The Kelvingrove Review Issue 12 A Most Masculine State: Gender, Politics, and Religion in Saudi Arabia by Madawi Al-Rasheed Cambridge University Press, 2013 (ISBN: 978-0-521-76104-8). 333pp. Noor Sanauddin (University of Glasgow) A casual thought of Saudi women conjures up two stereotypical images in the mind – a woman in a black abaya (veil) who is a victim of Islam and Sharia; or a wealthy woman enjoying the luxuries of oil wealth. Madawi Al-Rasheed, Professor of Anthropology of Religion at King’s College, University of London, set straight these and other such stereotypes about Saudi women in her new book – A Most Masculine State: Gender, Politics, and Religion in Saudi Arabia. She argues that rather than Islam itself, it is the tacit partnership between the ruling Al-Saud family and Wahhabiyya (a strict version of Islam) which has manipulated the image of women for religious and political interests. She provides a detailed account of how, in the process of creating a Saudi nation-state based on a pious Islamic nationalist identity, ‘[w]omen become boundary markers that visibly and structurally distinguish this pious nation from other ungodly polities’ (p.16). The book is distinctive in its theoretical and methodological approaches. Its combination of feminist theory with anthropology and history and its use of a wide range of sources (textual documents, interviews, and even internet sources) are well suited to the nature of investigation. This has enabled the author to situate the ‘women’s question’ in the evolution of Saudi state to explain how the state turned Wahhabiyya from a ‘religious revivalist movement’ into a ‘religious nationalist movement’ in order to unify the different tribal groups into one ‘pious nation’. Like most nationalist movements, Saudi religious nationalism appropriated women, unified them under one black abaya, and then continued to present these publically invisible women as the most visible symbols of religio-national identity of Saudi Arabia. The State-Wahhabiyya partnership is most clearly visible in the form of girls’ education and Mutawween (a religious police working under the doctrine of