Realizing Islam

Front matter

Realizing Islam

The Tijaniyya in North Africa and the

Eighteenth-Century Muslim World

CHAPTER FIVE Abundant Blessing in an Age of Corruption, 175 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Alhamdulillah wa salat wa salam ‘ala rasūlillāh. 1 have been honored in completing this work by the assistance of many guides, mentors, and scholars better than myself. First and foremost, my gratitude to the late Shaykh Hasan Cissé and the current Imam of Medina-Baye Senegal, Shaykh al-Tijani Cissé, who graciously provided me access to their knowledge and archives. Scholars of the Tijāniyya who also helped me with this work include Shaykh Muhammad al-Mahi Cissé of Senegal, the late Dr. Abdelaziz Benabdallah of Morocco, the late Shaykh Ahmad b. Muhammad al-Hāfiz of Egypt, and Shaykh Muhsin Shalaby of Egypt.

I am graced by a supportive academic community, many of whom gave substantive feedback on this manuscript. I thank Ousmane Kane, Rūdiger Seesemann, Rudolph Ware, and Mark Sedgwick for reading this work or earlier versions of it, and for their invaluable comments, resources and mentorship over the years. I also thank Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Andrea Brigaglia, Oludamini Ogunnaike, John Voll, Joseph Hill, Ahmad Dallal, Louis Brenner, Zekeria Ould Salem, Said Bousbina, Nelly Hanna, Carl Petry, Mohamed Serag, Justin Stearns, Omar Edward Moad, Erin Pettigrew, Mamadou Diouf, Ismail Warcheid, Farah El-Sharif, Amir Syed, Sean Hanretta, Will Caldwell, and Brannon Ingram for pointed interventions in the development of my research on the Tijaniyya and the eighteenth-century Islamic world. I am grateful to UNC Press editors Elaine Maisner, Carl Erst, and Bruce Lawrence for their invaluable feedback through the revision process, and for supporting the publication of this book.

I am honored by a rich research network, with Sohaira Siddiqui, Jonathan Brown, Abdel Rahman Azzam, Joseph Lumbard, Gavin Picken, Mauro Nobili, Ibrahim Abusharif, Alexandre Caeiro, Henry Lauziere, Rebecca Shereikis, Ousman Kobo, Rasul Miller, Samiha Rahman, Patrick Laude, Jonathan Glassman, David Schoenbrun, Nate Matthews, Rogaia Abusharaf, Anto Mohsin, and Sami Hermez deserving special mention for sharing their insights on Islamic intellectual history, and African and Middle East Studies more broadly. I also thank the Muslim intellectuals

IX

X Acknowledgments and readers who gave feedback and provided resources on various parts of this research: Fakhruddin Owaisi (South Africa), Muhammad al-Irāgī and his uncle Anas b. Idris al-‘Iraqt (Morocco), Ibrāhīm Khalil al-Tijani (Morocco), Mustafa Sané (Senegal), Ashaki Taha-Cissé (USA), the late Sayyid Abdussalam (USA), Selma Bennani (Morocco), Abu Bakr Kindi (Ghana/Morocco), Talut Dawud (USA/Mexico), Ibrahim Dimson (USA), Hicham Hall (USA), ‘Abd al-Samad Uruzzi (Italy), Yahya Weldon (USA/ Qatar), and Khalifa al-Khulayfī (Qatar).

