Beyond Timbuktu: An Intellectual History of Muslim West Africa contains two related but distinct studies concerning the history of Islamic proselytism and education in Africa, particularly in the western and central Sudan. Ousmane Oumar Kane is eminently qualified by cultural background and formal training to address this theme. The first study, embracing chapters 1 through 5, explores the precolonial legacy of Islamic instruction. Chapter 1, “Timbuktu Studies: The Geopolitics of the Sources,” introduces the literature of Orientalism, a discipline that emphasizes the study of written texts in Arabic and other languages spoken by Muslims. In its formative stage Orientalism paid little heed to West Africa, though its genres of discourse and techniques of knowledge production remain potent. As the European colonizing enterprise in Africa gathered impetus during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, pioneering efforts were undertaken to collect and often translate West African sources. The author’s helpful overview misses William D. Cooley, The Negroland of the Arabs Examined and Explained; or, An Inquiry Into the Early History and Geography of Central Africa (1841), reprinted by Taylor and Francis (2016). In about 1990 the Saudi-backed Al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation, followed by diverse other international organizations, greatly encouraged and increased the discovery and preservation of West African Islamic texts, while substantially freeing the endeavor from the political taint of colonialism. The digital reproduction and dissemination of sources is a radical liberation. Kane offers a country-by-country survey of current conditions.

THE MAHDIST STATE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY SUDAN - Sharìa and the Islamic State in 19th-Century Sudan: The Mahdi's Legal Methodology and Doctrine. By Aharon Layish. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Pp. xxx + 348. $149.00, hardback (ISBN 9789004311381). - Volume 59 Issue 2

The recent historical resurrection of the pre-colonial Nubian-speaking communities of Kordofan invites reflection upon one of the activities for which, in their time, they were best known—the production of iron.2 "Iron smelting is now a forgotten art in Northern Kordofan," wrote inquisitive colonial official Harold MacMichael at the dawn of the twentieth century.

together an eclectic collection of articles without connecting threads to stitch them together, the editors have violated a basic rule of collective works. Half of the contributions are potted versions of work already done by stalwart Ethiopianists. Inoffensive for the most part, occasionally they lapse into opinionated statements, such as one editor’s assurance that Ethiopia’s “revolutionary and federal democracy has become a model which is quite unique” (3). In his summary of the Meles Zenawi era that closes the book, the same editor gratuitously blames the hapless opposition for lacking “long term political maturity” in challenging the regime (430). Another contributor describes in some detail the tortured history of elections under the EPRDF, and concludes that the move to an effective multiparty democracy is some years away, “if only because of the weaknesses of the opposition” (330). One is left to wonder what accounts for a crippled opposition. The book also includes work by younger scholars based on recent research offering fresh data and perspectives, provided one can unearth them from the thick layer of conceptualization and pseudoscientific jargon they are buried under, following current social science fashion. Among other topics, this covers the reaction of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church to the challenges of modernity represented by the phenomenal spread of Pentecostalism, the veiled posture of Islam in Ethiopia (a faith that represents some 34% of its population), as well as the revival of Rastafarianism. Such shortcomings notwithstanding, Understanding Contemporary Ethiopia does provide useful guidance to anyone with a recently acquired interest in the fortunes of that country. John Markakis Exeter , United Kingdom doi:10.1017/asr.2016.48 johnmarkakis@Hotmail.com

Chris Vaughan. Darfur: Colonial Violence, Sultanic Legacies & Local Politics, 1916–1956. Woodbridge, Suffolk, U.K.: James Currey, 2015. xiv + 231 pp. Map. Glossary. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $80.00. Cloth. ISBN: 978-1-84701-111-4. - Volume 59 Issue 2

The Islamic Nubian kingdom of Sinnnr dominated the northern Nile-valley Sudan from about 1500 to 1821. During the eighteenth century the government began to issue official documents in the Arabic language. Of these, about seventy are known to exist today. The present study examines an extended dispute over landholding near the Nile confluence that generated a series of official documents. Specifically, it considers a pair of unusual early nineteenth-century records that document the invocation of the right of sanctuary by the leader of the defeated party.

