is article explores the transformation of the study of tafsīr in Kano city (Northern Nigeria) during the twentieth century, highlighting the role of a Sufi phenomenon of revival (al-fayḍa, the 'flood') within an established order (the Tijāniyya) in promoting intellectual change. e historical background to the Nigerian 'flood' is the encounter between the Senegalese Shaykh Ibrāhīm Niasse (d. 1975) and a dynamic sector of the scholarly class of Kano. Two case-studies of local tafsīr networks are presented here in order to assess the position that the studying, the teaching and the public performing of tafsīr had in the broader edifice of Islamic knowledge of the West African city before and after the 'flood'. e article emphasizes the intensity of the participation of the West African Muslim scholars to the intellectual tradition of tafsīr, and looks at the links between a contemporary Sufi revival, local traditions of Qurʾānic exegesis, and wider bodies of Islamic knowledge.
Shaykh Jaʿfar Mahmoud was one of the most popular voices of the Salafi/Wahhabi mission (daʿwa) in contemporary West Africa. This article reconstructs his career, from his studies in Nigeria and Saudi Arabia through the time of his teaching and preaching in Kano and Maiduguri, until his dramatic assassination in April 2007. After detailing the many conflicts and debates that accompanied his career as a public preacher and surveying the several hypotheses that have been advanced so far to explain his murder, the article considers the career of Jaʿfar Mahmoud in light of the rise of Wahhabism in the densely populated West African nation through the last three decades (1980s–2000s).2
There is a distinctive type of manuscripts across the whole of West Africa characterised by ample space between the lines. This codicological feature seems to point to teaching practices wherein extra space is planned for annotations. This article attempts to draw a correlation between this specific layout and the content of the manuscripts, thus demonstrating that practices of Islamic education can be deduced from analysis of manuscript production. Following Introduction, section 2 discusses ample space layout relation to annotations in the Borno Quran manuscripts; section 3 focuses on the same features in manuscripts from Borno, other than Quran manuscripts; section 4 is a comparative survey of the Borno, Senegambia and Adamawa manuscripts in terms of the relationship between the types of texts and the ample-spaced layout. This comparison reveals a complex pattern of correlation between types of glosses, layout, titles of works, curricula and phases of education.
This paper reconstructs, in a parallel way, the continuous oscillations occurred in the interpretation of the notion of takfīr (excommunication), respectively in Abū Bakr al-Baġdādī’s Islamic State and in its West African province (the latter being in turn an offshoot of the Nigerian group known as “Boko Haram”). The paper combines an analysis of theological discourses as emerging from primary sources, with a sociological reading of the processes of jihadist mobilization. It argues that the continuous oscillations between more and less stringent interpretations of the same theological doctrine, similarly observable in the center and the periphery of the Caliphate, are the result of multiple discursive and strategic imperatives pulling the Ǧihādī-Salafī leadership towards contrasting directions. The “lapsed abode of unbelief” – a notion originally devised by a section of the Caliphate’s scholarly leadership in order to halt the oscillation of the takfīr pendulum – was unable to create an ideological consensus in the global Ǧihādī-Salafī community, showing the degree to which the latter has come to be enmeshed in a complex entanglement between its discursive and strategic needs.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.