This research has been supported by a number of grants and institutions over the years: Fulbright Hayes and IIE grants in Senegal and Morocco, Northwestern in Qatar research grants, and visiting fellowships at Northwestern’s Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa and Harvard’s Divinity School. For hosting my presentation of various sections of this book, I especially thank Northwestern’s ISITA and Middle East and North Africa programs, the Harvard Divinity School, Columbia University’s Institute for African Studies, Georgetown’s Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, the University of Michigan’s IKHLAS initiative, NYU-Abu Dhabi’s Arab Crossroads program, and Hamad Bin Khalifa’s College of Islamic Studies. During my time at Northwestern in Qatar, I am especially indebted to the support of Marwan Kraidy, Hariclea Zengos, Craig LaMay, Kathleen Hewett-Smith, Elizabeth Lance, Iman Khamis, Mark Paul, Everette Dennis, and Sandra Richards. I must also recognize the generosity of the Qatar Foundation, and especially the vision of Shaykha Moza bint Nasser and Shaykha Hind A1 Thani, in the ongoing support for research and scholarship in Qatar’s Education City.

Lastly, I am grateful for the support of my family, without whom this book would not have been possible. To my children: this work is for you.

NOTE ON ORTHOGRAPHY

Transliteration of Arabic words complies with the system utilized by Cambridge’s International Journal of Middle East Studies. This system is reproduced for reference purposes below.

Place names rely on the French spelling (thus Oujdah, not Wijda), unless the name has been previously Anglicized (thus Fez, not Fés). Family names from sub-Saharan Africa are preserved as earlier represented in literature for the sake of continuity. Thus Niasse, Sy, and Cissé appear as they would on government passports and in earlier academic literature, rather than the Wolof spelling Naas, Sii, and Seesay or the Arabic transliteration Anyas, Sih, and Sisi. I have otherwise opted for the Arabic transliteration of first names in most cases (thus Tijānī rather than Tidiane, Hasan rather than Assane, Ahmad rather than Amadou).

All dates mentioned in the text have been converted to “Common Era” (CE). Translations from Arabic and French into English are my own, unless otherwise indicated.

Arabic Transliteration Chart

Arabic letter Transliteration Phonetic equivalent

! a talk

= b boy

e t table

ur th bath

id j joy

cC h e

€ kh -

E d day

3 dh then ko E E c B xi xii

Note on Orthography

Arabic letter Transliteration Phonetic equivalent

3 Z zebra

o S sun

Qs sh shine

use $ -

ua d -

L t -

b z m

E s =

E gh i

cà f feast

à q -

2 k key

J l love

e m mother

Ū n none

5 h health

e i (glottal stop) B -/t (silent)/hat i a bag , i big , u bug

REALIZING ISLAM

Jobauas aunnnog e

D e

}195 d ele yes ybuiys e eulpay e auebbay .

eupuexaly wajesniaf e

IS A ES

Introduction

V M 7 HAT IS THE REALITY of Sufism?” asked a disciple of Shaykh Ahmad al-Tijānī. “Know that Sufism is to exemplify the command (of God) and to flee from what is prohibited, both externally and internally, in what pleases God, not in what pleases you.” It seems extraordinary that a learned student of a reputed scholar-saint in late eighteenth-century Morocco would be asking to verify the basic reality (haqīqa) of the Sufi path. But for followers of the nascent Tijāniyya in late eighteenth-century North Africa, verification, realization, or actualization (tahqīq) of Islamic religious identity appears at the center of their search for knowledge. To a student of Islamic learning, al-Tijānī thus wrote, “May God... cause us to seek the way of realization (tahqīq) and sincerity (sadād), and may He allow us to die on the religion pleasing to Him.”

For al-Tijānī, the establishment of his own *Muhammadan spiritual path” (Tariqa Muhammadiyya) was the means to share the realization of human potentiality, exemplified by the Prophet Muhammad, at a time when humanity was perceived to be distant from God. The Tijānī Muhammadan path (or Tijaniyya) emphasized the individual self's acquisition of divine satisfaction by following the external and internal example of the Prophet Muhammad. Verification of the external Muhammadan law (Sharī a) thus paralleled verification of an enduringly important prophetic spiritual presence. The resultant activation of the Muhammadan essence at the core of human identity made an individual the recipient of divine grace, even in a perceived age of social and political corruption.

