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Scholars, Secrets, and Sultans: Clerical Authority in West Africa, 1450–1650
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 June 2023
Abstract
Available historical sources for West Africa's Middle Niger c. 1450–1650 reveal that the ‘indigenous’ (non-Arab) Islamic scholarly class was already a self-conscious, independent social entity long before the clerical revolutions of later centuries. The influence of Muslim scholars was not limited to urban environments like Timbuktu, and clerical elites claimed a number of mostly independent communities throughout West Africa by the end of the sixteenth century. Mostly based on a reading of Arabic texts such as Muḥammad al-Kābarī's Bustān al-fawāʾid (‘Garden of Beneficial Prayers’) in dialogue with the Tārīkh Ibn al-Mukhtār and Tārīkh al-Sūdān (‘Timbuktu Chronicles’), this article argues that Muslim scholars were engaged in a spiritual war for independence clearly on display since the beginning of the Songhay empire. Scholarly texts display deep concern for tempering unjust political power and the protection and attraction of women, discourses that reveal a perilous clerical struggle to assert community independence. Later armed jihads were thus not so much a break from earlier traditions of clerical pacificism, they were the natural evolution from this earlier spiritual jihad.
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References
1 Kaʿti, M., Tārīkh al-fattāsh fī akhbār al-buldān wa l-juyūsh wa akābir al-nās (Damascus, 2014), 268Google Scholar. This Arabic text reproduces earlier confusion surrounding the amalgamation of two separate works, but is retained for citation purposes here as the most recent publication of the text. For more background on the seventeenth-century Tārīkh Ibn al-Mukhtār (from which this citation is drawn) as a separate work from the interpolated nineteenth-century Tārīkh al-fattāsh, see Nobili, M., Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the Faith: Aḥmad Lobbo, the Tārīkh al-fattāsh and the Making of an Islamic State in West Africa (Cambridge, 2020), 94–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Subsequent citations from the 2014 Arabic ‘Tārīkh al-fattāsh’ have been authenticated as part of the original Tārīkh Ibn al-Mukhtār.
2 O. Houdas and M. Delafosse (trans.), Tarikh El-Fettach ou Chronique du Chercheur par Mahmoud Kati (Paris, 1913), 272; C. Wise and H. Abu Taleb (trans.), Ta'rīkh al-fattāsh: the Timbuktu Chronicles 1493–1599 (Trenton, 2011), 262; M. Gomez, African Dominion: a New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa (Princeton, 2018), 366. Most notably, P. F. de Moraes Farias contested these mistranslations in his reviews of Timbuktu Chronicles, in Islamic Africa, 4:2 (2013), 252, and African Dominion, in American Historical Review, 124:2 (2019), 591, although de Moraes Farias's contention that al-ʿibād connotes a ‘general sense of human beings’, is probably too broad of a definition given the very specific use of the word ʿibād in the Arabic text.
3 Although such references are ubiquitous, one example would be Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn who converted the people of Gao to Islam sometime in the late eleventh century. See Al-Qunbili, Tārīkh Ibn al-Mukhtār, sec. 14; ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Saʿdī, Tārīkh al-Sūdān, in J. Hunwick (ed.), Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire: al-Saʿdī's Taʾrīkh al-sūdān down to 1613 and other Contemporary Documents (Leiden, 2003), 39.
4 This was often articulated as the ‘circle of justice’ by early Muslim thinkers, borrowing from preceding political theories developed in the Sasanian empire. See Streusand, D., Islamic Gunpowder Empires: Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals (Boulder, 2011), 13–20Google Scholar.
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12 R. Ware III, The Walking Qurʾan: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge and History in West Africa (Chapel Hill, 2014), 83.
