Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-15T01:20:41.643Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Gender and Agency in the History of a West African Sufi Community: The Followers of Yacouba Sylla

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 April 2008

Sean Hanretta
Sean Hanretta
Affiliation:
Stanford University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In 1929, French colonial officials in Mauritania began monitoring a young man named Yacouba Sylla, the leader of a religious revival in the town of Kaédi. A Sufi teacher (shaykh), Yacouba Sylla had incurred the hostility of local administrators and the disdain of Kaédi's elite for preaching radical reforms of social and religious practice and for claiming authority out of proportion to his age and his rather minimal formal education. He claimed to derive his authority instead from a controversial shaykh named Ahmed Hamallah, then in exile from his home in Nioro, French Soudan (now Mali).

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , April 2008 , pp. 478 - 508
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 First arrested for having composed “seditious chants and songs,” Yacouba was imprisoned for eight years in Sassandra for engaging in activities “of a nature to compromise public security.” Arrêté 225, Gouv.-Gén. AOF (Carde), 27 Jan. 1930, published in Journal Officiel de l'Afrique Occidentale Française, 15 Feb. 1930; see also Gouv.-Gén. AOF (Carde) to Min. Col., Rapport #133AP/2, 13 Apr. 1930 and Arrêté 807, Gouv.-Gén. AOF (Carde), 11 Apr. 1930 (Archives Nationales de la France—Centre des archives d'outre-mer [hereafter CAOM], 1Affpol 2802/6 dossier 3).

2 Cmdt. de Cercle de Gorgol (Quegneaux), “Recensement des Tidjanis,” 23 Mar. 1930 (Archives Nationales de la République Islamique de la Mauritanie [hereafter ANMt] E2-34); Adama Gnokane, La diffusion du Hamallisme au Gorgol et son extension dans les cercles voisins, 1906–1945 (Memoire de Fin d'Etudes, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Nouakchott, 1980), 66. Mauritania's Governor René Chazal gave even lower figures: 130 adult women, 220 children, and no adult men. It seems likely that this only included Kaédi, where Quegneaux's numbers may have included Djeol. Furthermore, Chazal's report was written closer to the events, and thus his information may not have been as accurate. Lieut. Gouv. Maur. (Chazal), to Gouv.-Gén. AOF (Carde), “Rapport #12C,” 18 Mar. 1930 (CAOM 1 Affpol 2802/6 dossier 3), p. 32.

3 It is misleading, however, pace Hayden White, to see the relationship between an explanatory context and a social ideology as a product of a narrative's formal features; by considering rather its rhetorical features we restore the contingency of the link between form and content. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley, 1969 [1950]).

4 Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, vol. 1, The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible, Sîan Reynolds, trans. (Berkeley, 1992 [1981]). Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 2 vols., Joseph A. Buttigieg, trans. (New York, 1991–1996). For a nuanced use of Gramsci for an African topic, see Jonathon Glassman, “The Bondsman's New Clothes: The Contradictory Consciousness of Slave Resistance on the Swahili Coast,” Journal of African History 32, 2 (1991): 277–312; and Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856–88 (Portsmouth, N.H., 1995). Edward Said's explicitly non-Marxist appropriation of Gramsci (esp. Orientalism [New York, 1978], and Culture and Imperialism [New York, 1993]) has been more influential on the historical anthropology of colonialism and the “new colonial history.” Kate Crehan has been quite critical of such appropriations, arguing persuasively that they result from the reification of Gramsci's use of “culture.” Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology (Berkeley, 2002).

5 This insight motivated much of the subaltern studies initiative in South Asian historiography; Ranajit Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” in, Ranajit Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi, 1982), 1–8. Although the post-subaltern “new” colonial and imperial histories are less sanguine about their recuperative (or redemptive) prospects, they have retained the assumption that the focus of critical scrutiny should be on metropolitan projects. Frederick Cooper, “Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History,” American Historical Review 99 (1994): 1516–45; Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution. Vol. 1: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago, 1991); Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, 1997); Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government (Princeton, 1994). The tendency to associate “projects” (with their implications of rational planning, encompassing vision, and forethought) with metropoles, and “adaptations,” or “subversions” (with their emphasis on situations, locations, and reactions) with the “colonized,” is one of the more troubling leitmotifs of this literature. It is not agency per se that is at stake in these debates, but rather the way temporality and explainability are distributed within our narratives.