Such realization of the human condition (tahgīg al-insāniyya) was not unique to al-Tijānī and his followers. But even if the Tijānī version of the Tariqa Muhammadiyya drew upon similar articulations within an eighteenth-century global scholarly network, the Tijāniyya developed a distinctive rendition of this concept. Al-Tijānī's notion of the consummation,

I perfection, or “sealing” of the Muhammadan path in the Tijāniyya both responded to regional Maghrebi intellectual and social currents and facilitated the global spread of the order in a manner perhaps unrivaled by contemporary articulations. With a vibrant and growing presence in West and North Africa, the Middle East, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Muslim minority communities in Europe and the Americas, the Tijāniyya has certainly become one of the world’s most widespread Sufi orders.

The Tyaniyya came with nothing new in relation to earlier Islamic and Sufi ideas: adherents conceived their affiliation to the “way of Muhammad” as the fullest actualization of a very old and basic concept. In most Arabic dictionaries, the meaning for haggaga or tahgīg is to “act according to the truth,” or to “verify; confirm.” To make ta/iqiq is thus to put knowledge into practice, or confirm a religious truth through its performance. The notion of actualization as a form of knowledge beyond rational verification was associated with Sufism in opposition to Hellenistic philosophy at least since the thirteenth-century formulations of the Andalusian Ibn al-‘Arabi and his Anatolian disciple Sadr al-Din al-Oūnawī.* According to William Chittick:

Sufi teachers frequently spoke of the goal of the Islamic tradition as “realization” (tahgīg), a word derived from the same root as the Divine Name a/-Hagg, the Real, the Right, the True, the Appropriate. Grammatically, realization means to actualize truth (haqq) and reality (haqiqa), and in Sufism it came to designate the end result of following the path to God. To achieve realization means to reach the Real, to see and understand all things in light of the Real, and to act rightly and appropriately in all situations. This demands the transformation of the very being of the seeker?

A muhaqqiq is thus one in whom truth has become manifest: he is the living proof of the truth's verification.

The spiritual claims of the Tijāniyya—that al-Tijānī was the Seal of Saints, that the "stamp" ofthe Tijaniyya is over all other Sufi paths till the end of time, for example—is best understood through the concept of tahgīg. Sufi actualization was part of a more general accent on scholarly verification for al-Tijani. According to al-Tijānī's close disciple ‘Ali Harazim:

Among his concerns was verification (tahqiq) and scrutiny (tadgīg) in everything, large or small, in order to establish the real truth. By this, he departed from the yoke of imitation (taglīd) and (blind) acceptance (tasdīg) . . . until he came to encompass all of the official sciences (al- ‘ulum al-rasmiyya), with verification, investigation, understanding, and contemplation; solving problems and enigmas. He became the imam of all types of knowledge. People sought him out for his explanations, for he was knowledgeable of the cause, judgement, sources, branches, derivative issues, understandings, pronouncements, abrogating and abrogated matters [in all fields of learning]. He plunged into the depths of all transmitted and official learning . . . just as [he did in] the knowledge of divine reality.

In other words, the appeal of eighteenth-century scholar-saints such as Ahmad al-Tijānī was their perceived ability to offer a comprehensive realization of an Islamic religious identity. These exemplars were guides to the truth in a time of confusion. “The true scholar,” al-Tijānī said, “gives form to what is clear, and clarifies what is ambiguous, from the strength of his knowledge, the breadth of his understanding, the soundness of his spiritual vision (nazr) and his verification (tahqiq).”’ Al-Tijanr's Sufi claims are illegible without an appreciation of this vibrant discourse on the verification and realization of Islamic knowledge, by which scholars justified their prominence in the eighteenth-century Muslim world.

