A Treatise on Practical and Theoretical Sufism in the Sokoto Caliphate

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 152-173
Author(s):  
Ogunnaike Oludamini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
The Political ◽  
African Continent ◽  
Short Text ◽  
Intellectual Traditions ◽  
The Status ◽  
Sokoto Caliphate ◽  
Annotated Translation

Abstract This article presents an annotated translation of The Exposition of Devotions, a short text by Shaykh ʿAbd al-Qādir ibn Muṣtafā (1218–1280/1804–1864) about his spiritual master and maternal uncle, Muḥammad Sambo (1195–1242/1782–1826). Muḥammad Sambo was the son of ʿUthmān ibn Fūdī (also known as Usman dan Fodio), the founder of the Sokoto Caliphate, one of the largest pre-colonial polities on the African continent. While modern scholarship has tended to focus on the political, legal, social, and economic dimensions of the jihad movement that created the Sokoto Caliphate, this text provides a brief, but detailed account of the spiritual practices and discussions amongst Usman dan Fodio’s clan (the Fodiawa), demonstrating the centrality of the Akbarī tradition in technical discussions, as well as the unique developments of this tradition in thirteenth/nineteenth century West Africa. The work begins with an account of a dream of the then-deceased Muḥammad Sambo that occasioned its composition, and after a brief discussion of the status of dreams and their importance, gives an account of Sambo’s spiritual method and practices. The short treatise concludes with the author’s summary of Sambo’s responses to several technical and highly esoteric questions posed to him by the author, illustrating the profound mastery and unique perspectives developed on these topics by the Fodiawa. Combining oneirology, hagiography, practical and theoretical Sufism, this short treatise is an illuminating window into the spiritual and intellectual traditions of the founders of the Sokoto Caliphate.

The Spread of the Sooro

2012 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 168-185
Author(s):  
Mark D. Delancey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Change ◽  
The Political ◽  
Direct Relation ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Important Index ◽  
Political Symbolism ◽  
The Status ◽  
Northern Cameroon ◽  
Sokoto Caliphate

The Sooro, the pillared entrance hall to the majority of palaces now existing in northern Cameroon, is an important index of political change in this region. The Spread of the Sooro: Symbols of Power in the Sokoto Caliphate traces the proliferation of sooroji from the time that Fulbe conquerors incorporated this region within the Sokoto caliphate in the early nineteenth century until Cameroon’s independence in 1960. The status of Fulbe rulers who conquered the region was not high enough to employ the political symbolism of the sooro, but the use of this building type spread quickly after German colonial borders separated northern Cameroon from the rest of the caliphate in 1901. Eventually the form expanded beyond the boundaries of the Fulbe and spread among non-Fulbe rulers. By explaining the changes in the form and political symbolism of the sooro, Mark DeLancey argues that it was a symbol of power spread in direct relation to the loss of real political power of rulers in colonial northern Cameroon.

The River of Salvation Flows Through Africa: Edward Wilmot Blyden, Raphael Armattoe, and the Redemption of the Culture Concept

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean Hanretta
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Social Group ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nobel Peace Prize ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
Pan Africanism ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Culture Concept

The concept of culture, in the Boasian sense of the learned, variable, and mutable “structures” underlying “the behavior of the individuals composing a social group collectively and individually,” has played an important role in the production of knowledge about many human societies. This chapter examines two moments in the history of the culture concept as applied to West Africa. First, a moment during the process of the concept's formation in the mid-nineteenth century; second, a moment in the 1950s that revealed the political limits of appeals to culture. Juxtaposing the lives of Edward Wilmot Blyden, the father of Pan-Africanism, and the Ghanaian doctor and poet Raphael Armattoe, one of the first Africans nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, the chapter illuminates the diverse networks and shifting political valences that shaped the rise, redemption, and circumscription of the culture concept in Africa from colonialism to neoliberalism.

Derrida and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Earlie
Keyword(s):  
Digital Technology ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
The Political ◽  
Critical Thought ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Key Questions

This book offers a detailed account of the importance of psychoanalysis in Derrida’s thought. Based on close readings of texts from the whole of his career, including less well-known and previously unpublished material, it sheds new light on the crucial role of psychoanalysis in shaping Derrida’s response to a number of key questions. These questions range from the psyche’s relationship to technology to the role of fiction and metaphor in scientific discourse, from the relationship between memory and the archive to the status of the political in deconstruction. Focusing on Freud but proposing new readings of texts by Lacan, Torok, and Abraham, Laplanche and Pontalis, amongst other seminal figures in contemporary French thought, the book argues that Derrida’s writings on psychoanalysis can also provide an important bridge between deconstruction and the recent materialist turn in the humanities. Challenging a still prevalent ‘textualist’ reading of Derrida’s work, it explores the ongoing contribution of deconstruction and psychoanalysis to pressing issues in critical thought today, from the localizing models of the neurosciences and the omnipresence of digital technology to the politics of affect in an age of terror.

scholarly journals A Gendered Enterprise: Placing Nineteenth-Century Businesswomen in History

1998 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wendy Gamber
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Small Business ◽  
The Political ◽  
New Order ◽  
Upper Management ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
The Status ◽  
Large Corporations

Readers who perused a 1904 issue of the Atlantic Monthly encountered an article with the intriguing title of “The Small Business as a School of Manhood.” Largely a diatribe against the growing dominance of large corporations, it lamented the presumably inevitable passing of smaller concerns. Curiously, its author, Henry A. Stimson, placed relatively little emphasis on the economic or even the political consequences of this development. Rather, he worried that the new order, which reduced would-be entrepreneurs to the status of corporate employees, represented “the loss of something fine in manhood.” Men who inhabited the newly-created ranks of middle and upper management might lead prosperous lives but faced the loss of their selfrespect, their dignity, their “intellectual stamina.” As Stimson saw it, they had been emasculated by the rise of the corporation.