13 This seems particularly true of the Cissé, from which al-Ḥājj Sālim Suwaré and the Jakhanké scholars were perhaps also descended. See Sanneh, Beyond Jihad, 82; Levtzion, Ancient Ghana and Mali, 16; Wright, Z., Living Knowledge in West African Islam: the Sufi Community of Ibrāhīm Niasse (Leiden, 2015), 105–111CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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15 For further discussion of the caste system in West Africa, see D. Conrad and B. Frank (eds.), Status and Identity in West Africa: Nyamakalaw of Mande (Bloomington, IN, 1995); T. Tamari, Les Castes de l'Afrique occidentale: artisans et musiciens endogames (Nanterre, 1997). For Islamic scholarly situation and engagement within the caste system, see G. Brooks, Landlords and Strangers: Ecology, Society and Trade in Western Africa, 1000-1630 (Boulder, 1993), 102; L. Colvin, ‘Shaykh's Men: Religion and Power in Senegambian Islam’, in N. Levtzion and H. Fisher (eds.), Rural and Urban Islam in West Africa (Boulder, 1987), 58; Ware, Walking Qur'an, 82–3; Wright, Living Knowledge, 64–7.
16 Gomez, African Dominion, 156–7.
17 Al-Kaʿti, Tārīkh al-fattāsh, 295.
18 Ibid., 297.
19 Ibid., 297.
20 Houdas and Delafosse, Chronique du chercheur, 94n2.
21 Z. Wright and M. Nobili, ‘Muslim scholars, political elites, and social complexities in Songhay: historical context of the Tārīkh Ibn al-Mukhtār’, in Nobili, Wright, and Diakité, The Chronicles.
22 Al-Qunbili, Tārīkh Ibn al-Mukhtār, secs. 112–16; see also, Gomez, African Dominion, 212.
23 According to the Tārīkh Ibn al-Mukhtār, however, Mori Hawgāro's tomb was located in Yara not Morikoyra, but Yara ‘has fallen into ruin and few know the place of his grave today’. Al-Qunbili, Tārīkh Ibn al-Mukhtār, sec. 184.
24 Zouber, M. A., Traditions Historiques Songhoy: Tindirma, Morikoyra, Arham (Niamey, 1983), 28–30Google Scholar.
25 Gomez, African Dominion, 212–13. Contrary to the oral traditions of Morikoyra collected by Zouber, Gomez makes the case that Morikoyra was not one village but rather a ‘community of learned individuals from multiple inland Delta locales’.
26 M. Nobili, ‘Reinterpreting the role of Muslims in the West African Middle Ages’, The Journal of African History, 61:3 (2020), 337.
27 Zouber, Traditions Historiques Songhoy, 28.
28 Al-Kaʿti, Tārīkh al-fattāsh, 145. The text says, ‘Know that the dynasty (Soɲi), along with askiya Muhammad, Mori Hawgāro the ancestor of the people of Morikoyra and all of their scholars, all have a common origin’, and proceeds to list a number of locals associated with the Soninke people.
29 Al-Kaʿti, Tārīkh al-fattāsh, 256. The son of this union, Mansa ʿAluwā, would later inherit the rule of his mother's mother, Queen Yanu, becoming the ruler of Bana. This suggestion that a brother of Mori Hawgāro was alive at the beginning of Soɲi ʿĀli's reign (1464), while the mori's great-grandchildren prayed against him at the end of his reign (1492) raises some concerns in identifying and dating Mori Hawgāro; but it is not entirely impossible for both narrations to have been true if he had lived sometime in the first half of the fifteenth century.
30 Al-Kaʿti, Tārīkh al-fattāsh, 139.
31 Ibid., 148.
32 This was primarily through the charter of inviolability (kitāb al-ḥurma) granted to Mori Hawgāro's descendants. For a discussion of the authenticity of this document, see Hunwick, J., ‘Studies in the Taʾrīkh al-fattāsh II: an alleged charter of privilege issued by Askiya al-Ḥājj Muḥammad to the descendants of Mori Hawgāro’, Sudanic Africa, 3 (1992), 133–48Google Scholar.
33 Al-Kaʿti, Tārīkh al-fattāsh, 174–5.
34 Gomez, African Dominion, 262.
35 Ibid., 213. As mentioned above, Gomez considers Morikoyra as a collection of scholarly communities, in this case including the towns of Kābara and Jinjo where Kankoi studied and taught respectively.