Al-Tijānī's Tarīga Muhammadiyya, allegedly gifted directly by the Prophet in a waking encounter to al-Tijānī, was thus meant to verify the essence of all Sufi paths. The shaykh’s own realization of paradigmatic sainthood was articulated as simply the reflection of his spiritual proximity to the Prophet Muhammad as the source of all divine realization. While such claims to saintly authority were no doubt controversial to an external audience, they were certainly not illegible. Sufi saints, and premodern Islamic religious authority more generally, were “presences” thought to be inscribed not only with the knowledge they taught, but with the aspirations of their students and followers. “Without saints, there is no Sufism,” a prominent historian of Sufism observed.’ But too often observers have decontextualized the spiritual claims of saints from disciple investiture in sainthood as a participatory medium.” “Tf the greatest of the perfected saints (agtāb) came to know what has been given to our companions,” al- Tijānī assured his disciples, “they would cry to God and say, ‘Our Lord, you have given us nothing." "? In partial explanation, the shaykh reported the Prophet Muhammad's words to him: "Anyone who loves you is the beloved of the Prophet, God’s blessing and peace on him, and he will not die until he becomes a saint." For followers of the Tijaniyya, the rank of their shaykh was thus a medium to actualize the Prophet’s own invitation to get closer to God.

The Eighteenth-Century Islamic World

The Tijāniyya emerged at the end of the intellectually vibrant eighteenth century. New research on this period in the Muslim world concurs in overturning an earlier orientalist and Islamic modernist assumption of scholarly stagnation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. “It was a period,” John Voll observes, “of major developments in key aspects of the Islamic tradition, providing both a culmination for the first millennium of Islamic history and the foundation for many dynamic aspects of Islam in the modern world.” Ahmad Dallal makes a similar observation in his overview of Islamic intellectual history in the period: “The Islamic eighteenth century was a period of great intellectual vitality comparable in its scope, intensity, and quality to the cultural activities of the classical period. Intellectuals from virtually all the regions of the Muslim world systematically attempted to scrutinize the epistemological foundations of inherited knowledge and to reformulate the traditional Islamic disciplines of learning"? Such scrutiny shares much, then, with an emphasis on “verification” (tahgīg) that Khaled El-Rouayheb locates in the seventeenth century," but which arguably blossomed as the eighteenth century progressed.

Researchers have focused on different aspects of scholarly renewal: Voll on chains of prophetic narrations (hadith) and juristic interpretations (ijtihād), Dallal on juristic methodology (usa al-fiqh) and evaluation of hadith transmissions (usū/ al-hadith), and Rouayheb on theology (kalām) and Sufism, for example. Understandably, the exercise of tahgīg employed different epistemological strategies for different intellectual disciplines: transmission (‘ilm al-nagl) for hadith and jurisprudence (fiqh), rational proof (‘ilm al-'agl) for theology and legal methodology, and experiential witnessing (kashf, ma‘rifa) for the spiritual realities referenced in Sufism.’ Verifying transmitted knowledge prioritized the search for alternative sources of narrations, authenticating existing hadith literatures through the “science of transmitters" ("ilm al-rijal), and the acquisition of the shortest possible chain of knowledge transmission (sanad) from licensed scholars. Verifying theological premises or legal theory required

“rational demonstration” and the ability to “critically assess received views,” most particularly, for Dallal, through a “consistent historicization” of legal thought: the eighteenth-century scholar’s observation of the inherited intellectual tradition’s ability to respond to historically diverse circumstances, but also the necessity for contextualizing received opinions in their own time and place. Verifying spiritual realities required the direct experience of the unseen: “In a Sufi context, ‘verification’ typically denoted the mystical-experiential authentication of the truths to which ordinary believers—including exoteric theologians—abstractly assent.”

