Critical Dialogues

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 midfifteenth 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).