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.