In the ever-growing field of research concerned with the ways the Arabic script has been adapted to the phonetic needs of other languages – or what African Studies scholars have come to call ‘‘Ajamī’ – the nineteenth century looms large. It is striking how often this period provides the backdrop for the expansion of this particular orthographic practice as a tool of Islamic education. In locations as varied as southern Somalia, Senegambia, and the Kenya coast (the settings of the following three chapters), the fusion of Sufi identity, poetic expression, and ‘Ajamī (lit. ‘non-Arab’) is paramount. Why?

Together, the chapters in this section begin to provide an answer. In ‘Bringing ʿIlm to the Common People: Sufi Vernacular Poetry and Islamic Education in Brava, c. 1890–1950’, Lidwien Kapteijns and Alessandra Vianello describe the emergence of new forms of religious instruction in the port city of Brava on Somalia's southern Benadir coast. Led by the legendary scholar Shaykh ‘Uways (1847–1909), Brava's poets used Chimiini, or the ‘language of the town’, to write didactic verse aimed at educating Brava's entire population in Islamic precepts, regardless of social background. Drawing on not only the broader Islamic scholarly tradition, but also on the more specific networks of the western Indian Ocean that linked Brava to southern Arabia and the Swahili coast, these scholars composed steenzi: didactic poems about foundational Islamic concepts (tawba, taqwa, tawakkul, etc.) that were deliberately easy to memorize and often recited in public. Such gatherings came to be associated with the Qādiriyya community in Brava, but they were not exclusive to any particular ṭarīqa, as shown by the scholar-poet Mallim Nuri's Ahmadiyya affiliation. The most unique steenzi author, however, was the female scholar Mana Sitti Habib Jamaladdin, or Dada Masiti (c. 1820–1919), whose life as a celibate female saint drew comparisons to the eighth-century mystic Rābi‘a al-ʿAdawiyya and whose poetry most vividly evoked Brava's local character. She perhaps best exemplifies the intense (and intensely local) religious expression that Kapteijns and Vianello conclude lay at the heart of a new movement for Islamic education of the common people at a time of intensifying European presence in East Africa.