Liberal Arts

The eighteenth century witnessed a flurry of Islamic scholarly exchange, connecting North and West Africa to the Middle East and even India. The Islamic sciences transmitted through these networks have had lasting resonance in Africa, particularly in chains transmitting Ḥadīth and Sufi affiliations. Academics have been justly skeptical as to the actual content of these often short meetings between scholars, suggesting such meetings tell us little about shared scholarly understandings. Study of unpublished manuscripts detailing the acquisition of "secrets" (asrār), apparently widespread in these eighteenth-century networks, can add new understanding to the affinities between scholarly legacies emerging in the period. This paper considers such questions in relationship to Aḥmad al-Tijānī (d. 1815, Fez), the founder of the Tijāniyya Sufi order prominent in West Africa today.

from the University of Wisconsin funded my graduate training prior to conducting research for this manuscript. I thank these institutions for their generosity. This book could not have been written without the guidance and input of my dissertation supervisor Florence Bernault, and my mentors Thomas Spear and William Allen Brown. They, along with Michael Chamberlain, encouraged and challenged me to pursue this study with the utmost rigor. Jo Ellen Fair and James Sweet also read the original dissertation and provided me with very helpful comments. I thank all of them for their support and critical interventions. Florence Bernault and Thomas Spear continued to follow the development of this project not only through constant encouragement, but also by reading and providing feedback on portions of the manuscript. I would like to acknowledge and extend my heartfelt gratitude to them. Their intellectual rigor and indefatigable support were indispensable for my intellectual development. I extend my special appreciation to my mentors at Gettysburg College, William Bowman and Frank Chitegi, as well my mentors at the Ohio State University, James Bartholomew, Claire Robertson, Walter Rucker, and Ahmad Sikainga. I thank Ahmad Sikainga for his friendship, continuing support and guidance. Claire Robertson deserves additional mention here for always being there when needed. I particularly appreciate her close reading of the final xxxiv acknowledgments version of this book and very important suggestions and corrections. Similarly, James Bartholomew and William Childs read some portions of this book and provided me with very insightful comments. I thank all of them. The immense intellectual support of many scholars, friends, and colleagues facilitated this book's progress. I am indebted to Marie Miran-Guyon, Sean Hanretta, and Rüdiger Seesemann for their generosity in sharing ideas and providing feedback throughout the process of researching and writing this manuscript. Thank you for your sustained intellectual support and friendship. Sean Hanretta was involved in this project from the beginning and generously intervened at various stages of the research and writing. Marie Miran-Guyon discovered this project later, and became personally interested in it and committed herself to its ultimate fruition. As she once remarked, "this work deserves attention." Marie, please accept my gratitude. I must not neglect to recognize the support of my colleagues and friends in graduate school, especially

The Tijaniyya has witnessed a lively debate concerning the classic Sufi requirement of a living guide to give spiritual training (tarbiya) to aspirants. Prominent Tijani scholars across the Sahara—modern-day Morocco, Mauritania, and Senegal—have apparently staked different positions on this issue from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The discourse has acquired added significance since the emergence of the community of the twentieth-century Senegalese Shaykh Ibrāhīm Niasse, whose widespread teaching of gnosis (maʿrifa) reinvigorated discussions surrounding the need for a living shaykh. This article argues that some Tijānī scholars, responding to a North African public discourse that had turned against Sufism, did indeed deemphasize the need for a Sufi guide other than the enduring spiritual presence of the founder of the Tijāniyya, Shaykh Aḥmad Tijānī. But close reading of the relevant source material reveals that Niasse’s practice of tarbiya reflected the general consensus...

Qurʾān exegesis (tafsīr) in African Muslim societies represented the pinnacle of scholarly achievement, and public explanation of the Qurʾān was the event that marked the emergence of one of Africa's most successful Sufi revivals, the "Community of the Flood" of the Senegalese Shaykh Ibrāhīm Niasse (d. 1975). Niasse's network of knowledge transmission, foregrounding the direct experiential knowledge of God (maʿrifa bi-Llāh), continued to emphasize Qurʾān learning, but Niasse's own recorded Arabic tafsīr demonstrated a shift away from traditional West African sources in this field. Prior understandings of the West African tafsīr discipline locate the fifteenthcentury Egyptian Tafsīr al-Jalālayn as the primary influence on West African understandings. But Niasse's tafsīr exhibits a clear preference for an early eighteenthcentury Ottoman multivolume work, Ismāʿīl Ḥaqqī's "Spirit of Explanation" (Rūh al-bayān), one of the most comprehensive summaries of Sufi understandings of the Qurʾān. This paper not only demonstrates the globally-connected nature of Islamic knowledge production in West Africa but also argues that Niasse's emphasis on gnosis built on the Rūḥ al-bayān to ultimately occasion a noteworthy addition to the existing literary corpus of Qurʾān exegesis.

Ideas of African cultural or racial distinction, most notably Négritude,
largely have been dismissed as marginal to “ordinary” Africans, or
the vast majority who did not have the opportunity to study in Paris
or London and meet with ideologues of Black nationalism from the
diaspora. Sub-Saharan African Muslims earlier responded to a process
of racial othering, particularly in response to the prejudice of some
Arab coreligionists. Even if Black African Muslims were reacting to
decidedly different circumstances than African Americans or Black
West Indians studying in Europe, Muslim articulations of Black cultural
identity in the twentieth century successfully pivoted to the new
historical discourse, both apprising and contributing to the discourse
on Africanité emerging from the diaspora. This study considers the
engagement with the question of Black racial identity by the prominent
Senegalese Muslim scholar Shaykh Ibrāhīm Niasse (1900–1975).