This overview does not mean to collapse significant distinctions between studies of the eighteenth century. Researchers have disagreed most notably on how widely ideas were shared, and whether or not global scholarly exchanges have any relevance in understanding the local formulation and reception of diverse scholars. Even so, such differences can risk exaggeration. According to John Voll, “these connections [between scholars] can be overstated as well as underestimated, and it is important to set a balance. The eighteenth century Muslim world was . . . [not] composed of totally separate and isolated parts." Elsewhere, Voll adds, “there is enough interaction among revivalists in the eighteenth century” to conclude that “revivalist movements . . . did not emerge in isolation.””' Ahmad Dallal’s emphasis on understanding local and regional contexts over global exchanges, while critical of Voll’s work on networks, nonetheless concedes, “none of these movements was totally detached from outside intellectual currents of the Muslim world.”

The foundation of the Tijaniyya is a key case study, only superficially referenced in earlier research on eighteenth-century intellectual history, that emphasizes the importance of verification or realization of knowledge. It also suggests both the significance of global scholarly exchanges and the importance of regional historical context in understanding the reception of eighteenth-century Islamic scholarship. Ahmad al-Tijānī traveled throughout North Africa and the Middle East and had meaningful connections with Arab, Kurdish, and Indian scholars in Egypt and the Hijaz. But clearly, his teachings responded to regional historical developments in Algeria and Morocco in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The spread of the Tyaniyya during his life and around the world today may have much to do with al-Tijānī's ability to make the inherited intellectual tradition speak to a perceived new historical era of unprecedented corruption. The emphasis on realization or authentication provides a useful lens through which to understand scholarly exchange, local context, and perception of historical specificity at the foundation of the Tijāniyya. Al-Tijānī in fact emphasized the same aforementioned tahgīg in all three epistemological strategies—transmission, rational proof, and spiritual experience—in promoting Islamic religious revival. Even if Sufism remained, for al-Tijānī as for al-Ghazālī, the privileged method of verifying the truth of religion, the foundational sources of the Tijāniyya give important insight into the ways in which the disciplines of hadith, legal theory, theology, and Sufism interfaced and mutually supported one another in eighteenth-century scholarship.

The Tarīga Muhammadiyya

As suggested above, al-Tijanr's notion of the “Muhammadan Way” was useful in focusing Islamic learning on individual religious realization. For the shaykh, the Tarīga Muhammadiyya was the Prophet’s own chosen path for the actualization of divine knowledge. Such external and internal emulation of the Prophet necessitated both the learning of the Prophet’s transmitted behavior (Sunna) and the emulation of his spiritual state in the presence of God. The Tijānī Sufi path thus presupposed a degree of legal and theological knowledge, though it certainly accentuated the methodology of the self’s purification in order to experience unseen realities. In this, the Tijāniyya was no different than most Sufi orders. Indeed, the Tijaniyya's most visible distinguishing characteristic—the waking encounter with the Prophet and the claim to Seal of Sainthood—do not result from any ideological or practical innovation. Al-Tijānī perceived his own “Muhammadan Way” as nothing new, only the ultimate fulfillment of Sufism’s promise to connect the worshipper to God. But Rūdiger Seesemann’s analysis of nineteenth-century Tijānī literature is instructive here: “even if the ‘old-hat-argument’ holds true, we still need to consider the possibility that the same idea (or text) can assume a different meaning or relevance in a different context"?

Al-Tijānī was not the first to employ the terminology of the Tarīga Muhammadiyya, nor was he the first to claim the waking vision of the Prophet or the Seal of Muhammadan sainthood. While the proliferation of self-proclaimed Tarīga Muhammadiyya movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries certainly suggests shared influences, there is little shared coherence to the term to indicate a globally transmitted *Muhammadan Way" in the period. Discussion of shared influences and global intellectual currents invoking the concept is useful to understand the context and later reception of the Tijaniyya, particularly in Africa. But there is nothing in Tijānī primary sources to substantiate the notion that the Tijaniyya was part of a global “movement” or network of Tariqa Muhammadiyya scholars visibly distinct from the larger Sufi tradition. Nonetheless, the Tijaniyya drew on the intellectual resources of eighteenth-century thought—themselves the crystallization of earlier ideas—and offered its own version of the Tarīga Muhammadiyya as having particular relevance to Muslims of the period.

