The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity's Moral Predicament By Wael B. Hallaq New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. 272pp. ISBN: 978‐0231162562

To describe this book as revisionist is to gravely understate its ambition, and it certainly deserves a far more substantive engagement than this short review can hope to provide. The central contention of the work, starkly announced in its title, also forms the short first paragraph of the works introduction. Hallaq states (p. ix), “The argument of this book is fairly simple: The “Islamic State,” judged by any standard definition of what the modern state represents, is both an impossibility and a contradiction in terms.” For him, the modern state, defined in detail in the second chapter of the work, is inherently antithetical to Islam's moral universe.