“Islamic Africa” is a code word with a heavy history that still affects the perception of the continent today. The term implies another Africa that is not Islamic, one that is, in the minds of many, the authentic Africa. Islam’s fourteen centuries of active presence in the northern half of the continent and its modern spread to the south have not indigenized it enough for the Africa purists. They still see it as imported and imposed on Africa without reaching its heart. Yet Islam’s expressions in the vernacular cultures of (Islamic) Africa confirm its robust rootedness in all aspects of life, from eating, dressing, and dwelling to learning, ruling, and, of course, worshipping. This simple fact forms the implicit framework of Michelle Apotsos’s latest book, The Masjid in Contemporary Islamic Africa, in which the use of “Islamic Africa” is tacitly aimed at debunking the binary of native/foreign. Apotsos’s tool of choice in arguing the Africanness of Islam is the polyvalent space of the contemporary masjid, the original term for the basic Islamic place of worship. Here the concept is expanded, however, to include not only space in its three-dimensionality but also intersectional space, space in motion, absence of space, and cyberspace.In an expansive theoretical introduction and four chapters investigating the various manifestations of masjid spaces in contemporary Africa, Apotsos deftly positions her argument on two tracks, one historical and one spatio-experiential. Her explicit intention is to transcend the usual focus on the conventionally architectural in the study of space without relinquishing this powerful analytical device. She in fact enlists it in novel ways to interpret both the political, ideological, ethnic, and spiritual contexts of her examples and the spatial qualities of items that are seldom considered in standard architectural histories, such as the praying mat and the vehicular masjid.The first chapter boldly uses the notion of intersectionality to situate three Islamic spaces within the webs of discrimination, oppression, and resistance that define their communities today. The first two South African examples, the Open Mosque and the People’s Mosque (Masjidul Umam), both in Wynberg, Cape Town, address the thorny issues of gender and LGBT+ discrimination in traditional Islam. The famous Malian city of Timbuktu, home to a half-a-millennium spiritual tradition, provides the third example. The coupling is puzzling at first sight. The South African masjids challenge established religious perceptions and prohibitions through their spaces, performance, and forcefully articulate leaders, and they survive by adapting and concealing despite strong pushback. Timbuktu, recently the victim of a vicious Islamist militant campaign of destruction and subjugation, stands here as the home of the anti-masjid, or, more romantically, the “martyred masjid.” To bring the three strands together, Apotsos takes intersectionality to its utmost interpretive capacity through a clever pairing of people and buildings in a struggle to exist and act against the forces of oppression. Her sympathies are couched in language that is at times wishful and at others militant, but always theoretically astute, and sometimes even excessive.The second chapter’s focus is memory and heritage, or, more precisely, the fluidity and discursive nature of both even when they are pegged to fixed spaces. Here, too, Apotsos chooses three cross-African examples. The first is the medieval sacred city of Harar Jugol in Ethiopia, a UNESCO World Heritage Site noted for its Africanization of basic Islamic spiritual building types, especially the masjid and the shrine. The second is the architecturally organic approach to masjid architecture by the famed Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy, the father of vernacularism. Apotsos brandishes two of his mosques, one in New Gourna in Egypt built in 1945 and the other in Abiquiú, New Mexico, dating to the early 1980s, into some sort of a dialogue underscoring the universality of spiritualism (meaning here its Islamic manifestation in Sufism) when it is embedded in transculturally calibrated forms. The third example, the monumental National Mosque of Ghana (Akra Furqan) in Accra (2016), is a political project par excellence donated by Turkey as a projection of its ascendant soft power. Although Apotsos is intensely critical of this project, she nonetheless reads it as an Afro-Ottoman mosque, endowing it with a sociocultural appropriation that militates against the mere notions of copy or kitsch. In fact, the discussion of all three examples aims to expand the category of heritage conceptually but also situationally as arising from the particular conditions of Islam in Africa.In the third chapter, Apotsos turns her attention to the connection between nature and religion as expressed in the masjids