36 Al-Saʿdī, Tārīkh al-Sūdān, in Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire, 122.
37 Ibid., 123.
38 Ibid., 23.
39 Zouber, Traditions Historiques Songhoy, 78–80.
40 Ibid., 28.
41 Saif, L., Leoni, F., Melvin-Koushki, M., and Yahya, F., Islamicate Occult Sciences in Theory and Practice (Leiden, 2021)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
42 For notable studies of Islamic esotericism in West Africa, see L. Brenner, Réflexions sur le savoir islamique en Afrique de l'ouest (Bourdeaux, 1985); D. Owusu-Ansah, Islamic Talismanic Tradition in Nineteenth-Century Asante (Leiston, NY, 1991); R. Dilley, Islamic and Caste Knowledge Practices Among the Haalpulaar'en in Senegal: Between Mosque and Termite Mound (Edinburgh, 2004), 12–14, 131–91; B. Soares, Islam and the Prayer Economy: History and Authority in a Malian Town (Ann Arbor, 2005), 127–52; C. Hamès (ed.), Coran et Talismans: textes et practiques religieuse en milieu musulman (Paris, 2007); Wright, Living Knowledge, 42–51, 231–9.
43 Soares, Islam and the Prayer Economy, 129.
44 L. Saif and F. Leoni, ‘Introduction’, in Saif, Leoni, Melvin-Koushki, and Yahya, Islamicate Occult Sciences, 3–4, 7.
45 Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, trans. Michael Marmura (Provo, 2000), 162.
46 Ibid., 162.
47 Interview with Dauda Maiga, in Brenner, L., West African Sufi: the Religious Heritage and Spiritual Search of Cerno Bokar Saalif Taal (London, 1984), 89Google Scholar.
48 Dilley, Islamic and Caste Knowledge, 109.
49 Ogunnaike, O., Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions (State College, PA, 2020), 345Google Scholar.
50 Dilley, Islamic and Caste Knowledge, 107–8.
51 The Tārīkh Ibn al-Mukhtār credits the Askiya with a number of karamāt (saintly miracles), see Al-Kaʿti, Tārīkh al-fattāsh, 171–2.
52 N. Malio, The Epic of Askia Mohammed, trans. Thomas Hale (Bloomington, IN, 1996), 21.
53 Al-Saʿdī, Tārīkh al-Sūdān, in Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire, 312–13. The italics are from Hunwick's translation.
54 Z. Wright, Realizing Islam: The Tijāniyya in North Africa and the Eighteenth-Century Muslim World (Chapel Hill, 2020), 41–8, 70–5.
55 Al-Saʿdī, Tārīkh al-Sūdān, in Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire, 69–70; Z. Wright, ‘The Islamic intellectual tradition of Sudanic Africa, with analysis of a fifteenth-century Timbuktu manuscript’, in F. Ngom, M. Kurfi, and T. Falola (eds.), Handbook of Islam in Africa (London, 2020), 65.
56 Al-Nafrāwī, Kitāb al-fawākih al-dawānī ʿalā Risālat ibn Abī Zayd al-Qayrawānī; cited in Owusu-Ansah, Islamic Talismanic Tradition, 33–4; For reference to al-Shāfiʿī's opinion as related by ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī, see Z. Wright, ‘Secrets on the Muhammadan way: transmission of the esoteric sciences in eighteenth-century scholarly networks’, Islamic Africa, 9:1 (2018), 87; Wright, Realizing Islam, 42.
57 Hadith related in the collections of Muslim and Abū Dāwūd, as contained in the Egyptian hadith scholar Muḥammad al-Ḥāfiẓ al-Tijānī's introduction to his collection of prayers related by Aḥmad al-Tijānī, Aḥzāb wa awrād (Cairo, 1972), 21. For further discussion of this hadith authenticated by Muslim scholars, see https://dorar.net/hadith/sharh/117403. Accessed by author 21 July 2022.