The century that embraced the last half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth formed a critical period in the creation of the modern Sudan. For the eastern kingdom of Sinnar, centered in the Nile valley, this Heroic Age witnessed the rise of towns and a middle class at the expense of a central government grounded in older principles of political economy.1 The new middle class continued to flourish under the Turco-Egyptian colonial regime established in 1821, and its prosperity was intimately linked to the acquisition and deployment of slaves.2 To facilitate its break with the past, it adopted a new Arab ethnic identity.3 The wide western lands of Kordofan had long been an integral part of successive precolonial kingdoms based on the Nile, including Makuria, Alodia, and Sinnar.4 From the mid-eighteenth century, however, Fur-speaking Musabba'at and Keira intruded from the west, and gradually wrested authority away from the eastern kings.5 The territory they acquired was vast and diverse. South Kordofan was a hilly region about the size of South Carolina, where some ninety different languages were spoken by diverse communities who clustered on and around low mountains called jabals. North Kordofan was an arid lowland about the size of Texas, punctuated at intervals by rocky desert crags. In 1821 the Turco-Egyptians annexed North Kordofan, while the southern realm of Taqali and other mountain districts struggled toward independence.6 In Kordofan, as on the Nile, the difficult transitional century from 1750 to 1850 was characterized by the rise of a middle class, changes in the rules governing the acquisition and deployment of slaves, and shifts in ethnic identity. The Nubians An ancient community of African people entered the historical record in the fourth century AD in an inscription of the Ethiopian emperor Ezana. Ezana had intervened in the Nile valley kingdom of Meroe in response to the arrival of a group of invaders known as the or Nubians, and for the next thousand years the Nubians dominated the history of the Nile valley.7 It was reasonably obvious that the origin of these was Kordofan.8 Time passed. By the twentieth century, the Nubian language family was seen to include two major languages spoken along the banks of the great river in southern Egypt and North Sudan-Kenzi-Dongolawi and Nobiin. The present author has defended the viewpoint that Nobiin Nubian was probably the dominant language of the Nile Valley as far south as the confluence and beyond until the sixteenth century AD. At the close of the Middle Ages, folk of Christian Nubia became Muslims, but the notion that they should also become Arabs was an idea whose time had not yet come.9 The twentieth-century Nubian language family also included remote and isolated relict tongues, two spoken in the northernmost jabals of the Nuba Mountains, Kadero-Koldagi and Debri, and two by communities in eastern Dar Fur, Birgid (probably now extinct) and Meidob.10 But by the twenty-first century, studies by Herman Bell and M.W. Daly had demonstrated the survival into the 1930s of Nubian-speaking communities at numerous mountainous sites in North Kordofan. By the turn of the present millennium the vast distances between Aswan and the Nuba Mountains, and between Dar Fur and the Nile, were filled by an extinct Nubian-speaking community hitherto unknown. or Nubians? With the benefit of hindsight provided by Bell and Daly, surprising new information about the lost nation suddenly leaped from hitherto-neglected pages, not only of C.A.E. Lea, but also the earlier German traveler Eduard Ruppell and the Austrian colonial technocrat Joseph, Ritter von Russegger, who visited Kordofan in the period 1823-1837.12 At that time at least one Nubian language was spoken throughout the semi-sedentary settlements based on the North Kordofan desert crags.u Nubian was the original language of El Obeid and its environs.14 Only Nubian was spoken west of El Obeid across the wide plains toward the border of Dar Fur where predominantly pastoralist communities relied not upon camels, but upon pack-oxen,15 and the Nubian language Birgid was spoken not only, as recently, in the corridor between al-Fashir and Nyala, but as far south as the Bahr al-Arab/Kir River. …

Servants of the Sharia: The Civil Register of the Qadi's Court of Brava 1893-1900. Edited by Alessandra Vianello and Mohamed M. Kassim. African Sources for African History Volume 6. Leiden: Brill, 2006. Volume I: Pp. xviii, 1-1169, 24 illustrations; Volume II: Pp. vii. 1172-2185, 10 appendices, glossary, bibliography, general index, index of names. $99.00/euro99 paper. A significant theme in medieval history was the rise of merchant city-states amidst a variety of fundamentally different and not always sympathetic surrounding societies. The Swahili towns of the East African littoral are good examples, and careful examination reveals both their need to interact positively with their alien hinterlands and the imperative of maintaining a cautiously distinct cultural identity. The South Somali coast community of Brava preserved its own Bantu language (Chimini) and preferred way of doing things long after the medieval trade diasporas that gave it birth had been absorbed by larger and vastly more potent modern historical trends. One such force, during the nineteenth century, was the Zanzibar sultanate that claimed and lightly administered the Banadir ports of which Brava was one. New trade during the century brought both prosperity and vulnerabilities, while widened Islamic horizons and passions too had positive and problematic aspects. At century's end, however, European interests gnawed at Zanzibar's influence, and Brava fell into a zone dominated informally and tenuously by Italy. For the seven years from 1893 to 1900, as the ambiguous transition from Zanzibari overlordship to Italian colonial rule began, a series of five local Islamic judges in Brava created records in Arabic, ostensibly according to the shari'a, for the Italian authorities. The work reviewed here offers Arabic texts and English translations of almost 2,000 of these civil court records-those that have survived. With the support of an insightful historical and social introduction and helpful appendices and indices, these records offer unparalleled insight into the internal workings of the community of Brava on the eve of its final subordination to the outside world. The present reviewer, through introducing the various types of records, will also venture some ideas concerning how these invaluable primary sources might conceivably serve subsequent interpretive historiography. In the years from 1893 to 1900 the town of Brava had a population estimated at 4000 or 5,000 souls. Therefore the approximately 3,000 names that appear in the records, though not all were townsmen, may nevertheless in the wider context of precolonial African historiography be accepted as an unusually comprehensive sample of traditional community life. Given the conventions of naming in the Islamic world, moreover, most of these primary entries in the index of personal names contain also the names of one or numerous forbears. This evidence invites the reconstruction of Brava families through nominal record linkage over at least three generations; in other words, a significant part of the city population throughout the last half of the nineteenth century lies embedded in the names current during the period 1893-1900. Further examination would expose some of the internal dynamics of community politics through the conduct of marital and commercial relations among small or extended native families. By far the most common genre of record was the public acknowledgement of indebtedness (pp. 61-62), sometimes secured by collateral or the support of a third party, and sometimes stipulating a schedule of repayment. The community thus derived some of its cohesion from the complicated network of mutual financial obligations undertaken by so many of its members. Further, this network imposed a structure of obligation upon the community through time; although some loans were repayable upon demand many, and conspicuously most of the biggest, were intended to extend over many years or even decades. …

This is the story of the legal battle between Northeast African headwomen of the zar and the religious, administrative and commercial middle class of Aden, The records of this battle, part of the Aden Residency Records of the India Office,1 begin in December 1923 with a petition by fifty-four men ('the undersigned inhabitants of Aden, Arabs, Somalis and Indians') to the British colonial administration. The petition, dated 23 December 1923, requested the government to take legal action to stop the practice of zar: The subject which we bring forward for consideration is the great nuisance caused to us by an irreligious performance usually held in Aden among women, which is called 'ZAR.'

White, Luise, Stephan F. Miescher, and David William Cohen, eds. 2001. African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices In Oral History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 322 pp. $22.95 (paper).