Margot Badran has assembled in this very useful volume 12 articles by outstanding scholars and ethnographers in the fields of African Studies and Islamic Studies. By focusing on political, social and economic societal micro-processes that are often ignored in text-focused Islamic legal studies, this volume helps reveal how particular conceptions of Islamic law are naturalised and valenced ‘a historical’ in particular African societies.

One of the strengths of this volume is its emphasis on analysing how canonical texts and the social conventions that attend their interpretations are negotiated and at times subverted by women who contest ‘the text’ as a male epistemological space. Beverly B. Mack's opening essay, for example, ‘Muslim Women's Knowledge Production in the Greater Maghrib’ shows the creative means and genres by which women in West Africa have historically accessed and represented their own traditions. Mack gives a lucid account of one of the most important such female intellectuals of African modernity, Asma'u Dan Fodio, daughter of 'Uthman Dan Fodio, the founder of the Sokoto Caliphate (r. 1809–1900) in Hausaland (today's Northern Nigeria), emphasising Asma'u Dan Fodio's stress on obedience to Islam – and by extension, I would argue, the emerging Sokoto caliphate – both spiritually and ethically.

Another strong example in this volume of the ‘hermeneutics of experience’ is Sa'diayya Shaikh's chapter, ‘Embodied Tafsir: South African Muslim Women Confront Gender Violence in Marriage’, which outlines two dominant possibilities for a Qur'anic conception of marriage: one that is based in a notion of fundamental equality before God or one that upholds a patriarchal social structure. Shaikh argues that because of the high level of gender violence internationally, Qur'an 4:34 ‘demands reinterpretation from the perspective of women's experience’ (p. 92), thereby introducing the hermeneutic of experience to the menu of interpretive possibilities. Shaikh interviews eight Muslim women between the ages of 28 and 43, showing how they offer an alternative to standard exegesis, which they characterise as a dispassionate engagement with scripture. By contrast, these women read scripture through the prism of their own experience and with an eye toward interpretations of Islam that help them make sense of that.

A broad critique of some of the work in the volume is the tendency, at times, to take for granted the assumption that canonical texts like Qur'an and Hadith contain inherently libratory agendas for women that have simply been lost in centuries of male-dominated interpretation and subsequent historiography. I believe such charitable interpretations are better understood as a function of societal needs and women's approach to scripture – in other words, as an artifact of social history – rather than a reflection of the texts themselves. However, holding this caveat in mind does not detract from how highly useful and productive the dynamic convergence of ethnography and scripture is in this excellent volume.