58 Related by Shaykh Tijānī b. ʿAlī Cissé, conversation with Muḥammad al-Yadālī, witnessed by author. Dubai, 17 Feb. 2022.
59 Brenner, West African Sufi, 97; Soares, Islam and the Prayer Economy, 129; Wright, Living Knowledge, 46–9, 236.
60 Soares, Islam and the Prayer Economy, 130.
61 See, for instance, an account of a Yale University conference on ‘Magic and the occult in Islam and beyond’. M. Tabib, ‘The hidden histories of Islamic magic’, 20 Mar. 2017. https://religiousstudies.yale.edu/news/hidden-histories-islamic-magic. Accessed by author 24 Mar. 2022.
62 For a more comprehensive overview of the work, see Wright, ‘Islamic intellectual tradition’, 55–76. Lectures that discussed this manuscript include Z. Wright, ‘Islamic esotericism in West Africa: from Timbuktu to Senegal, 15th to 20th centuries’, Islamic Esotericism in Global Contexts (virtual conference hosted by the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, Dec. 2020); R. Ware III, ‘The dawn of the West African clerisy: Moodibo Muhammad al-Kabari and the “The Grove of Gains and Benefits”’, Timbuktu Talks (virtual lecture hosted by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Center for African Studies, Dec. 2021). I thank Rudolph Ware for first sparking my interest al-Kābarī's manuscript and providing me my first copy of the work from the Northwestern collection.
63 Muḥammad al-Kābarī, Bustān al-fawāʾid wa l-manāfiʿ. MS no. 161, Paden Collection, Herskovits Library of African Studies, Northwestern University; MS no. 5684, Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Learning and Islamic Research, Timbuktu, Mali. Two further copies exist in the Institut de Recherche en Sciences Humaines, Niamey, Mali (no. 1110 and 1342), but I have not been able to acquire copies without traveling to Mali. I thank Mauro Nobili for helping me acquire a digital copy of Ahmed Baba manuscript and for facilitating my contact with the Niamey collection. All subsequent citations, unless otherwise indicated, are from the Northwestern University (NU) manuscript. Although I find the Arabic script of the Ahmad Baba manuscript easier to read, the NU manuscript is more complete, with the last page of the Baba manuscript (29) corresponding to page 42 out of 71 pages of the NU manuscript.
64 Examples of discrepancies between the texts mostly surround the inclusion or non-inclusion of various diagrams or arcane symbols. The Ahmad Baba text includes the seven symbols said to represent the ‘Seal of Solomon’ (see page 20 of the Baba manuscript), for example, while the NU text appears to include a number of ‘names’ composed of disjointed letters according to the sīmā tradition (see page 28 of the NU manuscript) that the Baba manuscript does not include. Appraisals of copying dates are based on the author's own wide exposure to manuscript styles in West Africa, and agreed upon by colleagues Ruldoph Ware, Andrea Brigaglia, and Mauro Nobili (personal correspondences).
65 Al-Kābarī, Bustān al-fawāʾid, 1; also cited in Wright, ‘Islamic intellectual tradition’, 66.
66 Shaykh al-Tijānī ʿAlī Cissé, interview with author, Cairo, Egypt, 25 Feb. 2022. Shaykh al-Tijānī showed me a copy of al-Shinnāwī's commentary, consisting of four volumes comprising 200–400 pages each that he was preparing for publication in Egypt.
67 Al-Saʿdī, Tārīkh al-Sūdān, in Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire, 69.
68 Al-Kābarī, Bustān al-fawāʾid, 1; also cited in Wright, ‘Islamic intellectual tradition’, 66.
69 For more on the circulation of al-Būnī's works, see N. Gardiner, ‘Esotericist reading communities and the early circulation of the Sufi occultist Aḥmad al-Būnī's works’, Arabica, 64:3/4 (2017), 405–41. Gardiner considers al-Būnī's most famous work, Shams al-maʿārif al-kubrā to be falsely attributed to him
70 N. Gardiner, ‘Lettrism and history in ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Bisṭāmī's Naẓm al-sulūk fī musāmarat al-mulūk’, in Saif, Leoni, Melvin-Koushki, and Yahya, Islamicate Occult Sciences, 233.
