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