Ahmad al-Tijānī (1737-1815) and the Tijāniyya

Ahmad b. Mahammad b. Mukhtar al-Tijānī al-Hasani** was born in the southwestern Algerian oasis of ‘Ayn Madi and traveled throughout North Africa and the Hijaz before taking up permanent residence in Fez, Morocco, in 1798. Before leaving Ayn Madi at age twenty-one, he completed the standard curriculum of Qur'an memorization and study of jurisprudence, theology, prophetic traditions, Qur'an exegesis, and Arabic literature. His travels in search of further knowledge (mostly prophetic narrations and Sufi training), led him to stays in several North African centers of knowledge, such as Fez, Tlemcen, Tuwat, and Tunis. During these years, he received initiation into various branches of the Shādhiliyya, the Qadiriyya, and the Khalwatiyya. He accomplished the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1774. During this trip, he received initiations from prominent Khalwatī shaykhs Mahmūd al-Kurdī (d. 1780) in Cairo and Muhammad al-Samman (d. 1775) in Medina, as well as an Indian Sufi, likely of the Naqshbandiyya, Ahmad al-Hindi (d. 1774) in Mecca. His combination of Islamic learning and Sufi knowledge eventually distinguished him as "one of the greatest imams of his time,” according to Tijānī sources.”

While making spiritual retreat (khalwa) in the Algerian town of Abū Samghūn in 1781-82, he experienced his first waking encounter with the Prophet Muhammad. Al-Tijānī reported that the Prophet told him to leave aside his previous Sufi initiations and gave him the distinctive litany (wird) of the Tijaniyya Sufi path.” The claimed direct involvement of the Prophet Muhammad in the establishment of the Tyaniyya, as well as the disciple’s constant visualization of the Prophet’s enduring spiritual presence, meant that followers of the Tijāniyya considered the Prophet Muhammad to be the ultimate Sufi shaykh of their “Muhammadan way.”

Upon his final establishment in Fez, al-Tijānī joined Sultan Mawlay Sulayman’s council of scholars and initiated several prominent Moroccan figures into the Tijaniyya, such as the jurist and theologian Hamdin b. al- Hajj, several government ministers, and perhaps even the sultan himself. The most comprehensive biographical dictionary of Moroccan scholars relating to the period, Muhammad al-Kattani’s Salwat al-anfas, describes al- Tijani as “the grounded gnostic,” “the rope of the Sunna and the religion,” and the “comprehensive saintly pole” before continuing: “He was among the scholars who put his knowledge into action, the imams of independent scholarly opinion (a/-a imma al-mujtahidin), among those who combined the nobility of origin with the nobility of the religion, the nobility of knowledge, action, certainty, divine spiritual states (a/rwal) and lofty saintly stations (magamdt).””’ Such descriptions, although not uncontested, suggest al-Tijānī's reception among elements of both general and elite audiences. A number of Moroccan sultans have since maintained close relations with the Tijāniyya, most recently funding the restoration of al-Tijānī's final burial place and main lodge (zawiya) of the Tijaniyya in Fez, as well as al-Tijani's original house in the city, the “House of Mirrors,” that Mawlay Sulayman gifted to al-Tijānī upon his arrival in Fez.

The Tyaniyya first spread primarily in North and West Africa. By the early twentieth century, it had become the most popular Sufi order in Morocco.”* By the nineteenth century, it had made significant inroads among established clerical lineages of Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, and Nigeria; and by the mid-twentieth century, under the leadership of the Tijānī revivalist Ibrahim Niasse (d. 1975, Senegal), had displaced the Qadiriyya as the dominant Sufi order in West Africa.” It is today found all over the Muslim world and beyond, with notable Tijānī communities (besides North and West Africa) in Indonesia, Singapore, India, Turkey, Palestine, Arab Gulf states, Egypt, Europe, and North and South America.