6 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “A Small History of Subaltern Studies,” in Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago, 2002), 3–19. Efforts to specify the space of agency within hegemony persist: Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History 37, 1 (2003): 113–24; Thomas David Dubois, “Hegemony, Imperialism, and the Construction of Religion in East and Southeast Asia,” History and Theory 44, 4 (2005): 113–31. One recent effort in an Africanist context has revived the claims of psychoanalytic Marxism to explain the “split” subject by reference to the cleft in history produced by capital. Andrew Zimmerman, “A German Alabama in Africa: The Tuskegee Expedition to German Togo and the Transnational Origins of West African Cotton Growers,” American Historical Review 110, 5 (2005): 1362–98.

7 Jacques Revel, Jeux d'échelles. La micro-analyse à l'expérience (Paris, 1996).

8 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973).

9 Kenneth Burke, Attitudes towards History (rev. ed.) (Boston, 1959); and A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley, 1969 [1945]). For another critique of those forms of historicism that seek to describe all action within a single temporal frame see Christopher Pinney, “Things Happen: Or, from which Moment Does that Object Come?” in, Daniel Miller, ed., Materiality (Politics, History and Culture) (Durham, 2005), 256–72.

10 Steven Feierman, “Colonizers, Scholars, and the Creation of Invisible Histories,” in, Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley, 1999), 182–216.

11 Nancy Rose Hunt's A Colonial Lexicon: Of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo (Durham, 1999) is the most sophisticated example, and both its title and organization reflect its commitment to describing the assemblages of microprocesses that made up the colonial situation. From the works of Nicholas Thomas, Carolyn Hamilton, and Achille Mbembe the metaphor of entanglement passed into Lynn M. Thomas' Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (Berkeley, 2003), and thence into Julie Livingston's Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana (Bloomington, 2005). Gramsci's influence here may be traced to a shared debt to Steven Feierman's work, especially “Struggles for Control: The Social Roots of Health and Healing in Modern Africa,” African Studies Review 28, 2–3 (1985): 73–147; and Peasant Intellectuals: Anthropology and History in Tanzania (Madison, 1990).

12 Mamadou Diawara, La graine de la parole: dimension sociale et politique des traditions orales du royaume de Jaara (Mali) du XVème au milieu du XIXème siècle (Stuttgart, 1990), 113. Diawara translates moodinu as “marabouts,” and notes that the saying refers to two widely shared perceptions: that moodinu provide women with magical services to attract and influence men, and that they are barred from participation in warfare. One might also add the therapies such figures offer for problems of conception, childbirth, and illness.

13 For example, Fondation Cheikh Yacouba Sylla [hereafter FOCYS], “Cheikh Yacouba Sylla où le sens d'un combat (1906–1988)” (privately circulated MS, Abidjan, 1999).

14 BaThierno Marega, trans. Maître Cheickna Sylla, with others in attendance, Gagnoa, 29 Apr. 2001. I carried out over twenty formal interviews with Yacouba's followers, but because of constraints imposed by the community's leadership all but one of my interviews with women were either spontaneous or done through intermediaries.

15 Charbonnier, “Compte-rendu, 1099C,” 5 Sept. 1929 (CAOM 1Affpol 2258/3 dossier 2), p. 4.

16 Lieut. Gouv. Chazal, “Rapport politique annuel, Mauritanie, 1929” (Archives Nationales de la République du Sénégal, Dakar [hereafter ANS] 2G-29 v. 9), p. 28.

17 Daisy Hilse Dwyer, “Women, Sufism, and Decision-Making in Moroccan Islam,” in, Lois Beck and Nikki Keddie, eds., Women in the Muslim World (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), 585–98.

18 For the spiritual stakes in the reform, see Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Vie et enseignement de Tierno Bokar: Le Sage de Bandiagara (Paris, 1980), 58; and Louis Brenner, West African Sufi: the Religious Heritage and Spiritual Search of Cerno Bokar Saalif Taal (Berkeley, 1984), 94, 128.

