Etty Terem's study of the Moroccan jurist al-Mahdī al-Wazzānī is a welcome and important contribution to the field of modern North African history, and to the study of Islamic law in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries more broadly. Terem uses a monumental compilation of fatāwā (s. fatwā, Islamic legal responsa) by one of Morocco's greatest legal minds to explore how Muslim scholars engaged with modernization. In the process, she also reminds us of the extent to which legal sources can tell us about the past far beyond courts of law. In this vein, Terem fruitfully follows in the tradition of David Powers (one of her mentors), whose 2002 book Law, Society, and Culture in the Maghrib, 1300–1500 uses the fatāwā compiled by Aḥmad al-Wansharīsī (d. 1508) to offer fascinating insights into the sociolegal world of medieval North Africa. By applying this methodology to the modern Maghreb, Terem demonstrates the richness of legal texts and sociolegal history for understanding the Middle East in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Beyond the specific case of al-Wazzānī or even the Maghreb, Terem calls for revising our understanding of how Muslim intellectuals confronted the challenges of modernity. She observes that “. . . the study of Islamic modernism postulated a distinctive image of Islamic tradition as a fixed set of beliefs and practices that . . . understood reform in terms of a rupture with tradition” (178). She understands al-Wazzānī as a scholar who called for the reform and renewal of Islamic law and advocated “fidelity to a madhhab and the authoritative rulings and opinions that had accumulated over centuries of juristic creativity” (178). Terem thus weighs in on the broader debate in Islamic legal studies about ijtihād (independent legal reasoning) vs. taqlīd (the following of precedent within a particular madhhab, or school of law). She argues against the assumption that all Islamic reformers privileged ijtihād. Instead, Terem demonstrates that legal innovation can and did occur through taqlīd (an argument scholars such as Sherman Jackson have made for the classical period). But even more importantly, Terem shows that this sort of innovation could characterize a particularly modern approach to Islam that sought to preserve the boundaries and traditions of a single school of law. In other words, al-Wazzānī's corpus shows that Islamic reformers were not unanimously focused on freeing themselves from a madhhab; indeed, some advocated precisely the opposite.

One of Terem's greatest contributions is to embed al-Wazzānī in the social, intellectual, and political currents of his time (which in and of itself is no easy task). Terem's extensive research around al-Wazzānī—in many ways reminiscent of Natalie Zemon Davis's work on Leo Africanus—allows her to argue that al-Wazzānī was a staunch defender of Mālikī Islam in large part as a reaction against reform-minded challengers to the status quo. These chapters also provide a welcome contribution to the intellectual history of the pre-colonial Maghreb, another topic that is woefully understudied.

The heart of Old Texts, New Practices consists of very close readings of selected fatāwā that Terem uses to explore three main issues: consular protection and relations with Western Christians, the construction of gender and the family, and new patterns of consumption. Each chapter begins with a deeply researched discussion of the historical context behind each issue that serves to contextualize al-Wazzānī's contribution to the debate. Terem uses the historical context of these three issues to make an argument about how al-Wazzānī articulated his vision of Mālikī Islam in the particular cases at hand. These discussions are often subtly surprising, such as the text in which al-Wazzānī argues that drinking the alcoholic beverage known as māʾ al-ḥayāh (commonly referred to as māḥiyā) is, in fact licit (170–2). Taken together, her analysis implies that al-Wazzānī's vision of Islam defies the categorizations often associated with terms like traditionalist or reformer.

Terem's study is akin to a microhistory, in that its focus on a single jurist provides readers with a level of detail and nuance that is often lost in more wide-ranging studies. While this approach is in many ways extremely rich, her work calls out for further studies with a somewhat broader scope to test her farthest-reaching claims. To what extent did other Muslim intellectuals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries advocate a type of reform that remained true to a particular madhhab or to the practice of taqlīd? Did Muslim intellectuals’ discussions of modernity look different if they primarily practiced as jurists, rather than, say, public intellectuals like Rashīd Riḍā? Terem's book will hopefully inspire further studies in similar directions, both in the Maghreb and beyond.