of Africa. Her argument relies heavily on both the economy of scarcity in pre- and early Islamic Arabia and the later Sufi readings of the architectural symbolism of natural elements—topography, water, light, greenery—that are integral to spiritual spaces. Again, she offers three examples. The Kramats (shrines of awliya’, or friends of God) of Cape Town form a spiritually protective ring around the city and deploy several strategies to enlist nature in their spatial expressions. The sinuously shaped old Mosque of Djenne in Mali induces a variety of biological parallels in its structure, form, and material. Apotsos pits its organicity against the modern tendency to museify heritage, as exemplified by UNESCO’s directives, which disrupt the subtle process of continuous change; such attempts at preservation have marked not only the history of the Djenne Mosque but also that of all celebrated vernacular structures. The third example, the eco-mosque in Kisemvule, Tanzania, is part of a charitable eco-village devoted to orphans that utilizes the full gamut of green techniques. Apotsos infuses her description of the village’s environmentalism with Qur’anic quotations and analysis of Islamic ecological practices so as to highlight the interlacing of technology and spirituality in the achievement of a holistic approach to environmental sustainability.The fourth chapter is an investigation of the relation between mobility and sacrality. Noting the accelerating mobility in modern urban life, Apotsos presents three examples in which shared spiritual spaces are defined by movement. Her first example is a mode of public transport known to everyone in the global South, which in Dakar, Senegal, is known as car rapides. These trucks, colorfully painted with a mixture of sacred and mundane sayings and images, zip around the popular areas of the capital, creating a peripatetic, yet easily recognizable, expressive space. Calling them “mobile masjids,” however, seems to be a bit of a stretch, even though their cruising surfaces add a layer of shifting religio-cultural scenes to the urban space. The second example is the airport masjid, of which Apotsos examines a few cases across the continent. Liminal by definition and by location, these spaces afford the believers a niche in which to engage in collective universal spirituality. The last and most contemporary example is the online masjid space, which offers a culmination of the author’s main thesis about the rapidly changing nature of religious space and the need for a redefinition of both architectural space and modern Islam in Africa. Through an analysis of the digital Touba (the holy city of the Muriddiya Sufi order in Senegal), Apotsos interprets the cyber religious space as essentially a magnification of the physical one and an intensification of its spiritual charge.Michelle Apotsos belongs to two architectural scholarly lineages. One consists of students of modern mosques and includes Hasan-Uddin Khan, Akel Kahera, Kishwar Rizvi, Eric Roose, and Jamal Elias. The second is that of the trailblazers in the study of vernacular architecture in Islamic Africa, such as Labelle Prussin and Suzanne Preston Blier. Apotsos judiciously brings the two areas of study together while engaging multiple registers of theorization, running from Sufi illuminationism to modern anthropology and on to contemporary cybernetics. Her overall reliance on polyvalent manifestations of Islamic spiritual spaces allows her to push their hermeneutics to new levels of refinement, though her insistence on the masjid as her only lens of analysis occasionally compels her to see masjids in spaces in which it is otherwise hard to see them. Moreover, the relative absence of native African Islamic scholarly voices from her references leaves a gap in our understanding of how the Qur’an and Hadith, which are cited profusely and clearly through secondary sources, are interpreted and used in today’s Africa. On the nitpicking side, the book would have benefited from a more thorough editing to eliminate several repetitions, infelicities such as the use of the discarded term horror vacui (192), and typographical errors.This volume comes after Apotsos’s first book, Architecture, Islam, and Identity in West Africa: Lessons from Larabanga (2016), which initiated her engagement with the relationship between architecture and Islamic identity in (West) Africa.1 In this new book, she goes well beyond the parameters of the first to encompass all of Africa and an expansive notion of space/architecture that resonates well with the various current critical challenges to the traditional definitions of architecture. In this book, her most impressive achievement, in my opinion, is her grounding of Islam in Africa as a native identity with its ever-expanding spatial, ritual, spiritual, but also social, political, and economic anchors.