Engaging modernity: Muslim women and the politics of agency in postcolonial Niger Ousseina D. Alidou. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. xxi, 235 pp. ISBN 0-299-21210-6 Robert Launay Published online: 26 September 2007 # Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2007 Abstract Ousseina Alidou’ s book is a welcome addition to the growing anthropolog- ical literature on Islam in Africa. In the book, she focuses on the experiences of three very different Muslim women: Malama A ’ishatu, who runs an Islamic school for girls and broadcasts a popular radio show; Habsu Garba, a singer and dancer who also host a radio talk show; and “Agaisha”, a spokeswoman for the armed Tuareg rebellion and, for obvious reasons, the only one of the three denoted by pseudonym. She intersperses chapters which detail the lives of her three heroines with more general discussions of relevant aspects of the situation of Muslim women in Niger. Keywords Islam . Women . Feminism . Niger . West Africa Ousseina Alidou’ s book is a welcome addition to the growing anthropological literature on Islam in Africa. In her study of Muslim women in Niger, she very rightly insists that there is no legitimate basis for marginalizing the experiences of Muslim women in countries like Niger, with an overwhelmingly Muslim population; a feminist book on gender and Islam in Niger is neither more nor less “central” than one on Egypt. In addition, she decries the fact that the few previous studies of Muslim women in Niger have been framed in ethnic terms, as depictions of Hausa or Zarma Muslim women. Ethnicity, she suggests, is not really salient, given the reality of what she calls “le brassage sahelien,” Sahelian mixing. While she is absolutely justified in relativizing the analytical importance of ethnicity, she paradoxically and unfortunately couches her argument in regional terms, as if ethnic intermarriage and Cont Islam (2007) 1:327–329 DOI 10.1007/s11562-007-0024-9 R. Launay (*) Northwestern University, 1810 Hinman Avenue, Evanston, IL 60208, USA e-mail: rgl201@northwestern.edu Present address: R. Launay 932 1/2 Judson Avenue, Evanston, IL 60202, USA