19 The precise date is somewhat controversial. The key sources are: Ltr., Mohammed Mokhtar, Muqaddam Tijani, Cadi de Boghé, no addressee, 1930 (ANMt E2-32); Alioune Traoré (apparently working from oral materials), Islam et colonisation en Afrique: Cheikh Hamahoullah, homme de foi et résistant (Paris, 1983), 48–50, esp. 48n60 and 50n65; Charbonnier, “Compte-rendu, 1099C,” 5; Cheikh Tahirou Doucouré, Dakar, 26 Feb. 2001.

20 Al-Hajj Malik Sy, “Ifham al-munkir al-jani cala tarîqat sayyidina wa wasilatina ila rabbina Ahmad bin Muhammad al-Tijani” (unpub. MS), cited in Saïd Bousbina, “Un siècle de savoir islamique en Afrique de l'ouest (1820–1920): Analyse et commentaire de la litterature de la confrérie Tijaniyya à travers les oeuvres d'al-Hajj cUmar, cUbayda ben Anbuja, Yirkoy Talfi et al-Hajj Malik Sy” (Thèse de Doctorat du 3ème cycle, Université Paris I, 1996), 330–32; David Robinson, Paths of Accommodation: Muslim Societies and French Colonial Authorities (Athens, Oh., 2000), ch. 10. On Seydou Nourou Tall and the Hamawiyya, see, inter alia: Vincent Joly, “La réconciliation de Nioro (septembre 1937): Un tournant dans la politique musulmane au Soudan français?” in, David Robinson and Jean-Louis Triaud, eds., Le temps des marabouts marabouts: itinéraires et stratégies islamiques en Afrique occidentale française, v. 1880–1960 (Paris, 1997), 366, 368–70; Sylvianne Garcia, “Al-Hajj Seydou Nourou Tall, «grand marabout» tijani: L'histoire d'une carrière (v. 1880–1980),” in Le temps des marabouts, 259–63; and Brenner, West African Sufi.

21 Charbonnier, “Compte-rendu, 1099C,” 4.

22 Eric Pollet and Grace Winter, La Société Soninké (Dyahunu, Mali) (Brussels, 1971), 128; François Manchuelle, Willing Migrants: Soninke Labor Diasporas, 1848–1960 (Athens, Oh., 1997), 31–32, 113, 170–78, 198–99; J.-H. Saint-Père, Les Sarakollé du Guidimakha (Paris, 1925), 51–52, 144–53; Mouhamed Moustapha Kane, “A History of Fuuta Tooro, 1890s–1920s: Senegal under Colonial Rule. The Protectorate” (Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University, 1987), 133–50, 460–48; James F. Searing, “God Alone Is King”: Islam and Emancipation in Senegal, the Wolof Kingdoms of Kajoor and Bawol, 1859–1914 (Portsmouth, N.H., 2002); Cmdt. Coup, “Monographie du Cercle de Gorgol” (typescript, 1908) (ANS 1G-331), p. 11.

23 All remained active strategies of control up through the 1980s and 1990s. Ousmane Camara, Figures de servitude: les petites servantes à Kaédi (Strasbourg, 1995), 13–16.

24 “Liste de Yacoubists décédés à Gattaga: 15-2-1930” (ANMt E2-34). A copy of this file and others from Nouakchott were graciously provided to me by Professor Adama Gnokane of the Université de Nouakchott, to whom I am deeply indebted. Pierre Alexandre, who was in the colonial service in later years, reported the same information without attribution, in “A West African Islamic Movement: Hamallism in French West Africa,” in, R. Rotberg and Ali Mazrui, ed., Protest and Power in Black Africa (New York, 1970), 507.