Political Theology in Nineteenth-Century West Africa: Al-Ḥājj ʿUmar, the Bayān mā waqaʿa, and the Conquest of the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Amir Syed
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
West African ◽  
The Political ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Muslim Intellectuals ◽  
Legal Justification ◽  
New Vision ◽  
Muslim Communities

Abstract In 1862, al-Ḥājj ʿUmar Fūtī Tall (d. 1864) conquered a prominent Muslim polity of the Middle Niger valley, the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi. Several months earlier, he had penned a long polemical work, Bayān mā waqaʿa, where he outlined his conflict with Ḥamdallāhi's ruler, Aḥmad III (d. 1862), and presented a legal justification for his eventual conquest. Al-Ḥājj ʿUmar was one of several West African Muslim intellectuals who articulated a new vision of power in the region. These intellectuals linked legitimate political rule with mastery over Islamic knowledge that they claimed only they had. Yet these linkages between religious authority and political power remain understudied. Al-Ḥājj ʿUmar's Bayān offers one example of political theology in nineteenth-century West Africa. In this article, I trace his arguments and explain how he constructs his authority and claims to sovereignty in this work. In the process, I conceptualize two theoretical frameworks — the ‘political geography of belief’ and the ‘political theology of knowledge’ — to demonstrate how a careful engagement with Arabic sources can help develop new approaches to the study of Muslim communities in African history and beyond.

Mourning Imam Husayn in Karbala and Kabul: The political meanings of ʿAshura in Afghanistan

Afghanistan ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-236
Author(s):  
Robert D. Crews
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Lay People ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Ritual Practices

This article explores Afghan Twelver Shiʿi commemoration of the martyrdom of Imam Husayn at the Battle of Karbala. It shows how the rites of remembrance and mourning celebrated on ʿAshura in Afghanistan has evolved in important ways from the late nineteenth century to the recent past. More than a pivotal event in the ritual calendar of Shiʿism, ʿAshura has served as an index of Afghan politics—and a field of contestation among state officials, clerical authorities, and the Shiʿi faithful. It has thus been at the center of struggles over the identity of the Afghan nation, the status of the Shia, and ritual practices in public life. Drawing on representations of ʿAshura produced by government authorities, state media, clerics, and lay people, this article examines how different actors have competed to give ʿAshura meaning and to develop distinctively Afghan forms of commemoration.

scholarly journals Shari‘ah on Trial

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-102
Author(s):  
Ousmane Kane
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Northern Nigeria ◽  
African History ◽  
Religious Reform ◽  
Muslim Scholar ◽  
Sokoto Caliphate

At the turn of the nineteenth century, a movement of religious reform andstate building took place in present-day northern Nigeria, culminating withthe establishment of the Sokoto Caliphate. This movement was as central toWest African history as was the 1789 French revolution to European history.Its leader, the Muslim scholar Uthman Dan Fodio (d. 1817), deservesrecognition as a towering figure of nineteenth-century African Islam. DanFodio’s community (jamā‘a), which included many scholars, toppled thepreexisting Hausa kingdoms, replacing them with emirates ruled by Fulanileaders who all paid allegiance to the Caliph based in Sokoto. At its zenith,the Caliphate, which became the most powerful economic and political entityof West Africa in the nineteenth century, linked over thirty differentemirates and over ten million people ...

A History Manuscript in Hausa Ajami from Wurno, Nigeria by Malam Haliru Mahammad Wurno

1989 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 389-396
Author(s):  
John Edward Philips
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Dry Season ◽  
The State ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
The Family ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sokoto Caliphate ◽  
The Town ◽  
Local Languages

This manuscript is a history of the family of Muhammad Buji, who led a migration from the town of Bunkari in Argungu (Sokoto State, Nigeria) to Wurno, sometime capital of the Sokoto Caliphate. It is important as an illustration of the ongoing historiographical tradition of Islamic west Africa in local languages, and as evidence of the strong historical sense and continuing production of historical documents by certain of the scholars of the area.Wurno was constructed ca. 1830 by Muhammad Bello, Sultan of Sokoto and successor of Usuman dan Fodio, founder of the Sokoto Caliphate. Its primary purpose was to defend Sokoto from the northeast, and it replaced Magarya as the principal ribat (frontier fortification) and residence of Bello in that area. It also became the staging point for the annual dry season campaigns against the Gobirawa and other enemies of the Caliphate. When the Caliph himself was resident there, it became the capital of the state. Barth referred to it as such in his account of his travels. Wurno was the capital with more and more frequency as the nineteenth century wore on.

Bulk Exports, Trade Tiers, Regulation, and Development: An Economic Approach to the Study of West Africa's “Legitimate Trade”

1979 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 419-438 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Chamberlin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Approach ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Historical Origins ◽  
Economic Character

During the nineteenth century the export of bulk commodities from West Africa expanded at the expense of slave exports. Research has focused on the political implications of the expansion of so-called “legitimate trade” rather than on its economic character. In the interests of an economic approach, new terminology and a conceptual framework are proposed, and then applied to a historical problem—the levels of competition prevailing in the African trader networks serving the coastal ports. The conclusions of this study are related to the issue of the historical origins of African underdevelopment.

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