If the Tijāniyya has become one of the Islamic world’s most popular Sufi orders, it is certainly a testimony to the success of eighteenth-century Islamic scholarly revival. The lack of serious academic consideration of the Tyaniyya in historical overviews of Sufism, or its place in eighteenth-century revivalism, is an astounding oversight in both fields. In elaborating the notion of the “Hidden Pole” (a/-qutb al-maktūm), the Tijānī tradition seemed unconcerned by such opacity: “The secret with me,” al-Tijānī said, “is locked in a house whose doors are shut and whose key has been lost"?! But full understanding of the shaykh's secret knowledge is not necessary to appreciate the rapid spread of the order and the dynamic intellectual production it inspired.

Literature and Sources on the Tyaniyya

Generalist studies of Sufism or of eighteenth-century intellectual history have undoubtedly been limited by incomplete or problematic prior research on the Tijaniyya. The primary English monograph on the Tijaniyya, Jamil Abun-Nasr's The Tijaniyya: A Sufi Order in the Modern World (1965), framed an otherwise notable exposition of primary source material with an uncritical belief in the inevitable “demystification” of the modern world. For Abun-Nasr, the Tijaniyya was an example of Sufism’s incompatibility with modern, postcolonial Muslim rationalized sensibilities. “Their story is,’ Abun-Nasr noted in accusing the Sufi orders and the Tyaniyya in particular with colonial collaboration, “that of adjustment and reconciliation, which would have enabled them to survive politically had it not been that the doctrines which they preached and the functions which they performed were no longer suited to modern times.”” Themes of colonial collaboration, political posturing, and intellectual irrelevance remained consistent refrains for subsequent mentions of the Tyaniyya, as they did for African Sufi communities more broadly. A later introduction to a series of conference papers on the Tijāniyya remarks on the order’s “theological arrogance” and its “long ‘concubinage’ with French colonial power” permitting it to become “one of the greatest beneficiaries of the colonial period.” And unlike other orders, the Tyaniyya “remains exclusively African—this is another one of its characteristics.’ Generations of later scholarship thus appear to have remained beholden to Abun-Nasr's reading of the Tijāniyya.

My 2003 master’s thesis, “On the Path of the Prophet: Shaykh Ahmad Tijani and the Tariqa Muhammadiyya,” was later published (2005) without peer review. It hoped to recontextualize Tijānī primary source material within the intellectual history of the eighteenth century. The work stands, I believe, as a useful introduction to the Tijaniyya, but is limited by a surface-level reading of primary source material and an exaggeration of the Tarīga Muhammadiyya as an intellectually coherent scholarly network. In any case, the book has received some academic attention, with two reprints and a French translation reflecting its apparent usefulness to non-academic audiences and the undergraduate classroom.*4

The only other published academic monograph to narrate the history of the Tijaniyya (in a European language?) is Jilali El Adnani's La Tijāniyya, 1781—1861.5 While Adnani recognizes the significance of the Tijāniyya in the modern history of Morocco, his utilitarian focus on shaykh-disciple relationships at the foundation of the order reduces Sufi affiliation to a form of false consciousness. Like Abun-Nasr, Adnani's citation of primary source material focuses on provocative statements to substantiate an apparent narrative of Tijānī heterodoxy, failing to balance such citations with others that might allow him to read these statements differently. Adnani thus concludes, “the rehabilitation of Ahmad al-Tijānī resided in the reinforcement of his superior rank over his disciples, something impossible without recourse to miracles and magic . . . testimony to a strategy destined for the masses, which was much more receptive to invisible actors than to Sufi erudition.”>” Alexander Knysh has usefully bracketed such understandings of Sufi communities based on crude power dynamics: “ ‘Power’ is too general a concept to account for construction, justification, and performance by Sufi masters of their claims to knowledge and guidance across centuries. Commanding respect and awe, being listened to in silence by a captive and respectful audience without necessarily ‘dominating’ or ‘exploiting’ it, is a motivation that does not fit neatly into the narrowly conceived grid of power relations envisioned by neo-Marxian sociologists of various stripes.”** Knysh concludes that such an understanding “fails to do justice to the complexity of human aspirations.” Abun-Nasr's and Adnani’s apparent reduction of the religious identities of millions of Tijānī adherents may fit various instrumentalist understandings of the Tijaniy ya's social and political role in Africa from the nineteenth century, but their dismissal of the intellectual contributions of al-Tijānī and his early disciples has left a void in more general overviews of Sufi thought and history. This tendency to selectively ignore formative teachings from primary sources, in preference for decontextualized controversial statements, necessitates a more balanced narration of one of the Islamic world’s most important Sufi orders.

