Saba Mahmood looms large in Mona Oraby's excellent new book that questions and ultimately tries to overcome influential arguments regarding the supposed privatization of religion. Mahmood, in her 2016 Religious Difference in a Secular Age, highlighted the workings of the modern (secular) nation state that “inevitably must take normative judgments about what religion is or ought to be and its proper place in the social life of a polity”.1 Oraby instead insists on the unbroken centrality of the sharia to Egyptian public law: “The belief that the Abrahamic traditions were revealed in succession and are irreversible in their truths remains a powerful normative framework that judges use to decide administrative questions” (125). Even more important, her account does not grant pride of place to the dominating sovereignty of the modern state in transforming religion and institutionalizing inequality while claiming to do the opposite (211). For Oraby, this role should rather be ascribed to citizens belonging to marginalized minority groups who are in an emotive bind with the state that she frequently describes as “devotion” (9). Even though this may sound strange at first to many Western readers, Oraby emphasizes that Christians and Bahais are, in fact, “yearning for distinction” (4): they want to be demarcated and sing