Robert W. Hefner, ed., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 358 pages.

We can sense, Robert Hefner announces in the introduction to this edited volume, “a new dynamic of popular participation and contestative pluralism … inspiring dreams of a Muslim politics that is civil and democratic” (p.11). Herein lies the book’s singular thesis. Since 9/11, scholars have spilled enormous quantities of ink in convincing western audiences that radical violence and ideological intolerance do not characterize mainstream Islam. Yet the quest to delineate Islam’s compatibility with democracy often meant ignoring the complexity of ideas within the stream of democratic Muslim thought. This eclectic collection fills this gap, bringing together twelve authors who demonstrate the rise of new Islamic voices promoting civic pluralism within the boundaries of religious tradition. However, they also show that such views have triggered fierce contestation from more conservative interlocutors. In laying out a sweeping map of these battles, the volume performs a necessary service to general scholars of Islamic politics.

This book ties together thirteen remarkably diverse chapters, most consisting of detailed case-level analyses of countries as diverse as Egypt, Malaysia, and France. They all revolve around a deceptively simple claim: An autochthonous discourse of a civil-democratic Islam is emerging in Muslim public spheres and can provide an alternative to the dichotomous trap that plagues political discourse in so many Islamic (especially Arab) countries: either secular autocracy or illiberal Islamism. However, the volume hesitates to provide a theoretically robust framework for what a civicdemocratic Islam precisely entails beyond the vague notions of “decency” and “equality.” Even accepting the caveat that, as Peter Mandaville warns in his “Sufis and Salafis: The Political Discourse of Transnational Islam,” that “it is not and will never be possible to identify a single form of civil, pluralist Islam” (p. 322), it still behooves the authors to postulate what basic rights and institutions would emerge under a minimal view of a civic-democratic Islamic order.

Thus, there are many well-researched chapters, among them Gwenn Okruhlik’s “Empowering Civility through Nationalism: Reformist Islam and Belonging in Saudi Arabia,” Bahman Bakhtiari’s investigation of former President Khatami’s reform program in “Dilemmas of Reform and Democracy in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” and Jenny White’s study of the Justice and Development Party in “The End of Islamism? Turkey’s Muslimhood Model.” However, while they explore the national contexts of discursive struggle, they give little empirical guidance as to how the most basic variables (e.g., political structures and economic relations) might change if civic-democratic Islamic voices do triumph.

Such vagueness also clouds the contradictory articulations of Muslim democracy in other chapters. For instance, M. Qasim Zaman’s essay, “Pluralism, Democracy, and the `Ulama,” establishes that the `ulama will continue to retain a central role in any Islamic political order. Compare this with Thomas Barfield’s contribution, “An Islamic State Is a State Run by Good Muslims: Religion as a Way of Life and Not an Ideology in Afghanistan,” which concludes that such deference to traditional authority has deterred the formation of independent political parties in post-Taliban Afghanistan, institutions that he concedes are part-and-parcel of a functional democratic system (p. 237)

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