71 Gomez, African Dominion, 145.
72 Hunwick, Arabic Literature of Africa, Volume 4, 12; Wright, ‘Islamic intellectual tradition’, 67.
73 Goldzier, I., Le Livre de Mohammed Ibn Toumert (Algiers, 1903), 18–19Google Scholar; Wright, ‘Islamic intellectual tradition’, 67.
74 De Moraes Farias, Arabic Medieval Inscriptions, cxlix.
75 The name so derived because the four letters at each of the four corners of the square render the name b-d-ū-ḥ. Yahya, F., Magic and Divination in Malay Illustrated Manuscripts (Leiden, 2016), 203–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
76 Al-Kābarī, Bustān al-fawāʾid, 38; A. Ḥ. al-Ghazālī, Deliverance from Error: Five Key Texts including his Spiritual Autobiography, al-Munqidh min al-Dalal. R. J. McCarthy, trans. (Louisville, 2004), 95. While not all diagrams are shared between the two copies of the Bustān consulted for this article, this budūḥ square is also found in the Ahmad Baba manuscript (20).
77 J.-C. Coulon makes this connection in his article, ‘The Kitāb Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya and medieval Islamic occult sciences’, in Saif, Leoni, Melvin-Koushki, and Yahya, Islamicate Occult Sciences, 342. However, the catalogue of Islamic Medical Manuscripts at the National Library of Medicine lists this text as authored by another Ibn Tūmart al-Maghribī (d. 1001) who ‘is not to be confused’ with the latter Ibn Tūmart. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/arabic/magical1.html. Accessed by author 24 Mar. 2022. Whoever the author, the text could certainly have been available in West Africa in the fifteenth century given its earlier provenance in North Africa.
78 This point is developed in the forthcoming chapter, Z. Wright and M. Nobili, ‘Muslim scholars, Political Elites, and Social Complexities in Songhay’ in Chronicles of Two West African Kingdoms.
79 Marlow, L., ‘Kings, prophets and the ʿulamāʾ in mediaeval Islamic advice literature’, Studia Islamica, 81 (1995), 117Google Scholar.
80 Al-Kaʿti, Tārīkh al-fattāsh, 200–1; Gomez (African Dominion, 294) also reminds us of ‘four leaders of the Moroccan occupation’ buried in Timbuktu ‘under the protection of Sidi Yahya’.
81 This man, as the account unfolds, was appointed the seventh judge of Djenné under the Askiyā dynasty. He is described in the Tārīkh al-Sūdān as having been of Wangarī origin. His sons Muḥammad and Aḥmad were also both distinguished scholars. See al-Saʿdī, Tārīkh al-Sūdān, in Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire, 26.
82 Al-Kaʿti, Tārīkh al-fattāsh, 195–6.
83 Ibid., 198.
84 I. Wilks, ‘The transmission of Islamic learning the Western Sudan’, in J. Goody (ed.), Literacy in Traditional Societies (London, 1968), 162–195; Saad, Social History of Timbuktu, 68.
85 Al-Kaʿti, Tārīkh al-fattāsh, 148.
86 Ibid., 245. The Qurʾān verse cited is 4:93. The same passage is cited, with slight variation, in J. Hunwick, ‘Secular power and religious authority in Muslim society: the case of Songhay’, The Journal of African History, 37:2 (1996), 192.
87 For reference to the practice of ‘magic squares’ in the Arab world, see B. Hallum, ‘New light on early Arabic Awfāq literature’, in Saif, Leoni, Melvin-Koushki, and Yahya, Islamicate Occult Sciences, 57–161; J. Sesiano, Magic Squares in the Tenth Century: Two Arabic Treatises by Anṭākī and Būzjānī (Cham, 2017).
