LAUSR

Muslim-ness that are articulated around faith and practice or primarily seen as part of one’s ethnonational belonging (50). This point leads us to the second centrally stated aim of this study. Besides its ostensible focus on Islam, this study is equally a contribution to another fast-growing topic: the anthropology of secularism. Building on the seminal work of Talal Asad, in which secularism is understood as a historical formation that is structured around the construction, regulation, and demarcation of religion as a distinct ontological and epistemological realm, McBrien’s work critically problematizes the extent to which existing studies have so far primarily attended to liberal variants of the secular, wherein religion becomes re/constructed into a matter of individual faith. McBrien justifiably argues that such perspectives have tended to neglect other articulations of the secular, as in the case of the soviet. In her introduction and in a chapter on the repression and selective co-optation of Muslim scholars (“Living and Leaning Islam”), McBrien documents how soviet state secularism has consistently navigated between the erasure and the repression of religious beliefs and practices (in particular in the early phase) and the redefinition and institutional incorporation of Muslim-ness as a collective, communal ethnonational identity. This double movement, she contends, has resulted in a unique configuration wherein Islam, or notions of Muslim-ness, are primarily conceived as a matter of ethnonational belonging (29). Inverting Grace Davie’s well-known formulation “from belief to belonging,” McBrien’s central aim is therefore to examine how competing notions of Muslim-ness are simultaneously present in the context of Bazaar-Kongoz: a first one, which has been historically mandated and crafted by the soviet state, where Islam is conceived as an ethnic-religious-national marker, and a second one, which is largely promoted by global and modern revivalist movements, wherein Islam is primarily recasted into a matter of faith (49). The book is organized according to six thematic chapters, which all explore a different aspect of the central argument put forward byMcBrien. Whereas the question of gender runs as a transversal theme throughout the book, the different chapters are set as distinct case studies that explore how competing notions of Muslim-ness are articulated on the ground. Chapter 2 (“Listening to the Wedding Speaker”) and chapter 4 (“Mukadas’s Struggle”) are the most straightforward engagement with this question as the author documents how “new marriages” (which are turned into a site of religious prediction and also organized according to strict Islamic norms) or veiling emerge as distinct sites for the articulation of new notions of Muslim-ness. However, she also documents how these transformations are highly charged because they are seen as “foreign” or “extremist.” But these divisions are not constant, and some other new developments escape this polarization. Chapter 5 (“The Propriety of Mosques”), for instance, documents how the construction of a new mosque in the vicinity of apartment buildings manages to garner the support of otherwise divided residents, as this initiative seems to allow for the coexistence of different conceptions of Islam (148). Another aim of the book is to situate these transformations within a broader historical and geopolitical context and to understand how the local and the global interact. The hostility toward veiling as well as its growing popularity, for instance, cannot be understood without considering the history of soviet secularism, wherein this practice was explicitly targeted. But McBrien also explicitly locates the “turn to Islam” within a context of changing global dynamics. These interconnections are particularly at the heart of chapter 3 (“Living and Leaning Islam”) and chapter 6 (“Watching Clone”). These two chapters address very different cases (i.e., religious education and a Brazilian soap opera withMuslim characters), yet both attend to the ways in which local Islamic practices are linked with global dynamics. Chapter 3 is furthermore particularly relevant because of the important corrective it provides to the largely held view that the transmission of Islam under soviet rule was largely local, subterranean, and unofficial. One of the strengths of the book is undoubtedly the multiplicity of voices and perspectives it proposes. Rather than focusing on a specific social group, the protagonists in McBrien’s study are diverse in age, gender, class, and religious orientation. As such, her work provides an important and refreshing contribution to the existing anthropology on Islam and secularism. The attention given to sites of negotiation and contestation such as weddings, veiling, or a mosque also produces an insightful and delicate analysis that never locks protagonists into a distinct category (such as Islamist or secularist) and that leaves room for shifting alliances and positionalities. One would have hoped, however, that the author would have gone further in unfolding some conceptual tensions that are hinted at throughout her work but rarely explicitly tackled. For instance, the different cases examined raise an important series of questions on the idea of Islam as a discursive tradition when notions of Muslimness are primarily defined through ethnicity or genealogy. Furthermore, the analytical contrast that is proposed between notions of belonging and belief can also be further problematized in light of the recent ethnographic findings that suggest more complex articulations (in particular as Kyrgyz andUzbek states are involved in promoting national forms of Islam). But these remarks aside, McBrien’s From Belonging to Belief represents an important contribution to the field that will undoubtedly cave the path for new investigations.