Renewers of the Age

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).

• Chapter 1-- Introduction— The ʿUlamāʾ as “local intellectuals”Chapter 2-- Religious History as Social HistoryChapter 3--Saints, Scholars and the Acquisition of Discursive AuthorityChapter 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 InequalityChapter 6--The Best of Guides: Sufi Poetry, theological writing and Comprehending Qadiriyya popularity in the Early 20th Century

'Subtle and daring, this is a sociological perception of the role of religion-as-asocial-construct, of its implication in the socio-politico-intellectual discourse in Somalia. It is a book, however, that can prove useful to thinkers studying the shaping of social discourse by any hegemony - be that political, religious, economic, or a handy combination of all these'.Stavros Nikolaidis, in Journal of Oriental and African Studies, Volume 22, 2013'Renewers of the Age will prove to be a useful reading to those interested in the local history of Somalia and of Africa in general. But its attentive methodology also makes it a required reading for those who are interested in the role of religious literature in modern and pre-modern Islamic societies. Its approach to texts as active elements in social lives is of extreme interest, and it is an approach that, it is to be hoped, will be applied in future works on Somalia and Ethiopia, taking into account also the problem of readership of works in Arabic in non-Arabic speaking countries, which is only sketched in Reese’s work. Michele Petrone, University of Copenhagen, in Die Welt des Islams Vol. 58 (2018) pp. 257-259