Creating a shared moral community: The building of a mosque congregation in London By Judy Shuttleworth. London: Routledge, 2023. 190 pp.

In this fine, detailed account of everyday religious life in a London mosque, Judy Shuttleworth adds to a growing literature in the anthropology of Islam concerning ethics, experience, and discourse. She studies the building of a moral community through interactions in a mosque run mainly by Guyanese Muslims. We benefit from her attention to context-linked distinctions among diverse ways of speaking about Islam. Shuttleworth brings her clinical training as a psychotherapist to her analytical framework, in which the infant's early construction of intersubjectivity subtends the later emotional and cognitive dimensions of religious ritual. These processes, in her telling, constitute one dimension of ritual prayer in Islam and in other religious traditions; a second is in the creation of texts, largely in sermons. Sermons form a distinct and complementary genre in which propositional claims form the core. She depicts how, in the mosque, men, women, and children gather for congregational worship. Young children seem to experience worship as soothing, and they learn by following their elders’ motions, or at the very least they find comfort in the women's shared movements. The book traces how younger Muslims began to challenge a shared understanding of everyday religious practice in the 1970s as local elaborations of shared religious life became implicated in global debates over “correct” Islam. As long as differences were implicit, they could be managed. Yet they had become unavoidably explicit, especially when shaped by a language ideology that favored written Arabic texts over oral traditions. The study draws on two different pieces of literature in anthropology: the anthropology of ethics and the comparative study of Muslim adaptations to new environments. These are not the same thing. For example, the debates among Muslims concerning the best ways to interpret authoritative texts, well examined here, have mobilized competing interpretive frames. They have also made it more difficult to eschew engagement in these debates and simply say that we prefer to worship as our parents and their parents did. The need to justify one's choices is stronger than ever. The terms of these debates, however, need not invoke ethics. This shift is not a quasi-natural process, though. Some mosque leaders were opposed to abandoning the lived experience of being a Muslim in exchange for book-based and explicit Muslim ethics. To some degree, the general acceptance of multiculturalism in the UK aided the Guyanese community in their efforts to build a new mosque. But the divisions within the community over the locus and nature of Islamic authority complicated those efforts. The central ritual in question is congregational prayer, or salat. The author shows well the differences between men and women concerning what they were required to do and how they adapted—for example, regarding ways of attending to an infant while praying. The author deftly establishes a central difference between two sources of knowledge in Islam (and not only Islam): ritual, which builds the bodily and emotional engagement mentioned above, and listening to sermons, which provides commentary on religion and society. Shuttleworth finds a continuum in sermons, from underscoring the unity of God to stressing the rules that God set down for all Muslims, wherever they might live. The harsh tone in some of these messages emphasizes that those at prayer have to fix themselves by reassessing the Islamic propriety of their everyday lives. If these mosque-goers see prayer as restorative, sermons are intended to warn the congregation that bad outcomes await them if they don't mend their ways. One key feature of the book is the author's attention to the use of space. After situating the mosque in its London context and noting its close ties to the Guyanese community, she discusses congregational worship and the contents of sermons (chaps. 3–4), and the kitchen and the shop as distinct places for different kinds of discussions (chaps. 5–6). In the remainder of the book (chaps. 7–9), she shows how mosque teachers treat the diversity of ideas about proper Islamic practices. She sensitively traces conversations that walk a fine line between theological disputation (“Who gets into heaven?”) and everyday banter (“I'll just stop at the heavenly gates so I can have a smoke”). The latter describes everyday conversations at the mosque shop; the former a brusque intervention challenging the theological evidence. But the importance of preserving an atmosphere of a Guyanese consensus stops these conversations before they can go far. Here, the author's references to “how the Guyanese” think are less persuasive than instances in which Guyanese come together around the idea that Guyanese all think the same way. The importance of this self-image of unity is one of the more important ethnographic findings of this research. And it is not inevitable; there is great variance across Muslim communities in the self-image of unity and agreement vis-à-vis another self-image of clearly opposing some form of “scripturalism” to some form of “consensus.” Disputes over boundaries seem to have aroused a particular vehemence that might seem uncalled for, but minor disputes can often index broader or deeper concerns. For example, closing the mosque doors during a prayer time was, for some mosque-goers, warranted by safety concerns, but for others, it constituted an “illegitimate innovation” (bid‘a) that placed a lesser danger (injury) above a greater one (failing to pray). Contrasts in thinking about boundaries extend to marriage and holidays as well. Some of the author's interlocutors contrasted life in Guyana with life in the UK, particularly on this dimension. Marriages between Muslim and Hindu Guyanese were unremarkable, as was attending religious ceremonies across these lines. Anthropologists interested in Islam or ethics will emerge from their reading of this book with a nuanced, clear account of one community's engagement with a diversity of approaches to Islam.