Western publics have long had a keen, if not always well-informed, interest in the politics of Islamic religious reform. Whatever it was that was thought to have Gone Wrong—the economic, scientific, and technological backwardness of Muslim societies, their belated democratization and political modernization, or excessive fondness for violence and misogyny—it has often been argued that some kind of reform of Islam itself is a necessary prerequisite for Muslims finally getting with the program. Lots of people have gotten in on the game, from the U.S. State Department to glossy newsweeklies to self-styled latter-day Orwells like Paul Berman.

There is nothing wrong with an interest in Islamic religious reform, of course, and there is no a priori reason to think that religious authority and dominant religious values have absolutely nothing to do with political development. The problem is that Westerners just do not tend to be very good at asking the right questions about Islamic religious discourses, particularly when discussing them in public. We tend to think in terms of historical analogies to Western experiences (often poorly remembered; so “Who is the Muslim Luther?” or “When is the Muslim Reformation happening?”). We also tend to see a variety of distinct issues as bundled together, for example, that a Muslim thinker’s views on the status of the Qur'an and flexibility of Islamic law go hand in hand with political views that we would regard as “moderate.” We are thus often not sure where to draw the boundaries between good guys and bad guys but are sure that there are such boundaries. Indeed, the very concept of “reform” is problematic. We, in our inevitable Whiggery, assume that “reform” means to move ineluctably from a more traditionalist or fundamentalist position to a more liberal one. However, in Islam, the concept of reform (islah) is just as commonly associated with “correction” and “purification,” which involves restoring an original purity, rather than evolving toward something new.

For these reasons, Muhammad Qasim Zaman’s Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age could not be more welcome. The book presents a set of important debates on core Islamic religious concepts, some of which have almost become part of the English language: ijma‘ (consensus), ijithad (independent religious reasoning), and maslaha (public welfare, common good). It also covers a number of key subjects of public debate in the modern Islamic world: religious education, gender equity, social justice, and the rules of jihad. But the book is not just a survey of opinions and doctrines on these topics. Rather, it uses them to study the politics of internal criticism and the quest for religious authority in the modern, postcolonial, transnational Islamic public sphere.

Zaman’s views ought to be of great interest even to scholars not particularly interested in the weeds of modern Islamic religious debates, for the practice of “internal criticism” (or “connected criticism”) is more complicated than the notion of “criticism internal to the Muslim community,” thus excluding only non-Muslims. Criticism may be internal to the community of trained religious scholars (‘ulama’); but who is a scholar (’alim) in modern conditions? Criticism may be internal to a particular legal school (madhhab), but these have decreased in importance in the past 150 years. Criticism may be internal to a particular trend (tayyar) or “way” (manhaj), but Muslim intellectuals are resistant to accepting the kind of denominationalism beloved of Protestants.

Moreover, modern Islam has not developed the kind of semiofficial ritual differentiation into “Orthodox,” “Conservative,” and “Reform” branches. In important ways, the transnational Islamic public sphere does remain a site of shared debates over values, commitments, and, above all, methods. The actual fault lines between discursive communities that see themselves as developing a coherent tradition or body of authority within Islam are often very hard to identify, and, again, these communities do not necessarily bundle hermeneutic or methodological commitments with political or ethical ones. A trend may be exceptionally traditionalist and rigorist on how to read the Koran, while also being politically quietist, while another may be flexible and dynamic in its hermeneutics but politically illiberal. This is one important reason why the politics of Islamic authority and internal criticism are often so poorly understood in Western public debates, and why we need a guide as expert, patient, and thorough as Zaman.

The author focuses on a set of core intellectual figures at the beginning and end of the twentieth century, namely, the Syrian Muhammad Rashid Rida, Indian scholars affiliated with the Deoband madrasa and the most famous contemporary Sunni scholar, the Egyptian-Qatari Yusuf al-Qaradawi. One particularly valuable aspect of this book is the depth with which it treats scholarly debates from India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, not as an alternative tradition to the better-known debates from the Arab heartland of Islam but as part of the shared experience of modern Islam. Zaman’s Introduction has an outstanding, yet concise, summary of the respective lives and times of these scholars, with equal focus on their modern educations and political engagement. If there is a dominant theme here, it is Zaman’s insistence that traditional Muslim scholars must not be read out of the history of modern internal criticism, that “the traditionally educated religious scholars, who may be thought to have a vested interest in the preservation and defense of their tradition, also have often been vigorous critics of particular aspects of that tradition, and, by the same token, important contributors to the debate on reform in Muslim societies” (p. 2).

Readers of this journal will be particularly interested in Zaman’s fascinating discussions of scholars’ debates over “Women, Law, and Society” (Chap. 6), focusing on such contested issues as honor crimes, “bride selling” (vani in South Asia), coerced marriages, polygyny, and whether women who convert to Islam may remain married to their non-Muslim husbands. Suffice it to say that th author tracks a wide range of positions on all of these questions, but focuses with particular subtlety on the way that scholars have to navigate multiple challenges: the force of religious tradition versus pressures toward rethinking tradition, speaking with the authority of an institution versus the desire to speak in one’s own voice, speaking for a local context versus speaking to the global community of Muslims, and the diversity of views in the Islamic legal tradition versus the quest for certainty.

A key observation in this book is that the messiness of Islamic moral and legal discourses does not eviscerate the scholars’ authority but is precisely the medium for their competition over it. Thus, when Zaman turns his attention to the controversial question of suicide bombing in Islamic law as part of his discussion of Qaradawi’s treatise of the rules of war in Islam (pp. 273–81), it becomes clear that a fatwa on a contested modern topic rarely just points to settled doctrine but instead reveals the ambiguity of classical language, the vast range of exegetical and doctrinal texts to chose from, the temporal migration of technical concepts, and—above all—the uncertainty of where legal judgments end and political judgments begin. Here lies Zaman’s major theoretical claim of interest to a non-Islamicist audience: that unlike what Western theorists from Hannah Arendt to Joseph Raz have argued, in Islam “authority” does not mean surrendering one’s own judgment to another without a demand for justification but “is a matter of unrelenting contestation” (p. 33).