Content area
Full text
In the Benaadiri region of southern Somalia, saint stories contained within locally compiled hagiographies provide valuable insights into aspects of social history that would otherwise remain unrecoverable. In this article I draw upon these familiar but underused written sources to challenge some commonly held assumptions about the relationship between urban commercial life and Sufism in Somalia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. First I explore the complex linkages between urbanites and Sufi organizations during this period. Then I examine the nature of locally perceived social crises as they were understood within the hagiographical works, particularly the Qadiri work jawhar al-Nafis and the Ahmadi collection Manaqib Nurayn Ahmad Sabr, and their suggested paths of remedy.
And [Shaykh Uways] settled down to the task of bringing God's worshippers to the rightly guided path by land and sea, [both] male and female. Because of this he traveled to distant towns in the land of the Swahili... and the land of the Benaadir, [to] its villages, hinterland and towns. If he wished to travel, a great crowd of men, women and children, both free and slave, would accompany him. (Ibn Umar 1964:1112)
With this statement, from the hagiography of the Somali saint Shaykh Uways al-Barawi, Shaykh Abd al-Rahman b. Shaykh Umar casts doubt on western scholarly interpretations of Sufism in Somalia. Both colonial officials and contemporary scholars have often portrayed Somali Sufism as a rural phenomenon with little impact on the towns of the region. In the words of Tomaso Carletti, a colonial governor, "I did not see much [Sufi] organization, any brotherhoods or zawiya,"I located in the towns of the coast. "The term, zawiya," he adds, is "almost ignored and I have never thought to adopt the term 'ikhwan' [brotherhood] to designate the affiliates of a religious order [in the Benaadir]"(Carletti 1912:68-69). Certainly Carletti's interpretation was extreme, but while not denying their existence in urban areas, subsequent investigators such as the Italian official Massimo Collucci, the British anthropologist I.M. Lewis, and the historians Lee Cassanelli and Said Samatar have addressed Sufi manifestations in rural areas alone (Colucci 1924; Lewis 1955, 1956; Cassanelli 1982; Samatar 1983).'
A careful examination of locally compiled religious texts, written primarily in Arabic, including theological works, Sufi manuals, and hagiographics, reveals...