Has anybody looked into this. I assumed that muslim west africa had high wr arabic literacy and more in the 1800s then somalia did. Becuase you hear about the sokoto caliphate and the past stuff like the mali empire, etc. But I think might have been very wrong in this assumption the full islamization seems much more recent . While it seems there were more total people who knew arabic. If you were a somali elite at the time you could read and write arabic. This doesn't seem to be true in muslim west africa. I'm beginning to think if we were talking in terms of literacy per capita among the elite It seems much higher among somalis. It also seems like somalis were more active/aware of the intellectual world/currents of the muslim world.