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

Kapteijns, Lidwien

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 ulema's bid for authority, which is the subject-matter of this book, or is it inherent in the discourse and the genre to which the source text belongs?

In chapter three, Reese asks how scholars and saints assessed religious authority in turn-of-the-century Benaadir. He reconstructs their criteria from the ways in which they introduced themselves and each other in their works, emphasizing lineage and heritage, education and erudition (including study abroad), and transcendence (or miracles). Chapter four takes us forward in time to the "history of events" of the Benaadir from the 1880s to ca. 1915. It presents the economic downturns and outside political and economic encroachment as the context for the expansion of the religious brotherhood of the Qadiriyya, especially in the towns and under the patronage of wealthy merchants and notables. Reese emphasizes the economic dimension of the growth of the Sufi networks, as they allowed urban coastal merchants to establish relationships of trust with the religious leaders and members of newly established religious farming communities, the jamaacaat (Ar. jama'at), in the interior, some of which engaged in commercial agriculture. Reese's insistence that, in spite of this context, the brotherhoods "first and foremost, existed to serve the spiritual needs of a community in crisis" is. again, quite superfluous; the question perhaps should be to what extent and how they may have succeeded in serving these needs, especially because few common people would have read Arabic. The author may well be correct in arguing that Sufi ritual "became an integral part of urban life from the 1880s onward" (p. 120), but he gives little evidence for how or when the common people became associated with the brotherhoods.

Chapter five deals with the issue of social inequality as it emerges in Sufi texts of the early twentieth century. Here Reese provides as context the formal abolition of the slave trade by the sultan of Zanzibar in the 1870s, and then, in the early 1900s, the abolition of slavery in the Benaadir by the Italian colonial authorities. The author shows how different religious texts represent lingering social prejudice against former slaves and how the ulema (some of whom were themselves of servile origin) spoke up for equality and promoted accepting it as the correct moral position.

Chapter six examines two religious texts of ca. 1920 as examples of the religious teachings of the Qadiriyya in this period. That both texts--a collection of devotional poetry and a set of theological pamphlets--include polemics against Sayyid Muhammad 'Abdallah Hassan, who fought (and lost) a jihad against Ethiopian, Italian, and British colonial rule (1898-1921), indicates what a thorn the Sayyid was in the side of the Qadiriyya. However, Reese presents the major impetus of the collections as didactic, "a clear statement of Qadiriyya ideology aimed at a wide popular audience" (p. 214), and shows that the emphasis on the Prophet as spiritual mediator was in line with both classical Sufi teachings and contemporary trends of the wider Islamic scholarship.

Reese's book is an ambitious contribution to the field of Somali and African Islamic studies. Given the complexity and relative scarcity of sources and the impossibility of fieldwork in Somalia because of the civil war, this is a significant intellectual accomplishment. However, a book that ventures so boldly into new territory inevitably has flaws, even if these become visible in part because of the new information the book itself provides.

First, the book wavers between two intentions. The first intention is to piece together a chronological account of Benaadir history based on, among other sources, religious texts. This intention characterized the dissertation on which this book is based and is most prominent in the second and fourth chapters; however, it falls short in, for example, a comprehensive examination of the Italian writings produced during this period. The second intention is to regard the religious texts as a discourse produced by the local intellectuals of a particular place and era and analyze it as a form of intellectual and social commentary on the issues of their day. The second approach is the dominant one in this book and is overall quite compelling. However, wavering between the two approaches prevents full attention to either and undermines the unity of the book.

A second flaw is the author's failure to explain with sufficient clarity which texts form the basis for this study and why. For example, Reese only selected Arabic texts, although the Qadiriyya and many of its sheikhs also authored texts in Somali and Chimini (the Swahili dialect of Brava). He appears to have given preference to prose texts, while the Qadiri sheikhs also composed much poetry, again in various languages. This is not to say that the author should have single-handedly studied all these texts, but that he should have framed them better and created more transparence about what part of the existing sources for the study of the ulema of the Banaadir they present.

