In the following chapters, I will present the emergence and dynamics of Muslim movements of reform in their local and national contexts. I will start out with Senegal, where Sufi orders were largely able to maintain their social and religious influence in the twentieth century, and then contrast Senegal with Mali, where Sufi orders have been less prominent historically than in Senegal. I will continue with northern Nigeria, where one specific movement of reform, namely the jamāʿat izālat al-bidʿa wa-iqāmat al-sunna (Hausa: 'Yan Izala), was extremely successful as a social and religious movement. The northern Nigerian case study will be contrasted with Niger, where the development of the 'Yan Izala met a different local context. I will then proceed to a number of case studies, namely, Chad, Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia, where different movements of reform, both within and beyond what Louis Brenner (2001: 7) has called the ‘esoteric episteme’, had different trajectories. Subsequently, I will discuss Tanganyika (since 1964 Tanzania) and Kenya, where neither Sufi orders nor Salafi-oriented movements of reform managed to gain the kind of social and political support they enjoyed in northern Nigeria or Senegal. I will conclude with Zanzibar and the Comoros, where specific local contexts stimulated the development of influential Salafioriented movements of reform in different ways. In each case study, I will focus on several modes of reform, beginning with different Sufi-oriented traditions of reform that developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and were followed, often in a competitive manner, by more recent Salafi-oriented movements of reform. These Salafi-oriented movements of reform were characterised by their distantiation from the ‘esoteric’ paradigm, their activist and often confrontative approach to social, religious and political questions and their rejection of established authorities. Where possible, I will sketch the biographies of Salafi-oriented scholars and provide some background to their thinking.