Renewers of the Age: Holy Men and Social Discourse in Colonial Benaadir.

• Author: Kapteijns, Lidwien
• Position: Book review

Renewers of the Age: Holy Men and Social Discourse in Colonial Benaadir. By SCOTT REESE. Leiden: BRILL, 2008. Pp. xi + 246. $109.

This is a book about (and based on) some of the Arabic writings of the religious scholars of Somalia's Benaadir coast (from just north of Mogadishu to south of Brava) from ca. 1800-1920. It consists of six chapters. In the first, building on the work of Steve Feierman, Vincent Cornell, and Albrecht Hofheinz, Reese introduces the Somali ulema as local intellectuals, familiar with the major international religious thinkers of their time and endowed with a discursive authority that allowed them to shape the moral discourse of local society. He also places his own work in the wider historiography about Sufism, thus commenting on significant recent developments in that field. The author supports the insight that the Sufi brotherhoods as organized and popular social institutions emerged in Somalia (and East Africa as a whole) only in the last decades of the nineteenth century and links this emergence to the upheavals of the period (famine, drought, rinderpest, encroaching Zanzibari and then European colonialism, and a dramatic rise in the influence of Arab traders and Indian merchants-cum-moneylenders). He also joins other scholars in arguing that there was little new about what has been called "Neo-Sufism," except perhaps its explicit interest in moral and social reform. Reese also introduces the kinds of primary sources he uses, especially hagiographies, scholarly genealogies, and traditions about city origins. However, he does not explain how he selected the sources for his study and, therefore, which ones he excluded. This lack of transparence makes it harder to evaluate his findings.

Chapter two, entitled "Religious History as Social History," is a reconstruction of the "history of events" of the Benaadir from largely secondary sources, with special emphasis on how local Arabic accounts written (or written down) only later, during Italian colonial rule, interpret the history of the era 1800-1850. Reese frames this history as one of political and economic competition between different groups and polities, including small city-states such as Geledi and Baardheere, traders of all kinds, and groups of commercial farmers such as the Bimal. However, the Arabic texts interpret these events in terms of religiously meritorious winners and immoral losers, and this religious world view, Reese insists, must be taken seriously. This is obvious, but why not analyze the implications of such a religious evaluation of the events? Is this not part of the...