Challenging conventional discourse about African Muslim women as passive victims of religious, ethnic, economic, and cultural oppression, Alidou analyzes the lives and discourse of three prominent women of Niger. She focuses on these women's agency, understood as a capacity to realize one's aspirations in spite of obstacles. More broadly, she discusses the meaning of modernity for Muslim women in Niger today. Alidou is self-reflexive as she incorporates her own voice in the study – the voice of a Muslim female linguist and cultural critic from Niger who now resides and teaches in the United States. The book's qualitative data comprise Niger-based participant observations, interviews, and literary texts (poems, songs, fairytale). A chapter on Niger's political economy of education is supplemented with quantitative sociological data on educational achievement.
The book is divided into three two-chapter parts. Part 1 analyzes “the interplay between women, agency, literacy, and epistemological traditions” (27). Chap. 1 introduces one ethnographic subject – leading female Nigerian Muslim scholar Malama A'ishatu – to illustrate how the democratization of the 1990s created political and cultural space that allowed women to situate “their religious voices in the public arena” (34) and “to create an alternative modernity” (56). Chap. 2 analyzes the impact of the political economy of education on women's lives, examines how Niger's indigenous, Islamic, and Western legacy influenced women's orality/literacy and education, and discusses Islamic-based alternative educational opportunities created by women as means of empowerment.
In Part 2, Alidou examines performance and folklore as realms of expression of new identities among women. Those interested in language use and discourse analysis will find this section interesting. Chap. 3 offers a critical discourse analysis of Alidou's interviews with a female public performer, Hajia Habsu Garba, and her songs. Chap. 4 examines Habsu's public narrative of a fairytale as an example “of a subversive counterdiscourse in the arena of female resistance through the performing arts” (27).
Part 3 discusses women's political struggle in times of ideological or military conflict. Chap. 5 examines how, because of socioeconomic and political instability in the 1990s Niger, “different aspects of Islam in the urban landscape are appropriated and mobilized, especially by women” (150) to position themselves as agents in the discursive spaces of Islam and the nation. Based on the life story of a third ethnographic subject, chap. 6 examines how the Tuareg Rebellion redefined the notion of womanhood on local and national scales.
Alidou partly succeeds at demonstrating how Niger Muslim women's agencies exemplify their new meanings of modernity – a theoretical claim presented at the beginning of the book. Although she initially emphasizes a broader context of political, economic, historical, ethnic, and cultural power relations in Niger, her primary data come overwhelmingly from the social biographies of her three subjects, and the links between these micro-level data and the larger social realities are not always specified. The biggest limitation of the book is methodological: the author's reliance on three subjects who, despite some differences, are highly atypical of Niger's Muslim women. Two of the three women are of noble background and part of the urban elite, and the third is an important national political figure. It is unclear how their stories represent the struggle (and agency) of average Muslim women in Niger. Finally, the reader is left to wonder how the researcher/subject (power) relationship is affected by the subjects' close proximity to power and by the author's personal friendship with them.
Overall, the book is more social theory- and cultural studies-oriented rather than linguistically oriented, and it will be useful to scholars in cultural studies, women studies, African studies, or Islamic studies.
