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.