Renewers of the Age: Holy Men and Social Discourse in Colonial Benaadir
by Scott Reese (Leiden, Brill, 2008)

Studies of nineteenth and twentieth century Islamic reform have tended to focus more on the evolution of ideas than how those ideas emerge from local contexts or are disseminated to a broad audience. Using the urban culture of southern Somalia, known as the Benaadir, this book explores the role of local ʿulamāʾ as popular intellectuals in the early colonial period. Drawing on locally compiled hagiographies, religious poetry and Sufi manuals, it examines the place of religious discourse as social discourse and how religious leaders sought to guide society through a time of troubles through calls to greater piety but also by exhorting believers to examine their lives in the hopes of bringing society into line with their image of a proper Islamic society.

Table of contents
Chapter 1– Introduction— The Ê¿Ulamāʾ as “local intellectuals”
Chapter 2– Religious History as Social History
Chapter 3–Saints, Scholars and the Acquisition of Discursive Authority
Chapter 4–Urban Woes and Pious Remedies: Sufis, Urbanites and Managing Social Crises in the Nineteenth Century
Chapter 5–When is Kafāʾa Kifayah? – Sufi Leadership, Religious Authority and Questions of Social Inequality
Chapter 6–The Best of Guides: Sufi Poetry, theological writing and Comprehending Qadiriyya popularity in the Early 20th Century

Scott S. Reese, Ph.D. (1996) in History, University of Pennsylvania, is Associate Professor of Islamic History at Northern Arizona University. He has published extensively on Islam in Africa including the edited collection The Transmission of Learning in Islamic Africa (Brill, 2004).