It must be admitted, however, that the works of Abun-Nasr and Adnani provide a window into intriguing polemical debates surrounding Sufi doctrine and practice in modern contexts. Some of these debates—such as the implications of seeing the Prophet—appear specific to the Tijāniyya, but most are more general to Sufism (the hierarchy of saints or the power of Sufi prayers, for example) and perhaps to

The Tijaniyya and the Verification of Islamic Knowledge II

"traditional Islam” broadly defined (the authority of scholars, the enduring spirit of the Prophet beyond the grave, or the present-essence of God, for example). Full exploration of such polemics, and the voluminous literature they have produced, deserve a separate and more focused inquiry that is beyond the scope of this work. However, I hope that the disciplined situation ofthe Tijaniyya's emergence in eighteenth-century Islamic intellectual history can provide a more stable foundation for such further explorations.

In addition to the problematic decontextualization of primary sources in earlier academic accounts, a new history of the Tijāniyya is also warranted from the perspective of newly available or edited Arabic source material. While Ahmad al-Tijānī, like many Sufi shaykhs, left few writings himself, there are a number of central primary sources written or collected by his disciples. Foremost among them is the “Pearls of Meanings and Obtainment of Hopes in the Spiritual Floods of Sayyidi Abū l- Abbas Ahmad al-Tijānī” (hereafter referenced as Jawāhir al-maānī) written by al-Tijānī's closest disciple, Alī Harazim al-Barrāda (or al-Barāda, d. 1804), and completed in 1798.” The work contains al-Tijānī's biography, his interpretations of various Qur'an verses and sayings of the Prophet, and responses to a variety of questions from disciples. In writing the book, Harazim recycled short, formulaic sections from an earlier Moroccan Sufi text, ‘Abd al-Salam b. al-Tayyib al-Qadiri’s (d. 1699), Kitab al-magsad al-Ahmad, concerning the seventeenth-century Shādhilī saint Ahmad b. ‘Abdallah Man al-Andalūsī (d. 1708). While Abun-Nasr concludes that the fact that Harazim “drew heavily" on this earlier text constitutes an “act of plagiarism,"" close comparison between published versions of the Jawahir al-maānī and the 1932 publication of Kitab al-maqsad reveal that Harazim borrowed roughly 2.5 pages of al-Maqsad's formulaic introduction: a few of the introductory paragraphs, and a few of the poems probably themselves recycled from past writings.? Considering the roughly 680 pages of the 2011 publication of the Jawahir, this borrowing (0.3 percent) hardly qualified as plagiarism by the standards of the classical Arabic textual tradition,? but it nonetheless became part of a Salafi-inspired attack against the Tijaniyya in early twentieth-century Morocco.^ In any case, the Jawahir al-maānī has enjoyed unrivaled authority in the Tijaniyya, due to Harazim's designation as al-Tijānī's "greatest deputy" (al-khalifa al-a zam) and on account of the Prophet's appearance to al-Tijani to order the book's compilation: “Preserve it," Harazim records the Prophet's words to al-Tijānī, “in order to benefit the saints after you. Elsewhere, al-Tijānī was reported as saying,