25 The administrative accounts are fullest in Charbonnier, “Compte-rendu, 1099C,” p. 3ff.; Cmdt. de cer. Gorgol (Quegneaux) to Lieut. Gouv. Maur. (Chazal), 190, 22 Apr. 1930 (CAOM 1Affpol 2802/6 dossier 3); and Gouv.-Gén. AOF (Carde) to Lieut. Gouvs. (all colonies), “Circulaire #133AP,” 13 Mar. 1930 (CAOM 1Affpol 2258/3 dossier 1), pp. 10–11. Attaching a social identity and therefore social significance to Yacouba's followers was crucial for enabling administrative involvement. As Lieutenant Governor Chazal noted: “In strictly confessional matters, our neutrality remained obligatory, but it was not possible to remain indifferent to the tremors [Yacouba's teachings] brought to the cellular structure of families or to the social repercussions they unleashed.” Chazal, “Rapport politique annuel, Mauritanie, 1929,” 28.

26 Benjamin F. Soares, “The Spiritual Economy of Nioro du Sahel: Islamic Discourses and Practices in a Malian Religious Center” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1997), 170–71. For other examples see Searing, “God Alone Is King,” esp. ch. 3.

27 The earliest case of such valorization among the Yacoubists is Yahya Marega to Yacouba Sylla, 29 or 30 Nov. 1931 (Archives Nationales de la République de la Côte d'Ivoire, Abidjan, X-13-253 [9245] 1E-78).

28 The question of castes arose in numerous contexts, including haidara (lit. presence) ceremonies and both formal and informal conversations. The most direct exchanges on the delicate matter of slavery took place in an interview with Maître Cheickna Sylla, Deux Plateaux, 19 May 2001, with Bakari Toure, Aliou Doukoure and Saliou Dembele in attendance; and Ahmadou Sylla, Treichville, 7 June 2001. See also: letter, Maître Cheickna Sylla to the author, 3 June 2001. This letter was the formal codification of the Fondation Cheikh Yacouba Sylla's responses in interviews I conducted with the FOCYS on 19, 21, and 24 May 2001.

29 Ahmadou Sylla, Treichville, 12 Apr. 2001. Participants in the haidara ceremony of 5 May 2001 at Nimatala in Deux Plateaux put the matter similarly, if with somewhat less historicism: they noted that Yacouba had returned his followers to the type of community that existed at the Prophet Muhammad's time, for, they noted, there were no castes in the Prophet's day.

30 Cmdt. de cer. Gorgol (Charbonnier), “Rapport du troisième trimestre, 1929” (ANMt E2/111), pp. 11–12. It was from this class, along with Tukulor political and religious leaders and the local representatives of French trading houses, that the primary opposition to Yacouba and his followers emerged. Figures like Al-Hajj Amadu Tijani Woon, a merchant and twelve-bead leader, used their influence to provide information to the administration that characterized the revival as both a heterodox religious movement and an anarchistic social revolt, decisively shaping French responses. The clearest expression of the views of Kaédi's elite is found in a letter sent to St.-Louis in August 1929 (probably by Woon and his associates): “The Muslims of Kaédi (Mauritania)” to Lieut. Gouv. Maur., 28 Aug. 1929 (ANMt E2-34); see also Chazal, “Rapport #12C,” 2. Woon and six other important merchants who represented French companies in Kaédi would later inform a visiting colonial inspector of how pleased they were with the response of the administration to the disturbances. Charles Dumas (Inspecteur des affaires) to Lieut. Gov. Maur., “Rapport,” 10 Mar. 1930 (CAOM 1Affpol 2802/6 dossier 3), p. 3. Cerno Amadou Mukhtar Sakho, Woon's teacher and a judge and prominent Sufi leader in his own right, helped legitimate the suppression of Yacouba's revival. Quegneaux to Chazal, 190, 22 Apr. 1930; Gnokane, Hamallisme au Gorgol, 60; and Dumas, “Rapport,” 6.

31 Both French and Yacoubist sources present the revival as restricted to the Hamawis of the town; women were apparently considered exceptions that proved the rule. Carde, “Circulaire #133AP,” 10–11.

32 Compare J.D.Y. Peel, “Gender in Yoruba Religious Change,” Journal of Religion in Africa 32, 2 (2002): 136–63.

33 Sonya O. Rose, “Cultural Analysis and Moral Discourses: Episodes, Continuities, and Transformations,” in Beyond the Cultural Turn, 217–38, pp. 220, 232–33.

