The Tijaniyya is the largest Sufi order in West and North Africa. In this unprecedented analysis of the Tijaniyya's origins and development in the late eighteenth century, Zachary Valentine Wright ...situates the order within the broader intellectual history of Islam in the early modern period. Introducing the group's founder, Ahmad al-Tijani (1737–1815), Wright focuses on the wider network in which al-Tijani traveled, revealing it as a veritable global Islamic revival whose scholars commanded large followings, shared key ideas, and produced literature read widely throughout the Muslim world. They were linked through chains of knowledge transmission from which emerged vibrant discourses of renewal in the face of perceived social and political corruption.
The Tijaniyya is the largest Sufi order in West and North Africa. In this unprecedented analysis of the Tijaniyya's origins and development in the late eighteenth century, Zachary Valentine Wright ...situates the order within the broader intellectual history of Islam in the early modern period. Introducing the group's founder, Ahmad al-Tijani (1737 - 1815), Wright focuses on the wider network in which al-Tijani traveled, revealing it as a veritable global Islamic revival whose scholars commanded large followings, shared key ideas, and produced literature read widely throughout the Muslim world. They were linked through chains of knowledge transmission from which emerged vibrant discourses of renewal in the face of perceived social and political corruption. Wright argues that this constellation of remarkable Muslim intellectuals, despite the uncertainly of the age, promoted personal verification in religious learning. With distinctive concern for the notions of human actualization and a universal human condition, the Tijaniyya emphasized the importance of the realization of Muslim identity. Since its beginnings in North Africa in the eighteenth century, the Tijaniyya has quietly expanded its influence beyond Africa, with significant populations in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and North America.
Living Knowledge in West African Islam examines the actualization of religious identity in the Muslim community of Ibrāhīm Niasse (d. 1975, Senegal). The realization of Islam was achieved through the ...enduring West African practice of learning in the physical presence of exemplary masters.
This paper concerns a large community of Muslims in West Africa, the followers of the Senegalese Sufi Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse, who articulated an Islamic vision of African liberation and political ...engagement at the time of decolonization. They were not isolated from the discourse of the Western-educated elite, nor did they owe their inspiration to them. They drew heavily on inherited Islamic traditions in West Africa, and then attempted to transcend the confines of the colonial and postcolonial state rather than being reduced to clients. As nationalism can be defined as a project of liberation and anticolonial resistance separately from the project of the postcolonial state, the community fashioned itself as an important player in the story of African nationalism. But the community was largely excluded from the crafting of the Senegalese state, and its involvement in post-independence politics was mostly restricted to the re-articulation of Islamic religious identity and communal autonomy.
Muslim communities developing around charismatic Sufi marabouts in twentieth-century West Africa represented the fruition of enduring values concerning the carrying of sacred knowledge in the bodily ...presence of Muslim scholars. Muslim mystics were not ahistorical constants in the landscape of African Islam: they drew on earlier methods of embodied Islamic knowledge transmission even as they responded to internal social changes. This newly public form of sainthood offered unprecedented access to the loftiest of aspirations within the framework of the Islamic sciences: the experiential knowledge of God, or gnosis (ma'rifa). Through the knowledge thought to be contained in Sufi shaykhs, large numbers of disciples made claims to a form of Muslim religiosity only few were able to access before. Disciples used the medium of the Sufi shaykh not only to participate in gnosis, but also to share in Islamic knowledge practices more broadly. The shaykh as a site of participation also might permit disciples access to political and cultural debates on a scale usually thought beyond the scope of Africans outside of the Western-educated elite. Analysis of marabouts as loci of knowledge production, both Islamic and otherwise, thus reveals the historical agency of many “ordinary” African Muslims. The community of Shaykh Ibrahīm Niasse (1900-1975) in Senegal provides fertile ground for the exploration of embodied Islamic knowledge practices in African history. With millions of followers around Africa and beyond, Shaykh Ibrahim was one of the most renowned Sufi shaykhs and Muslim intellectuals on the African continent in the twentieth century. The teaching of gnosis within Shaykh Ibrahim's community both reaffirmed and reordered traditional Islamic knowledge practices, while making space for Muslim religious disposition in new discourses of identity and belonging. This thesis uses the lens of embodied gnosis to examine the movement's resonance with earlier forms of knowledge transmission and its reformulation of Muslim identity in a time of great historical change.
