Muslim Women's Quest for Justice: Gender, Law and Activism in India. By Mengia Hong‐Tschalaer. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

• Date: 01 September 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12358
• Published date: 01 September 2018

about the fate and influence of these moderate Islamic currents in

Indonesia (172).

The book positions itself as part of Southeast Asian Studies

and Asian Law and does not engage with methodological and the-

oretical issues in the field of sociolegal studies. The structure of

the volume, however, is a smart sociolegal work—“integrating and

organizing traditional forms of knowledge, skill, and experience

in a new and original fashion” (Banakar and Travers 2005: 6) and

combining bottom-up and top-down approaches to law with the

aim to increase our knowledge about how law works in contexts

where Islamic norms are dominant. It shows us the way that

Indonesia has adopted religious freedom into the Constitution

and how this, together with interpretations by courts, politicians,

and local governments, has turned freedom of religion into sym-

bolic law: lacking legal force. Despite the gloomy image presented

in the work, I believe that the constitutional freedom of religion

will remain a strong symbol to those Indonesians who continue to

oppose the intolerant policies of their government.

References

Banakar, Reza, & Max Travers (2005) Theory and Method in Socio-legal Research. Oxford

and Portland: Hart Publishing.

Feillard, Andre

´e, & Nelly van Doorn-Harder (2013) “A New Generation of Feminists

Within TraditionalIslam: An Indonesian e xception,”in, Burhanudin, Jajat, Dijk, &

Kees van, eds., Islam in Indonesia: contrasting images and interpretations. Amsterdam:

Amsterdam Univ.Press. 139–59.

***

Muslim Women’s Quest for Justice: Gender, Law and Activism in India. By

Mengia Hong-Tschalaer. New Delhi: Cambridge University

Press, 2017.

Reviewed by Kalindi Kokal, Department of Law and Anthropology,

Max Plank Institute of Social Anthropology, Halle (Saale), Germany.

Muslim Women’s Quest for Justice is a fine illustration of a realization-

focused understanding of justice, a concept that Amartya Sen elab-

orates in The Idea of Justice. Centered on the core themes of

“agency” and “plurality,” the prime contribution of Tschalaer’s

book is that it shows how the pursuit for justice is inextricably tied

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