34 On these reforms: haidara ceremony, 5 May 2001; Maître Cheickna Sylla, 19 May 2001; letter, Maître Cheickna Sylla to author, 3 June 2001; Ahmadou Sylla, 12 Apr. 2001; Carde, “Circulaire #133AP,” 10–11; Charbonnier, “Compte-rendu, 1099C,” 4; Gnokane, Hamallisme au Gorgol, 57. On the forty-two marriages, see testimony of Seydina Oumar “Baba” Cisse, as reported in Cheikh Chikouna Cisse, “Cheikh Yacouba Sylla et le Hamallisme en Côte d'Ivoire” (Mémoire de DEA, Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, 2000), 13.

35 Martin A. Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa (Cambridge, U.K., 1998), 246–48.

36 Ahmadou Sylla, Treichville, 5 Apr. 2001. See also Yacouba's comments to Traoré, Hamahoullah, 207.

37 Doing so required a redefinition of honor. Although adultery itself may have been widespread, public accusations or confessions of adultery were admissions of sexual weakness that could bring shame to a “noble.” Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule, 247. Anthropologists Eric Pollet and Grace Winter found even the discussion of adultery made their interviewees nervous: “You must not make us speak of the affairs of women; that [subject] makes us ashamed; it is the slaves whom you should ask about that” (Société Soninké, 432–33). In the matter of dancing Yacouba did not so much erase his followers' past as re-symbolize it; when he banned the “licentious” old dances he replaced them with the dance “of the Prophet.”

38 Saint-Père, Sarakollé, 90.

39 Luise White, “Separating the Men from the Boys: Constructions of Gender, Sexuality, and Terrorism in Central Kenya, 1939–1959,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 23, 1 (1990): 1–25, p. 14.

40 See the analogous links between embodied signs of piety, confession, and heterodoxy in Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, 2004).

41 One such gathering took place at a haidara in 2001 in Grand Bassam during a mawlid. Women sat on a bed where Yacouba Sylla had slept and touched a photograph of Shaykh Hamallah.

42 Ahmadou Sylla, Treichville, 3 May 2001.

43 Charbonnier, “Compte-rendu,” 5.

44 Unfortunately, sources on the bridewealth reforms of 1929 are mediated by French vocabulary, collapsing the subtle distinctions between concepts like hute, mahr, and naabure into one word: “dot,” or “dowry.” This makes it difficult to say with precision what the nature of Yacouba's intervention was, which parts of his reforms sparked opposition, and which found support.

45 The evidence is indirect: convincing imams to use their influence to lower bridewealth prices was one of the main tasks Seydou Nourou Tall would later perform for the French during the 1930s. See the letters from administrators in Abidjan, Ouorodougou, Baoulé, Bobo-Dioulasso, Sassandra, Dioubel (Sénégal), Kindia (Guinée), and Gagnoa, and from Gouverneur-Général Brevié, in ANS 19G-43 v. 108.

46 Pollet and Winter, Société Soninké, 428.

47 Ibid., 424–25. Saint-Père, by contrast, suggested that bridewealth went entirely to the bride, but the terminology he used suggests he may have been speaking only of the hute (Sarakollé, 103, 108).

48 Testimony of Seydina Oumar, “Baba” Cisse in Cisse, “Hamallisme en Côte d'Ivoire,” 13; Ahmadou Sylla, 20 Apr. 2001. Yacouba made these connections explicit in interviews with Alioune Traoré in 1974 and 1975. At that time, Yacouba placed his criticism of bridewealth alongside reforms in the practice of circumcision and prohibitions on usury and making business transactions in places of prayer; he presented all of these as attempts to enforce orthodox Islam. Traoré, Hamahoullah, 139–40, 207. None of these other reforms, however, seemed particularly important to my interviewees in 2001.

49 A Bamana laborer who worked in Gagnoa in the 1960s explained that those who came to work for Yacouba were given a choice: they could work for a salary, or they could join the community, be fed, and work for free. The prime advantage of joining the community was that Yacouba provided all the young men in his charge with a wife. Souleymane Goro, Dakar, 5 Mar. 2001.