88 M. Noble, ‘Sabian astral magic as soteriology in Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī's al-Sirr al-maktūm’, in Saif, Leoni, Melvin-Koushki, and Yahya, Islamicate Occult Sciences, 220
89 Soares, Islam and the Prayer Economy, 142.
90 Hadith narrated by ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib and Abū Hurayra, in Ḥākim's al-Mustadrik ʿalā l-Ṣaḥīḥayn, among others. See S. Motala, ‘Du'a is the weapon of the believer’, on Hadith Answers, and online source for hadith fatwas. https://hadithanswers.com/dua-is-the-weapon-of-the-believer/ . Accessed by author 17 Mar. 2022.
91 Al-Kābarī, Bustān al-fawāʾid, 16. The Qurʾān chapter mentioned is 102.
92 Al-Kābarī, Bustān al-fawāʾid, 17. The Qurʾān verses mentioned are 1:1–7; 112:1–4; 21:87. Here, and in some subsequent citations from the Bustān al-fawāʾid, I have elected to omit an element of the prescription to honor practitioners of these sciences who might object to outsiders practicing the talismanic sciences from an academic publication.
93 Qurʾān, 5:23, 23:108, 44:20, 15:46, 3:120. Several of the Arabic words here contain variant readings of the Qurʾān according to the warsh (as opposed to the now more popular hafs) recitation of the Qurʾān. For more the comparison between these two variant readings of the Qurʾān approved in the Prophet's own lifetime, see V. Garadaghli, “Vocal inflection in the Warsh transmission (compared to the Hafs transmission),” Laplage em Revista, 7:3B (2021), 481–94.
94 For other such examples in al-Kābarī's text, see Wright, ‘Islamic intellectual tradition’, 66, 68.
95 Al-Kābarī, Bustān al-fawāʾid, 21, 55, 40–1.
96 M. Subtelny, ‘Kāshifī's Asrār-i qāsimī: a late Timurid manual of the occult sciences and its Safavid afterlife’, in Saif, Leoni, Melvin-Koushki, and Yahya, Islamicate Occult Sciences, 301.
97 D. Owusu-Ansah, ‘Prayers, amulets, and healing’, in N. Levtzion and R. Pouwels (eds), The History of Islam in Africa (Athens, OH, 2000), 477–88; O. Kane, Beyond Timbuktu: an Intellectual History of Muslim West Africa (Cambridge, MA, 2016), 91–3.
98 Hunwick, J., Sharīʿa in Songhay: the Replies of al-Maghīlī to the Questions of Askia al-Ḥājj Muḥammad (Oxford, 1985), 89Google Scholar.
99 Ibid., 124.
100 This was the case for the town of Musadu (Guinea). See T. Geysbeek, ‘History from the Musadu epic: the formation of Manding power on the southern frontier of the Mali empire’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Michigan State University, 2002), 394–400.
101 Al-Kaʿti, Tārīkh al-fattāsh, 148.
102 Ibid., 170–1.
103 Ibid., 175.
104 J. Guyer and S. Belinga, ‘Wealth in people as wealth in knowledge: accumulation and composition in Equatorial Africa’, The Journal of African History, 36:1 (1995), 106, 115.
105 E. Akyeampong and H. Fofack, ‘The contribution of African women to economic growth and development in the pre-colonial and colonial periods: historical perspectives and policy implications’, Economic History of Developing Regions, 29:1 (2014), 49.
106 Al-Kābarī, Bustān al-fawāʾid, 55.
107 Ibid., 23–4.
108 Ibid., 54.
109 Ibid., 55.
110 Ibid., 54–5.
111 Ibid., 41.
112 Ibid., 41, 53.
113 Qurʾān, 7:186.
114 Ibid., 3:102.
115 Ibid., 4:1.
116 Ibid., 33:70.
117 Soares, Islam and the Prayer Economy, 145.
118 Hadith related in Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazzālī, Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn, in A. H. al-Ghazzālī, Marriage and Sexuality in Islam, trans. M. Farah (Kuala Lampur, 2012), 125.
