Megan Reid's rich and erudite study of the intersection of devotional piety and the culture of Islamic law in Ayyubid and Mamluk urban societies expands our understanding of medieval Muslim religious culture in invaluable ways. At the most basic level, she has opened a window into how the lives of a host of individuals were shaped not simply by their understanding of what it meant to be a good Muslim, but also by the numerous personalized forms of ritual behavior and voluntary body-focused religious activities that they performed. These practices—what she calls bodily devotion (derived from taʿabbud as opposed to taqwā, God-fearing piousness)—were at the heart of religious life. They were highly valorized and formed the central criterion of who should be considered religious exemplars. The practitioners were no longer the ascetics and hermits of old, but people from all walks of life: Sufis, mendicants, shopkeepers, jurists, military administrators, and sons of amirs. We meet scrupulously devoted men, and sometimes women, fashioning lives that were centered on long fasting regimens, night vigils, subsisting on meager diets, washing their bodies and garments obsessively, making the pilgrimage multiple times (even on foot), or refusing food provided by waqf-supported institutions for fear of being defiled by the moral failures of donors. Reid argues that this type of devotional practice has gone largely unnoticed precisely because it was so common, and because it was not associated with any particular social group.

A critical set of insights that Reid offers centers on the relationship between devotional piety, asceticism, and Sufism. According to an entrenched scholarly consensus, when Sufism rose as a distinct form of piety in the 9th century it spiritualized and absorbed preexisting asceticism, which would henceforth cease to function as an important ideal in its own right. Instead, Reid demonstrates that old ascetic practices of bodily mortification persisted, with new and diverse practitioners both emulating and expanding on the repertoire of earlier exemplars. Moreover, the whole new devotional piety came to have a broader appeal than what might be expected: it was clearly not simply the purview of Sufis. It is in this context that Reid sets out “to render problematic the category of the Sufi, which too often remains a catch-all category for pious persons” (p. 7).

Just as central to the project of Law and Piety in Medieval Islam is a set of insights concerning the relationship between devotional piety and the culture of Islamic law. The two modes of piety—one prioritizing individual and often solitary behavior, the other centered on the mosque and madrasa and emphasizing collective responsibility—were distinct and sometimes in tension with each other, but they also intersected in important ways. Even recluse ascetics could teach hadith, and sometimes law. Moreover, learning alone could not generate religious authority; one also needed to exhibit excellence in devotional piety. Jurists such as ʿAbd Allah Ibn Taymiyya (the brother of the more famous Ahmad), whose story opens and ends the book, doubled as pious exemplars and might wear the label of scholar uncomfortably. Numerous other jurists who were exemplars of world-renouncing piety used bodily ascetic and pious behavior not to overturn the law but to converse with it. Through their behavior they set standards that were observed and emulated and that found their way into the collections of substantive law written by jurists. All of these interactions conferred on medieval Islamic culture a vibrancy that belies an old view of Islam as a religion of textual learning and dry legalism.

Following a line of investigation pioneered by scholars of Islamic law, Reid shows how devotional piety, just like the legal tradition, was an evolving set of norms and attitudes, not a fixed body of practices. She argues that over time piety was subject to change in even more profound ways than Islam's legal traditions. But the two sets of dynamics were also linked in fundamental ways, with piety evolving in response to changing realities, to the ever-growing corpus of exemplary practice available for emulation, and to changes in juridical discourse—and in what the jurists did with their own bodies. While Reid is interested in exploring change in devotional piety—and how it was generated—throughout the medieval period, her focus is Ayyubid and Mamluk societies of the 13th and 14th centuries. What she finds here, among other things, is a devotional piety that had become more accepting of strenuous practices than before, and that had lost some elements once central to asceticism, such as a preoccupying fear of God. Furthermore, devotional practice was now discussed not only in terms of observance of the Prophet's sunna; it was rationalized in reference to a much wider body of exemplary behavior created over the centuries—and might even be discussed in entirely different terms, including ones derived from a new physiological discourse.

Particularly revealing of changing attitudes to piety are instances of what Reid calls “ethical asceticism,” in which the pious might refuse food (or income) from waqf-supported institutions. Unlike the old asceticism, such a refusal was a matter neither of renunciation nor of avoiding foodstuffs that might be physically impure. Consuming and exchanging food were mechanisms through which individuals of this era negotiated social relationships and social standing. In this case, refusal was an expression of moral scrupulosity in a world that was newly characterized both by increasingly visible corruption in the management of waqf and iqṭāʿ properties and by the very large systems of charity that sultans, amirs, merchants, and wealthy women set up. Thus for Reid this form of devotional piety was an example of exercising and exhibiting moral responsibility rather than of renunciation, and an instance of engaging with the world, not of retreating from it. In addition, refusing food that might be morally contaminated because it was the end result of newly corrupt systems of production, distribution, and profit is a pleasing illustration of how piety of this period “defined itself in response to gradual changes in the fabric of religious culture, and [to how] the devotees perceived themselves as facing a different set of ethical and social problems” created by new social and political realities (pp. 127–28).

A number of methodological issues underlying Reid's inquiry merit attention. First, part of the originality of this study stems from the decision to organize it around features of piety rather than types of practitioners and their social provenance. Thus, Chapter 1 investigates the persistence of asceticism and its meaning in late medieval religious culture; Chapter 2 explores voluntary fasting as the quintessential embodiment of devotional piety; Chapter 3 examines self-regulation in giving and receiving food; and Chapter 4 focuses on practices of ritual purity, and especially what came to be called “anxiety in ritual purity.” Only one group, the muwallahūn, or “mystic eccentrics,” is accorded separate treatment in the book's last chapter, just before the general conclusions. Second, by reading biographical and hagiographic materials, works of jurisprudence, and hortatory literature, among other kinds of sources, imaginatively and against each other, Reid is able to breathe life into people's daily devotional practice while also clarifying long-term changes in piety. She draws on biographical collections both for what their authors thought of pious individuals and as a more generic source of information on exemplary behavior. And she treats jurists as scholars-cum-exemplars who influenced society through their writing as well as their devotional bodily practice, which others observed and emulated. The result is a highly textured picture of the kind that is often assumed to be attainable only through the use of better descriptive sources, including court records.

Third, given that Reid's evidence comes almost entirely from the Ayyubid and Mamluk realms, I find insufficiently problematized her assertion that “pious practices were easily understood and transmitted across Islamic cultures,” creating a “shared piety” of wide geographic scope (p. 5). We would have benefitted from a discussion, perhaps in the introduction, of what she makes of recent scholarship on body-centered Muslim piety in other geographic areas, especially Shahzad Bashir's Sufi Bodies: Religion and Society in Medieval Islam, which explores a new form of bodily focused Sufi culture that emerged in Persianate societies of Iran and Central Asia between 1300 and 1500, precisely the period of Reid's study. Granted, Bashir's book (like other recent scholarship attentive to Muslim bodily practice) focuses on Sufis and Sufi culture, categories that Reid seeks to transcend; but if it is first and foremost the features of piety that are at stake, then what they have to say must have relevance to her inquiry. Of course, this quibble is not meant to diminish in any way the incredible richness that Reid brings to the investigation of devotional piety in those societies to which her book is devoted.