Regulating Religion in Asia: Norms, Modes and Challenges. Edited by Jaclyn L. Neo, Arif A. Jamal, and Daniel P. S. Goh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. 325. $130.00 (cloth); $35.99 (paper); $29.00 (digital). ISBN: 9781108416177.

Regulating Religion in Asia, edited by Jaclyn Neo, Arif Jamal, and Daniel Goh, is a valuable resource for academics and people interested in the region. Rather than concentrating on broad constitutional rights, such as the right to freedom of religion, the contributing authors to this volume focus on particular regulations as they examine the relationship between the state and religions. Their chapters also address the issue that before religion is regulated, the term religion itself needs to be dened, a process that is neither simple nor uncontroversial. To date, much of the study of law and religion has focused on Western jurisdictions, but this book examines how Asia’s distinctive history, demography, and politics have shaped the regulation of religion. The situation in Asia differs greatly from the West, where the state’s relationship with religion has been formed largely by its relationship with Christianity. In Asia, colonial history has resulted in nominally secular forms of government, but as the authors demonstrate, secularist ideas have never been fully adopted in this region, where the state has a greater degree of involvement in religion. As Neo, Jamal, and Goh comment in the introduction, the Asia-Pacic region is one of the most religiously diverse in the world, with 25 percent Hindu, 24 percent Muslim, 12 percent Buddhist, 9 percent adherents of folk religions, 7 percent Christians (Protestant and Catholic), and 21 percent unafliated (2). There are countries, such as Indonesia, that acknowledge different religions but have a majority religion, while in other countries, such as Singapore, the spread of believers is more diverse. Some countries have state religions—for example, Buddhism in Cambodia, while Islam is the state religion of Malaysia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Brunei (3)—but no majority tradition dominates the region unlike in other parts of the world. By primarily focusing on one country for each chapter, this book reects the diversity of the region and the differing methods employed by the states to regulate these religions. Given that the title of the book refers to Asia, however, the inclusion of three chapters on the Middle East—Shai Wozner and Gilad Abiri’s chapter on Israel and Mirjam Künkler’s and Haider Ala Hamoudi’s chapters on Iran—seem out of place. Their inclusion is unexplained by the editors, who refer to the Middle East as a separate region from Asia in their introduction (2, 4). To include two chapters on Iran is even more surprising, given that only one other country, Singapore, is represented by two chapters. While the chapters on the Middle East were interesting, I felt that the book would have been more coherent without them. For a region that is already as diverse as Asia, there seems little reason to insert additional chapters about other regions. The book is organized into three parts. The rst deals with the theory of regulation (chapters 1–5), the second with state practice and legal norms (chapters 6–10), and the third with challenges to state regulation (chapters 11–14). Journal of Law and Religion 36, no. 3 (2021): 579–582 © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University doi:10.1017/jlr.2021.57