In the small town of Dogondoutchi, Niger, Malam Awal, a charismatic Sufi preacher, was recruited by local Muslim leaders to denounce the practices of reformist Muslims. Malam Awal's message has been viewed as a mixed blessing by Muslim women who have seen new definitions of Islam and Muslim practice impact their place and role in society. This study follows the career of Malam Awal and documents the engagement of women in the religious debates that are refashioning their everyday lives. Adeline Masquelier reveals how these women have had to define Islam on their own terms, especially as a practice that governs education, participation in prayer, domestic activities, wedding customs, and who wears the veil and how. Masquelier's richly detailed narrative presents new understandings of what it means to be a Muslim woman in Africa today.

Contents SOURCES There Was Another Man . . . and a Woman: La Nouvelle Grammaire de l'Amazighe from the L'Institut Royal de la Culture Amazighe 1 Madia Thomson Abubakar Gumi?s al-?Aq?da al-?a???a bi-Muw?faqat al-Shar??a: Global Salafi sm and Locally Oriented Polemics in a Northern Nigerian Text 9 Alex Thurston ARTICLES An African Scholar in the Netherlands East Indies: al-Shaykh Ahmad Surkitti (1876-1943) and His Life, Thoughts, and Reforms 23 Ahmed Ibrahim Abushouk Central Sudanic Arabic scripts (Part 1): The Popularization of the Kanaw? Script 51 Andrea Brigaglia The Salafi Praxis of Constructing Religious Identity in Africa: A Comparative Perspective of the Growth of the Movements in Accra and Cape Town 87 Yunus Dumbe BOOK REVIEWS Review of Mogamat Hussein Ebrahim's The Cape Hajj Tradition: Past and Present 117 Muhammed Haron Review of Mirzai, Montana, and Lovejoy's Slavery, Islam, and Diaspora 119 David Skinner Review of Adeline Masquelier's Women and Islamic Revival in a West African Town 123 Abdoulaye Sounaye Review of Geert Mommersteeg's Dans la cite de marabouts 128 Tal Tamari

Although Islam is not new to West Africa, new patterns of domestic economies, the promise of political liberalization, and the proliferation of new media have led to increased scrutiny of Islam in the public sphere. Dorothea E. Schulz shows how new media have created religious communities that are far more publicly engaged than they were in the past. Muslims and New Media in West Africa expands ideas about religious life in West Africa, women's roles in religion, religion and popular culture, the meaning of religious experience in a charged environment, and how those who consume both religion and new media view their public and private selves.

The book offers an examination of issues, institutions and actors that have become central to Muslim life in the region. Focusing on leadership, authority, law, gender, media, aesthetics, radicalization and cooperation, it offers insights into processes that reshape power structures and the experience of being Muslim. It makes room for perspectives from the region in an academic world shaped by scholarship mostly from Europe and America.

Writing boards and blackboards are emblematic of two radically different styles of education in Islam. The essays in this lively volume address various aspects of the expanding and evolving range of educational choices available to Muslims in sub-Saharan Africa. Contributors from the United States, Europe, and Africa evaluate classical Islamic education in Africa from colonial times to the present, including changes in pedagogical methods—from sitting to standing, from individual to collective learning, from recitation to analysis. Also discussed are the differences between British, French, Belgian, and Portuguese education in Africa and between mission schools and Qur'anic schools; changes to the classical Islamic curriculum; the changing intent of Islamic education; the modernization of pedagogical styles and tools; hybrid forms of religious and secular education; the inclusion of women in Qur'anic schools; and the changing notion of what it means to be an educated person in Africa. A new view of the role of Islamic education, especially its politics and controversies in today's age of terrorism, emerges from this broadly comparative volume.

In this book Ousman Kobo provides a fresh understanding of the indigenous origins of Islamic reforms sympathetic to "Wahhabi" ideas in two West African countries, Burkina Faso and Ghana, and connects these movements to Muslim's search for religious purity in modern contexts.