<i>Devotion to the Administrative State: Religion and Social Order in Egypt</i>. By Mona Oraby. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024.

Devotion to the Administrative State argues against a broad consensus on the hegemony of the modern state in recent scholarship on law, religion, and society, offering instead a new way to understand the enduring and widespread appeal of legal recognition for minority communities.Oraby elaborates this general argument in the context of Egyptian minority religious communities, exploring a "yearning for distinction" that mutually reinforces majoritarianism (4).This mutual reinforcement, Oraby argues, opens up new analytic avenues for rethinking the relationship between law and religion, one which explains why minority communities, far from resisting state regulation, pursue it, often at significant cost.This is careful, original, and provocative legal anthropology, whose materials and perspectives raise new questions for debate across the fields of law and society, religious studies, minority politics, secularism and the secular, and majoritarian Muslim governance.As an analytic starting point, "devotion," understood here as practices aimed at the maintenance of status and belonging within a cosmology, allows Oraby to elaborate "why the nation-state's authority to decide what is religion/religious remains desirableto reconceptualize the tight association between freedom and equality, take seriously the inequalities that people pursue when they are free, and imagine what social relations these inequalities assure within a specific milieu" (24).The central dynamic in this analysis is not, therefore, the administrative imperialism of the modern state, but of simultaneous regulatory work among multiple institutions, state and nonstate, whose genealogies extend beyond the modern.Oraby argues that recognition of difference is essential to collective life, and emphasises the motive power of ensuring the "spatiotemporal continuity" of that collective life (251).The story that emerges is distinct from that of modernity and the modern state as rupture, insisting instead that the key logic of minority devotion to the administrative state is precisely the opposite: "devotion aims to ensure the continuity between who we are already and who we will become" (252).The four-part structure of the book: Ephemera, Inscriptions, Covenants, and Ethics, navigates alongside the experiences, strategies, and meaning-making of members of Egypt's minoritized religious communities.Oraby combines a range of established ethnographic, archival and textual methods to tease out new understandings of