to yield competing religious movements: mission churches and spirit medi- umship, under gerontocratic control, are increasingly challenged by the pro- liferation of Pentecostal churches alongside a rash of witchcraft accusations. This kind of fine-grained analysis of competing religious movements and ori- entations within specific local contexts is essential to understanding religion in modern Africa, whether during times of civil war or peace. Precisely because these are individual case studies that do revolve around very different facets of the relationship between war and religion, the volume hardly lends itself to a coherent comparative perspective. In this respect, it is unfortunate that the volume contains no detailed case studies of Muslim responses to civil war, although it is clear that the wars in Sudan, Sierra Leone, and Liberia all involve large numbers of Muslims. Does the pervasiveness of Christian sectarianism lead to different sorts of responses to war among Christians than among Muslims and, if so, under what condi- tions? When does civil war lead to a revival of indigenous African religion, and when does it accelerate its marginalization? However interesting the case studies in this volume are, it is hardly able to begin to address such questions. Robert Launay Professor, Department of Anthropology Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois Remaking Muslim Politics: Pluralism, Contestation, Democratization 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 vio- lence 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 plu- ralism within the boundaries of religious tradition. However, they also show that such views have triggered fierce contestation from more conservative 114 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 24:1