The ten articles in this lively and enlightening collection all revolve around questions of religious authorities, their authority, and connections to state power and/or to wider society. In other words the scope is quite vast, and in the short introduction the editors laudably desist from trying to define a narrower analytical framework. This is perhaps not an ‘edited volume’ in the usual sense but rather a showcase testifying to the diversity and vitality of contemporary French Turkology, and more specifically to that of the “Centre d’études turques, ottomanes, balkaniques et centrasiatiques” at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), where these papers were first presented at a “Journée d’étude” (workshop) in 2009. The focus is indeed thus not on the “lands of Islam” it their entirety or even necessarily on Islam at all, but on the Turkic or Turkish-speaking world in all its historical depth, from early modern Central Asia to Ottoman Egypt to the Greek Orthodox monastery of Patmos.

Arranged in rough chronological order, some of the contributions reflect raw new research in original sources while others offer polished syntheses or continuations of previous work by established scholars: Alexandre Papas analyses an unpublished manuscript treatise addressed by the sixteenth-century Naqshbandi Sufi shaykh Ahmad Kasani to the Shaybanid sultan ‘Ubayd Allah, in which asceticism is presented as the ideal virtue of a sovereign; Rachida Chih, building on her already important oeuvre on Sufism in Egypt, traces the career, social ascent and political function of the Khalwati Sufi Ahmad al-Dardir as shaykh of al-Azhar in the eighteenth century; the much regretted Gilles Veinstein (d. 2013) leaves an excerpt from his last research project, on European-Ottoman diplomatic relations, to show how the highest religious authority in the empire, the sheikh’ul-islam, was frequently called upon to play a role in negotiations with foreign officials. Nicolas Vatin, drawing on the monastic archives of Patmos, demonstrates how the Greek hegumen (abbot), who had initially been treated as the quasi-ruler of a tributary state under Mehmed II and continued to serve the Ottomans as a local intermediary and intelligence agent, nevertheless had no political status and came to be seen as a simple government functionary by the late seventeenth century; adopting a more conventional approach, Elisabetta Borromeo for her part reviews the articles of the so-called capitulations (ahdname) to indicate that the Catholic clergy of the empire, having no locally recognised religious head akin to the Orthodox patriarch, increasingly depended on the European powers to intervene on their behalf with the Ottomans.

The papers in the second part of the volume focus on the transformation of religious authority, particularly in regard to Sufism, in the contemporary period. Nathalie Clayer examines a twenty-year-long struggle for power at a Bektashi tekke (lodge) in Albania in the early twentieth century, arguing that the state has not succeeded, perhaps not even today, in completely imposing a national institutional framework on the Bektashi order in which a baba's authority still depends in large part on his local support, control of resources and charisma. Benoît Fliche in turn draws on his extensive ethnographic research within the Alevi community to show how rural dede lineages in Anatolia have multiplied, but thereby also lost prestige and influence, particularly since the 1970s. Two more contributions are based primarily on anthropological fieldwork. Jérôme Cler provides an intimate account (in which the patient and perseverant ethnomusicologist is the central figure) of cem rituals observed in southern Anatolia over the course of several years, and suggests that music can provide the key to understanding several sets of binary opposition or dualities within the community. Anna Neubauer, finally, highlights the place of women in the chains of transmission (silsile) in modern Rifai circles, arguing that spiritual guides such as Cemalnur Sargut have been able to reach numerous followers on account of their personal charisma, even while lacking an institutional basis for their authority.

Special mention might be made of Xavier Bougarel's contribution, at fifty pages the longest and, perhaps fittingly, that occupying the central portion of the volume. A declaration made by the Bosnian-Herzegovinan chief scholar (reis-ul-ulema) Džemaludin Čaušević in favour of Atatürk's secularising reforms in 1928, Bougarel shows, sparked a controversy that soon outgrew the simple question of veiling and relations with Turkey, to address the very foundations of religious authority in the country after the demise of the Ottoman Empire. Confronted both by traditional conservatives and the national council of scholars (džematski medžlis) that denied him the right to rule on religious matters, Čaušević and other progressive ulema carried on their campaign in the press and other new forums of public debate, and thereby contributed to placing the individual believer's exercise of free judgement at the centre of religion in modern Bosnia-Herzegovina.

In summary, this is a very heterogeneous, thought-provoking collection of articles presenting the best of current French studies on the Turkic world, augmented by numerous photos, English summaries and an index, and with only a dozen or so typographical errors. Both the editors and Brill are to be commended for making this fine work available to a wider research audience.