divided by schools of jurisprudence, methods of exegesis, and areas of application. As the author notes, Islamic law has undergone tremendous reform over the twentieth century owing to increased mass education and the decentering of religious authority from the elites to the masses. Tracing the changes in the content of Islamic law over time and space, or charting differences between elites and the masses, is a challenging task, but it is important for scholars to be able to understand where ordinary Muslims’ vision originates. Kendhammer rightly says that “All Sharia is Local” (p. 213), but without comparison of varied visions, it is difficult to explain their provenance.

A related trade-off concerns causality. Kendhammer notes in a thoughtful methodological appendix that frame analysis is not well suited for determining the direction of influence and the nature of the relationship between elite and mass discourse. As a result, we do not know why Nigerian Muslims support state application of Sharia; we only know how they do so. The author is rightfully wary about the book being a normatively charged verdict on whether demands for Sharia are compatible with democracy. He shares Alfred Stepan’s desire to “make democracy work” in places with strong demands for both religious government and democracy. Yet the text is bookended by Kendhammer’s own concerns about Boko Haram, an Islamic insurgency that has slaughtered thousands of civilians, destabilized interreligious cooperation, and further weakened the country’s fragile democracy. Ordinary Nigerian Muslims who demand Sharia do not support Boko Haram. But neither are their origins unrelated (p. 215). Poor governance and underdevelopment have led Nigerians to demand Sharia as a remedy. Once implemented, however, Sharia has failed to achieve the hoped-for “dividends of democracy” (p. 163). Instead, Sharia has proven socially divisive and yet another example of failed governance, thereby contributing to Nigeria’s decade of stalled democratic development.

While Stepan rightly points to the institutional compatibility of demands for religious government and democracy in Western Europe, India, and Senegal, Kendhammer reluctantly acknowledges that Nigeria is a rather different case. It is unclear that a low-capacity state with high levels of corruption and a deeply divided society is capable of the delicate work necessary for reconciling demands for Sharia and democracy. That incapacity makes the lack of a causal story in the book unsatisfying since we do not know how Nigerian Muslims’ preferences might change.

Nevertheless, Muslims Talking Politics is compelling and essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the vision for human flourishing that underlies everyday Muslims’ demand for Sharia. In a productive departure from much of the political science literature that seeks to advance the project of secularization, the book is not a critique of ordinary Muslims’ vision for democracy. Instead, it is an elegantly crafted portrait of the challenges facing Muslim-majority countries at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and an overdue history of Nigeria’s Sharia politics. Kendhammer’s erudite engagement with related literatures in anthropology and Islamic Studies, and his research ethic of empathy, set this book apart from recent work on Islam and politics and should ensure that it has a lasting influence.