119 Hunwick, Arabic Literature of Africa, Volume 4, 20; J. Hämeen-Anttila, ‘Al-Suyūṭī and erotic literature’, in A. Ghersetti (ed.), Al-Suyūṭī, a Polymath of the Mamluk Period (Leiden, 2017), 227–40.
120 Firanescu, D., ‘Medieval Arabic Islam and the culture of gender: feminine voices in al-Suyūṭī's literature on sex and marriage’, Mamluk Studies Review, 21 (2018), 72, 80Google Scholar.
121 Hadith discussed by al-Suyūṭī, originally related in the collections of al-Bayḥaqī and al-Ṭabarānī; cited in Myrne, P., ‘Women and men in al-Suyūṭī's guides to sex and marriage’, Mamluk Studies Review, 21 (2018), 60Google Scholar.
122 Al-Jawziyya, al-Ṭibb al-nabawī, Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal, Musnad; cited in T. Zadeh, ‘Touching and ingesting: early debates over the material Qurʾān’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 29:3 (2009), 464. For more on the practice of drinking the Qurʾān in West Africa, see Ware, Walking Qurʾān, 57–64.
123 Al-Kābarī, Bustān al-fawāʾid, 17. The Qurʾān verses mentioned include 20:25–36, 94:1–8, 106:1–4.
124 Al-Kābarī, Bustān al-fawāʾid, 33.
125 Ibid., 8.
126 V. Rispler-Chaim, ‘Ḥasan Murād Mannāʿ, “Childbearing and the rights of a wife”’, Islamic Law and Society, 2:1 (1995), 96; Khan, F., ‘Tafwīḍ al-Ṭalāq: transferring the right to divorce to the wife’, The Muslim World, 99 (2009), 509–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
127 Al-Kābarī, Bustān al-fawāʾid, 41. The Qurʾān verse mentioned in 56:71.
128 Al-Kābarī, Bustān al-fawāʾid, 61.
129 Al-Kaʿti, Tārīkh al-fattāsh, 182. The name is rendered Zāra Kabirun-koy in the Tārīkh al-Sūdān (Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire, 109n46).
130 Al-Saʿdī, Tārīkh al-Sūdān, in Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire, 109, 182. See also, Gomez, African Dominion, 301.
131 Al-Kaʿti, Tārīkh al-fattāsh, 184.
132 Al-Kābarī, Bustān al-fawāʾid, 60.
133 Ibid., 46–7. Qurʾān, 39:30–1.
134 Qurʾān, 113:4.
135 Soares, Islam and the Prayer Economy, 131, 147.
136 Dilley, Islamic and Caste Knowledge, 70.
137 Ibid., 75.
138 For more discussion on this subject, see Marcus-Sells, A., Sorcery or Science: Contesting Knowledge and Practice in West African Sufi Texts (University Park, PA, 2022), 11–16Google Scholar. The overlap between African Islamic esotericism and non-Muslim African healing practices (including ‘witchcraft’) is a fertile ground for further exploration but beyond the scope of this study. The overall accent here is on al-Kābarī's situation within a global discourse on Islamic esoteric practices. This seems to best reflect al-Kābarī's own asserted positionality, but it also serves, in contradistinction to some lingering perceptions of an Islam Noir inherited in academia from the colonial archive, to prove that African expressions of Islam were not uniquely syncretistic or isolated from practices of Islam elsewhere around the world.
139 Al-Kābarī, Bustān al-fawāʾid, 46.
140 Coulon, ‘The Kitāb Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya’, 329.
141 Al-Saʿdī, Tārīkh al-Sūdān, in Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire, 96.
142 Al-Kaʿti, Tārīkh al-fattāsh, 289–90.
143 Ibid., 176.
144 Ware, Walking Qurʾān, 99–118; Lovejoy, P., Jihād in West Africa During the Age of Revolutions (Athens, OH, 2016), 63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
145 For a discussion on the use of prayer as a weapon against colonialism, see Wright, Living Knowledge, 255–8.