Third, when one undertakes the study of religious texts as a discourse, attention to the absences and silences of that discourse becomes crucial. In the case of this study, whose focus coincides with the establishment of Italian and British colonial rule over different parts of Somalia, the "booming" silences are those regarding, first, the colonial presence and, second, the anti-colonial jihad led by the local head of the rival brotherhood of the Salihiyya, Sayyid Muhammad 'Abdallah Hassan. If the Qadiriyya in the first decades of the twentieth century did indeed become the most popular brotherhood, as the author suggests, then it did so, it appears, in spite of the fact that it was, compared to the Sayyid, either quietist with regard to colonial rule or even associated itself with it (e.g., by providing judges). For the Sayyid, such quietists were unbelievers who deserved to be killed and the degeneration of the Sayyid's jihad into a bloody intra-Somali civil war cannot but have had some impact on the fortunes of the Qadiriyya. The Sayyid also saw and forged a connection between his own movement and that of the Bimal, who fought a jihad against the Italians in the Benaadir in the period under study here. In the theological treatise (in Arabic) he sent to them, the Sayyid explained why, in the circumstances, jihad was obligatory for every Muslim, a conclusion with which the Qadiri ulema of Reese's study did not agree. Reese is aware of this source and discusses in chapter six two harsh Qadiri polemics against the Sayyid; but he does not analyze the Qadiriyya against this undoubtedly significant background.

The author defends his decision not to focus on colonialism in terms of refusing to "superimpose agendas of the twenty-first century academy" on his sources and instead chooses "to focus on what religious scholars say in their texts rather than what they do not" (p. 23). This makes no sense in a book that derives so much of its value from the framework Reese adopts for it: an approach to the ulema as representatives of a particular discourse together with a partial reconstruction, often from non-religious sources, of the political and socio-economic contexts in which they lived and wrote. In his dissertation "Islamic Literary Responses to the Imposition of Colonial Rule on the Benadir Coast in the Late 19th and Early 20th Century" (York University, 2006), Mohamed Kassim makes an argument that is different but, in the end, compatible with that of Reese. He argues that the explosion of religious poetry by the ulema of Brava represented their response to and defense against the presence of non-Muslim colonizers. These religious scholars not only wrote sophisticated poetry in Arabic for the Islamic elite of the wider region as far as Mecca and Medina, but also authored didactic poetry for the common people in Brava's vernacular. (Sheikh Uways, a major Qadiri leader who figures prominently in Reese's book, himself authored religious poetry in Somali written in Arabic script.) Kassim bases this conclusion in part on a small number of explicit colonial references in the poetic texts and, in part, on the exegesis of these poems by current Bravanese religious scholars, often descendants of the nineteenth-century ulema. Taken together, the studies of Reese and Kassim evoke a colonial context that did not determine but framed the religious "revival" that took place, and that contributed to a series of opportunities and crises to which the scholars of the Benaadir coast responded with an intensified intellectual production and, in the form of the brotherhoods, a popular religious movement.

The study makes a number of factual claims that require more evidence. For example, the impact of Indian merchants may not have been as disastrous in the Benaadir as in Zanzibar. The jamaacaat's significance to the agricultural economy in this era must be further documented. And the troubles of Sheikh Nurayn Muhammad (or Ahmad) Sabr indeed had to do with his strict application of Islamic law, but not with local resistance to women's inheritance (p. 144). Also, it may well be that the major primary source published in two large volumes as Servants of the Sharia: The Civil Register of the Qadis' Courts of Brava, 1893-1900 (Leiden: Brill, 2006) came out too late for Reese to digest its full implications for his subject-matter; however, the failure to so nevertheless detracts from this study's authority.

Finally, this book deserved better editing. Typological errors, basic grammatical mistakes in Arabic book titles, faulty transliterations of both Arabic and Somali words and names, problems with punctuation (especially in chapter one), and repetitions (for example, pp. 45 and 66) are evidence of sloppy copy-editing. Given its reputation in the field and the costs of the books it publishes, Brill must raise its standards in this respect.

LIDWIEN KAPTEIJNS

WELLESLEY COLLEGE