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East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2018, 187 pp, index. Paperback $29.95.
Silvia Bruzzi has written a compelling work that centers on Sitti ‘Alawiyya, the granddaughter of Sayyid Muhammad Uthman al-Mirgani, founder of the Hatmiyya order. She grounds the Sitti’s story in the context of the greater history of the Hatmiyya Sufi order, the Italian colonial government of Eritrea and the relationship between the Hatmiyya and the Italians in the 1930s, in an attempt to “to reconstruct the world in which she lived” (8). In the literal center of Bruzzi’s monograph is an analysis of the gender dynamics of those relationships as captured by the history, body and carefully self-constructed image of