Renewers of the Age (2008) by Scott S. Reese: Sufi scholars of the Benaadir coast

The book

Renewers of the Age: Holy Men and Social Discourse in Colonial Benaadir is by Scott S. Reese, a historian of Islam in Africa who took his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania in 1996 and taught Islamic history at Northern Arizona University. Brill published it in Leiden and Boston in 2008 as volume 9 of its Islam in Africa series, with 246 pages (Tabsir, 2008; relbib).

Sources

The book rests on Arabic writings by the religious scholars (ulama) of the Benaadir, the coast of southern Somalia from just north of Mogadishu to south of Baraawe, between about 1800 and 1920. Reese uses locally compiled lives of saints, religious poetry, Sufi manuals, scholarly genealogies and traditions about the origins of the coastal towns. Many of these accounts were written down only during Italian colonial rule (Tabsir; Journal of the American Oriental Society, 2008). See Banadir and Somali Sufi scholars and saints.

Chapters

1. Introduction: the ulama as "local intellectuals"
2. Religious history as social history
3. Saints, scholars and the acquisition of discursive authority
4. Urban woes and pious remedies: Sufis, townspeople and managing social crises in the nineteenth century
5. Sufi leadership, religious authority and questions of social inequality
6. Sufi poetry, theological writing and the popularity of the Qadiriyya in the early twentieth century

(Tabsir)

Its argument

Reese treats religious writing as a form of social commentary. The scholars of the coast knew the work of major thinkers elsewhere in the Muslim world and held the authority to lead moral debate at home. Faced with hard times, they called for greater piety and urged believers to examine their lives so that society would come closer to their idea of a proper Islamic community (Tabsir).

He argues that Sufi brotherhoods became organised, popular social institutions in Somalia, and in East Africa generally, only in the late nineteenth century. He links this to famine, drought and the cattle disease rinderpest, to the spread of Zanzibari and European power, and to the growing influence of Arab traders and Indian merchants and moneylenders. In the second chapter he sets the history of 1800 to 1850 as competition between groups such as the Geledi sultanate, the town of Baardheere, traders and farming communities, while the Arabic texts judge the same events by religious merit, a view Reese insists should be taken seriously (Journal of the American Oriental Society). See also Sufi orders in Somalia and Islam in Somalia.

How it was received

The historian Lidwien Kapteijns reviewed it in the Journal of the American Oriental Society in 2008. She described how Reese places his work within recent writing on Sufism, agreeing with scholars who see what has been called "Neo-Sufism" as not very new, except perhaps in its concern with moral and social reform. She criticised the book for not explaining how its sources were chosen, which she said "makes it harder to evaluate his findings", and asked why the second chapter did not analyse what the religious judgement of events implied (Journal of the American Oriental Society).

Where to read it

It is available in hardback and as an ebook from Brill and in research libraries. For the wider story of how Islam spread among Somalis, see How Islam reached the Somalis and Saints and Somalis by I. M. Lewis.