Mohamed M Keshavjee Islam, the Sharia and Alternative Dispute Resolution: Mechanisms for legal redress in the Muslim community London: I.B. Tauris, 2013, 240 pp £56.50 (hardcover) ISBN 9781848857322Routinely cast as a body of sacred law by Muslims and non-Muslims alike, the sharia surely ranks among the most seriously misunderstood religious concepts globally (jihad runs a close second). Fiqh, the jurisprudential corpus inspired by the sharia and constantly adapted by jurists across the diverse landscape of Muslim societies since the seventh century, is readily conflated with the sharia. For all its affinity with the Quran, the sharia itself is the result of an interpretive exercise by scholars where indigenous custom, the legacy of Roman law, and sheer pragmatism all find expression. Yet rather than serving as evidence of the rich heritage of Islam, this hybrid sharia has become for many the revered badge of an authentic identity-and a filter for political legitimacy and the rule of law.1These complexities are finely captured in the ethnographic study of family dispute resolution among British Muslims in the Hounslow area of London, which forms the basis of Mohamed Keshavjee's Islam, the Shari'a and Alternative Dispute Resolution. This community of some 20,000 has formed steadily since the 1950s, the vast majority arriving from rural Pakistan and adhering to the Sunni Hanafi school of fiqh. A more recent wave of Somali Muslims has added fresh texture to the milieu-alongside the coming of age of a locally born generation that makes up nearly a third of the community. Like any migrant experience, the early phase was about the mundane practicalities of settlement, with the emergence of institutionalized responses to matters of social and cultural identity. Only in 1998 did the community overcome the prejudice (and the legal hurdles) against its enjoyment of a full-fledged space of worship, the Jamia Mosque, also a hub of social interaction and schooling.A stable mosque environment also provided the sense of belonging and rootedness (48) to a community whose first generation mostly thought of the new country as a transient home; it was the culture, religion, and politics of the old country that were real. For the British-born generation, localization was the order of the day-and that applied to its brand of Islam as well.* 2 Keshavjee shows that when it comes to the interplay of British and South Asian ways in matters of private life, from halal foods to forced marriages and divorce, accommodation and change have increasingly prevailed over traditionalism. Hounslow is typical of the nation's Muslim community in manifesting gradual integration but not assimilation: the new generation greatly values the ethical parameters of the faith, while otherwise adapting to urban British mores (156-157).This grappling is especially evident when it comes to resolving conflicts through avenues short of formal, court-based justice, or what is today referred to as alternative dispute resolution (ADR). The appeal of secular modes of ADR has grown exponentially amid the rising costs and widening time-spans of formal justice; religiously based ADR has a much longer history in all the major faith traditions, including Islam. For migrant Muslims in an overwhelmingly non-Muslim, minimally religious society, it is no surprise that effective ADR has a particularly robust attraction. In two of this book's strongest chapters, Keshavjee brings to bear his professional expertise in ADR in discussing the array of culturally responsive choices available to Hounslow's Muslims in resolving family conflicts-and the recourse to secular legal adjudication when all else fails. …