50 Haidara, 5 May 2001.

51 Chazal, “Rapport #12C,” 4–6; Chazal, “Mauritanie, 1929,” 28; Gnokane, Hamallisme au Gorgol, 59.

52 Chazal, “Rapport #12C,” 4–6.

53 Telg. ltr. Gouv.-Gén. AOF (Carde) to Min. Col., 13C, 16 Feb. 1930; Gouv.-Gén. AOF (Carde) to Min. Col., “Rapport 133 AP/2,” 13 Mar. 1930; Chazal, “Rapport #12C,” 5; Lieut. Gouv. Maur. (Chazal) to Gouv.-Gén. AOF, 44AP, 28 Apr. 1930; Cmdt. de cer. Gorgol (Quegneaux) to Lieut. Gouv. Maur., 190, 22 Apr. 1930 (CAOM 1Affpol 2802/6 dossier 3); and FOCYS, “Liste des arrestations et des personnes martyrisées” (unpub. MS, updated 25 May 2001, in author's possession).

54 BaThierno Marega, 29 Apr. 2001; and FOCYS letter to author, 3 June 2001.

55 The quote is from Gnokane, Hamallisme au Gorgol, 59, and presumably is based on the oral testimony of a non-Yacoubist. If, as Gnokane reports, Kaba “completely renounced Yacoubism” sometime before her death in 1975, there may have been good reason for BaThierno Marega and Cheickna Sylla to downplay her personal significance. The FOCYS document also omits the name of Amadi Gata, who similarly left the Hamawi community of Yacouba Sylla some years after these events.

56 Chazal, “Mauritanie, 1929,” 29.

57 Dumas, “Rapport,” 6; Chazal, “Rapport 12C,” 33.

58 FOCYS to author, 3 June 2001; Maître Cheickna Sylla, 19 May 2001; Lieut. Gouv. Maur. (p. i.) (Descemet) to Gouv.-Gén. AOF, n.d. [early 1933], 227, AP-CF (ANCI X-13-253 [9245] [1E-78]).

59 There were in fact some who chose this latter route. See Cmdt. de cer. Gorgol, “Rapport politique du 4e trimester, 1930” (ANMt E2-100).

60 Barbara M. Cooper, “Women's Worth and Wedding Gift Exchange in Maradi, Niger, 1907–89,” Journal of African History 36 (1995): 121–40.

61 The earliest reference is Charbonnier, “Compte-rendu, 1099C,” 4.

62 Carde, “Circulaire #133AP,” 10–11.

63 Froelich, Les musulmans d'Afrique noire (Paris, 1962), 242; Abun-Nasr, The Tijaniyya: A Sufi Order in the Modern World (New York, 1965), 155; Gnokane, Hamallisme au Gorgol, 57.

64 Henri Lammens, Fâtima et les filles de Mahomet (Rome, 1912), 135.

65 Fazlur Rahman, Islam (2d ed.) (Chicago, 1979), 206; R. S. O'Fahey and Bernd Radtke, “Neo-Sufism Reconsidered,” Der Islam 70 (1993): 52–87.

66 J.-L. Montezer, L'Afrique et l'Islam (Dakar, 1939), 42; Lieutennant Jean d'Arbaumont, “La confrérie des Tidjaniya en Afrique Française” (Mémoire d'études, CHEAM, 1941, o1411), 21–22; Alphonse Gouilly [Mouradian], L'Islam dans l'Afrique occidentale française (Paris, 1952), 145; Abun-Nasr, Tijaniyya, 155–56.

67 Louis Massignon, “La notion du voeu et la devotion musulmane à Fatima,” [1956] in Opera minora: textes recueillis, classés et présentés par Y. Moubarac (Beirut, 1963), 580. A link might be sought in the cAlawite Idrisid traditions in Morocco and in the esteem in which the shurafâ' in general were held throughout Muslim West Africa.

68 Phraseology borrowed from Walter Benn Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (Princeton, 2005), 97.

69 Feierman, “Invisible Histories.”

70 Such as Timothy Mitchell's play on Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Mosquito Speak?” in Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, 2002), 19–53; or Dipesh Chakrabarty's “Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts,” in Provincializing Europe (Princeton, 2000). Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford, 2005).

71 Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” in, R. Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies II: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi, 1983), 42.