At the Journal of Islamic Studies, I have a new article out titled “Clerical Independence and the Religious Field in Post-Colonial Mauritania.” Here’s the abstract:Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the ‘religious field’, this paper examines the roles available to Mauritanian clerics at different points in the country’s postcolonial history. The paper retraces the interaction between an imam, his students, and the postcolonial state. Buddāh Wuld al-Būṣayrī (1920–2009), the longtime official imam of Mauritania’s capital Nouakchott, had state backing for much of his career and was an interlocutor for heads of state. His students and successors, however, faced an environment that was increasingly hostile to clerical dissent from the 1990s onward. Hopefully a lot more of my work will look like this going forward, rather than more work on jihadists, a topic I’m tired of.