Sir Norman Anderson (1908–1994) was a leading British Evangelical missionary of the Church of England and respected scholar of Islamic law but is little known today. With this book, Todd M. Thompson, who wrote Anderson's entry for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2008), seeks to prevent his subject from slipping into further obscurity. His is not, however, a conventional biography. Rather, Thompson looks at Anderson's many missionary and academic publications and talks to examine his intellectual ideas about Islam, Muslims, and Islamic law in the twentieth century. Anderson lived through most of that century, and Thompson admirably covers much ground across ten broadly chronological chapters to document and explain Anderson's work in, mainly, Europe, Africa, and Asia between the 1930s and 1980s.

Thompson begins by outlining Anderson's formative years at Evangelical English public schools, followed by law studies at Cambridge and missionary work in Egypt in the 1930s. Thompson shows that the outbreak of world war in 1939 was a turning point for Anderson. In 1940, he abandoned his pacifism and missionary career to enlist for military service. Anderson was employed by the Military Intelligence (Research) Department of the War Office in Cairo. He became British lead liaison with Sayyid al-Senussi (1889–1983), chief of the Senussi Sufi order and later King Idris of Libya, to recruit Libyan refugees for a covert guerrilla unit. Crucially, the war years deepened Anderson's interest in Islam and exposed him to the vigor of that faith and the reality of Arab nationalism.

Anderson's commitment to the primacy of Evangelical conversion for social change never wavered. However, contrary to traditional Evangelical thinking, he considered Islam to be a genuine but incomplete revelation from God that was neither static or unchanging. By the end of the war, Anderson believed that Islam would have to “modernize” in response to the predicament of modernity and secularization, political changes in the nature of the modern state, and the growth of new states, especially those arising out of the British Empire, which at the beginning of the century had contained over half the world's Muslims. Expecting those new states to “promote the partial differentiation of religion from other spheres of life such as politics and law” (86), Anderson anticipated Islamic reform, specifically through the reform of Islamic law. Thompson argues that Anderson did not underestimate the challenges of reform, but he saw promise in the “modernist” tendencies in Islam, specifically with the revival of ijtihad, or the exercise of human reason to reinterpret the textual sources of the Qur'an (Islam's Holy Book, revealed to the Prophet Muhammad) and the Hadith (the sayings and doings of Muhammad) to reconcile their contents with “the realities of the modern world” (94). He also saw Arab nationalism as an opportunity to foster new legal frameworks and “cleanse Islam of what he believed were its extraneous social, legal and political trappings” (9). Thompson explains that, in the process, Anderson “tried to encourage the fusion of Islam with British middle-class evangelical conceptions of domestic morality and gender relations” and therefore, ironically, “elements of the old civilising mission remained” (9).

In 1947, Anderson joined the staff of the School of Oriental and African Studies, where he remained until retirement in 1975 (he was, concurrently, director of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, 1959–1976). Thompson describes how, as decolonization accelerated, Anderson studied and shaped the legal codes of the new states that emerged from the British Empire, assuming that the West would serve as the model of development and progress for other societies. Between the late 1940s and mid-1970s, Anderson attempted, with varying degrees of success, to build a “transnational coalition of Muslim legal reformers committed to “‘liberalising,’ ‘modernising’ and codifying Islamic law” (7) in, primarily, North Africa (Libya, Tunisia), West Africa (Nigeria), and South Asia (India, Pakistan).

Thompson's fascinating final chapter considers critical responses to Anderson's approach to Islamic reform. In the 1960s and 1970s, some of Anderson's research students took issue with his approach, as did prominent critics of Orientalism such as the Pakistan-based American convert to Islam, Maryam Jameelah (1934–2012) and, in Britain, the historian A. L. Tibawi (1910–1981), who attacked Anderson's meddling in Muslim affairs and argued that attempts to transform Islam through “Westernization” or “modernization” were simply to render it as close as possible to Protestant Christianity.

Tibawi is one of the few British-based Muslims cited in the book, and it is unclear how much contact and discussion Anderson had with Muslim intellectuals or the growing Muslim communities in postwar Britain. Thompson does mention Anderson's response to calls from British Muslim leaders in the 1970s for the formal recognition of Islamic law in Britain, which Anderson rigorously opposed. He argued that Britain had accommodated other minorities such as Jews without officially recognizing their religious laws and questioned why it should risk creating a “community within a community” at a time when Muslim-majority countries and those with significant Muslim minorities such as India were edging toward “the establishment of one secular law applicable to all citizens” (243–44).

Thompson did not set out to write Anderson's life story, but the omission of biographical detail makes it difficult to get a feel for the man or a sense of his world outside of the church and academia and, consequently, to understand how those experiences might have influenced him. Thompson notes toward the end of the book that Anderson's understanding about social justice was raised by his socialist son, Hugh, but does not consider, for example, the influence of Anderson's wife of sixty years, Patricia, or the impact of the tragic and premature deaths of their three children in the 1970s. That said, this book succeeds in its aim of showing how Anderson helped to reconfigure theological responses to Islam in the twentieth century. It is meticulously researched (more than a third is taken up with endnotes and an extensive bibliography) and will especially appeal to those interested in Christian-Muslim relations, Islam, Islamic law, Orientalism, and missiology in the twentieth century, as well as in modern British intellectual and religious history more broadly.