Knut S. Vikør's Sufi and Scholar on the Desert
Edge is first and foremost a study of the founder of the
Sanusiyya religious brotherhood, Muhammad b. ‘Ali al-Sanusi. It is a
welcome addition to the existing literature on the Sanusiyya.
Vikør's stated purpose is to locate al-Sanusi in his own
religious and intellectual environment in order to separate the
history of al-Sanusi and the order he founded from the
Sanusiyya's later reputation as a highly politicised and
anti-colonial institution. Like another recent work on the Sanusiyya,
Jean-Louis Triaud's La légende noire de la Sanusiya,
Sufi and Scholar seeks to explode certain myths about the early
Sanusiyya, in this case the common belief that al-Sanusi was highly
politicised and came into conflict with the political authorities in
Fes, Mecca, Cairo and eventually Libya. In the intellectual sphere,
Vikør also re-evaluates assumptions that al-Sanusi was
dedicated to the jihad, and can be described as a neo-sufi
and Islamic revivalist. The main source for the book is
al-Sanusi's own writings, a rather neglected source which
obviously provide crucial information on the book's main topic,
al-Sanusi's personal religious and political outlook, a few
surviving letters and then a wide range of contemporary and later
European and Arabic sources.