In the Western imagination, Muslim women are perceived as victims of discrimination and the worst of patriarchal practices. Allegedly, they do not have the power to change their lives or reform their societies; they are subject to male control and lack any form of agency. Yet as anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod forcefully argued in 2002 (“Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others,” American Anthropologist. 104(3): 783–790), “Muslim women do not need saving.” In this book, Alice J Kang builds on Abu-Lughod’s claim, thus challenging Western assumptions about Muslim women. She does so by taking an illuminating case study and a relatively unfamiliar area of activity in Muslim-majority states. When they hear the words “Muslim women,” many in the West think of women in the Middle East and North Africa. However, despite the diversity of Arab women’s experiences, they represent a minority of Muslim women worldwide. Kang has chosen to focus on women’s political activism in Niger, a Muslim-majority democracy in West Africa. The argument she seeks to make concerns “both how civil society and the domestic political context are central to understanding Niger’s seemingly inconsistent record of women’s rights policy adoption” (p. 3).

More than 90% of Niger’s 13.7 million population are Muslim. Following independence from France in 1960, Niger, one of the poorest countries in Africa, embarked on its postcolonial existence as a secular state. Progress was not easy, and the country endured instability and authoritarian rule, eventually emerging as a democracy in 1999. This rather turbulent history affected women’s rights in several ways, but as Kang demonstrates, these were not entirely predictable. This is where the fascination of her book lies, in charting the somewhat complex and unexpected ways in which Nigerien women “bargained” for their rights. Just as we think we understand who Muslim women are, the female activists of Niger forcefully remind us that politics are negotiable and often surprising.

Bargaining for Women’s Rights, which “offers an analytic framework for understanding the adoption, and rejection, of women’s rights politics” (p. 26), is structured around four proposed reforms in Niger between 1960 and 2008, two of which were successful and two of which were not. They are, first, family law reform, which was rejected; second, the gender quota law, which was adopted with amendments; third, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which was ratified with reservations; and, finally, the Maputo Protocol, which was rejected. Kang examines all of these reforms very carefully, with reference to mobilization by a wide range of actors, from women’s rights activists and civil society groups to conservative religious organizations and state officials. To gain the necessary information, she conducted 14 months of fieldwork in Niger. The result is a testament to her ability to balance strongly conflicting views and to do so within a framework of appropriate theoretical literature.

In Muslim-majority Niger, according to Kang, a tension can be observed between claims of being a “secular” and a “democratic” state, on the one hand, and on the other, a partial reliance “on religious authorities and so-called Islamic law to regulate family matters” (p. 30). This debate is also present in other states in which Muslims form the majority, both in the Middle East and elsewhere, and it pertains to matters affecting the family and women in particular. In Niger, as the author explains, the debate on family law can be traced back to independence in 1960; during the early postcolonial period, “women mobilized several times to reform the country’s family laws” (p. 47). One of the arguments made by women was that a reform of the family code “would help promote democracy” (p. 58); however, democratization also enabled the rise of Islamic associations, which mobilized against the proposed code. The process by which women’s rights activists tried to make the new family code “thinkable” and how its opponents sought to render it “unthinkable,” including the issuing of a curse against three activists, is explored in great detail. In the end, the family code was rejected by the National Assembly.

The rejection of a measure considered fundamental to Nigerien women’s progress, though a setback, did not deter women’s rights activists. Their next battle was to bargain for greater women’s representation in political life, through the adoption of a gender quota. Kang reports that between 1960 and 1988, “the presence of women in Niger’s formal halls of power was close to nil” (p. 82). As with the family code, activists mobilized through “naming, blaming, and claiming the problem of women’s absence from formal politics” (p. 91), but unlike the previous battle, there was a relative absence of countermobilization by conservative religious activists, and therefore, in 2010 “Niger became one of the first Muslim-majority democracies in the world, to adopt a gender-based affirmative action law for elected positions in politics” (p. 81).

The final two examples explored in this book are international ones. In this part of her research, Kang compares two international women’s rights treaties. Such agreements are important, as she says, “because countries that ratify such agreements generally see improvements in women’s access to education, employment, and elected office” (p. 120). There is also the question of “international reputation,” how a particular state is regarded by the global community. As with domestic legislation, women activists on both sides mobilized. Yet in the case of CEDAW, those who advocated in favor were successful, while for the Maputo Protocol, religious opinion prevailed. Kang speculates at length about the reasons for this outcome; one, she suggests, was that during the CEDAW debate, there was no parliament in place, and military leaders were able to ratify the treaty by military decree, whereas during debates over the Protocol, parliamentarians intervened and, in the end, rejected it. The proper meaning of “democracy” was discussed extensively during this period—and this is another intriguing element of the book; Kang suggests that “the adoption of women’s rights policies does not simply boil down to whether countries are democratic, authoritarian, or transitioning” (p. 147). Such arguments throw into question assumptions about the “unchanging nature” of Muslim-majority states.

These very different outcomes raise intellectually challenging issues within the framework of women’s rights, the contested nature of politics, the international reputation of individual states, and the key role of mobilization. What Kang illustrates vividly in Bargaining for Women’s Rights, and in some depth, is the relationship between mobilization—especially by relatively marginalized groups such as women—and democratic change in a Muslim-majority state. Niger is an appropriate case study as it highlights some of the contradictions inherent in evaluating “the impact of democracy on women’s movements” (p. 158). First of all, democratization enables the mobilization of competing groups (p. 158), not simply those in favor of reform. But secondly, as she notes, “the ability of women’s movements to inform policymaking in democratizing and democratic regimes is complicated because democracy can be made to mean different things” (p. 158).

While recognizing the appropriateness of Niger as a case study, we should also be wary of trying to generalize its experiences to other Muslim-majority states. Each has its own history and its own dynamics, and each has its own active women, reinforcing again Lila Abu-Lughod’s claim that “Muslim women do not need saving.”