Abstracts

Conference Series 2018-19

West Africa and the Maghreb

 

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Keynote Lecture

Ousmane Kane “The Transformation of the Pilgrimage Tradition in West Africa.”

More than any other factor, it was pilgrimage that integrated the Islamic scholarship of West Africa into the larger Islamic intellectual tapestry in the second millennium. The earliest destination of West African pilgrims was the Muslim Holy Lands in Mecca and Madina, and this recorded pilgrimage tradition has a history of almost one thousand years. In the 19th century, the Tijaniyya, a Sufi order whose main bases are in Algeria and Morocco, spread in Sub-Saharan Africa. As a result, West African Tijani Muslims have been performing pilgrimage to Morocco and Algeria without interruption since the 19th century, establishing another important African pilgrimage tradition in addition to the Hajj. Up until the mid-20th century, the pilgrimage had two purposes. The first was accomplishing rituals in the Holy Lands and performing a pious visit in the mausoleums of the Prophet Muhammad in Madina or of Shaykh Ahmad al-Tijani, founder of the Tijaniyya in North Africa. The second purpose was intellectual advancement. Pilgrims were also students; they stayed for a while in centers of learning along the way and in the pilgrimage sites themselves to study and to receive intellectual credentials as scholars and religious leaders. In the late 20th century, two developments affected the pilgrimage tradition. One of them was the emergence of major Tijani sites of pilgrimage in West Africa where Tijani Muslims especially from other parts of Africa travel all year round. The second is the settlement of a sizable West African Muslim diaspora in the West. West African Muslim immigrants invested abundant material resources in the sustenance of ties between their homeland, the centers of pilgrimage in the Muslim Holy Lands, in North Africa, and their host societies. They not only created new pilgrimage routes, but also contributed to radically transform the experience of pilgrimage. While most immigrants tended to be religious scholars travelling for long period in search of knowledge, now the overwhelming majority of pilgrims are laypeople fulfilling the religious obligations and, and for many, engaging at the same time in leisure tourism or trade in major centers like Dubai. This paper will argue that the diaspora and the connection to global flows have changed both the participation in and nature of pilgrimage in a short time.

Panel 1:  Sufism and Sufi Orders in Muslim Africa

Armaan Siddiqi Examining Sufis in Politics and ‘Politicized Sufism’: A Case Study of the Boutchichiyya

This paper analyzes the increased participation and recruitment of women into one of Morocco’s most politically influential and popular Sufi orders, the Qadiri Boutchichiyya. Situating itself within both the distinct historical and cultural context of “Maghrebi Sufism” as well as broader Islamic discourses on spirituality, this project seeks to critically engage the question of Sufism's "politicization" and political "mediation" by analyzing and challenging in particular (1) the alleged tension that arises when women join the order as a result of politically-mediated recruitment programs and (2) the idea that disciples conceptualize political mediation as spiritually dubious.

Shaykh Hadi Nema Abdallahi “The Tijaniyya Tariqa: A Bridge between West Africa and the Maghreb

The Tijaniyya Sufi order is one of the largest Muslim organizations in the world. Its following runs in the tens of millions. Born in North Africa in the late 18th century, it spread in the rest of Muslim Africa in the 19th and 20th Century. At the turn of the 20th Century, it established a solid presence among African migrants in Europe and North America. This paper will address the rise of the Tijaniyya in the Maghreb, and its spread in the Sahara and south of the Sahara. It will analyze in particular the role of Mauritanian scholars (Shanaqita), and especially the clans of the Idaw ‘Ali and Senegambian scholars, especially Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse and his descendants, in the creation of Tijani Sufi lodges (zawaya) and schools in the African continent. It will also discuss the intellectual production of leading Tijaniyya scholars to argue that they occupy a central place in the intellectual history of Africa.

Ariela Marcus-Sells “Technologies of Devotion in the Works of Sīdi al-Mukhtār al-Kuntī”

This paper analyzes a set of non-narrative devotional works attributed to Sīdi al-Mukhtār al-Kuntī, a Sufi teacher of the late-eighteenth century who rose to prominence in the Azawād, in what is now Northern Mali. Labeled du’at, ahzāb, or adhkār in the catalogues, these texts appear to be intended as devotional aids to be used during practice. This paper uses these short texts to illuminate the relationship between Sufi authority and devotional religious practice in the eighteenth-century Southern Sahara. On the one hand, these texts can be situated relative to the popular devotional aids produced in the Maghreb, including the Ḥizb al-baḥr [Prayer of the Sea] attributed to the third-century Sufi Abu al-Ḥasan ʿAlī al-Shādhilī and the Dalāʾil al-khayrāt [Guides to Goodness] composed by the fifteenth-century Sufi, Abū ʿAbd Allah Muḥammad al-Jazulī. The intellectual lineage of Sīdi al-Mukhtār’s works and the clear continuities to their Moroccan predecessors points to a shared devotional and textual landscape that linked the Northern and Southern Sahara during this period. However, the significant differences between the two sets of texts highlight the intellectual work that Southern Saharan Sufis performed in order to influence the social and devotional landscape that they inherited. Thus, this paper will also situate Sīdi al-Mukhtār’s devotional aids synchronically and inter-textually in relation to his other writings in order to demonstrate how he attempted to shape Sufi Muslim practice and to assert authority, and thus control, over the devotional bodies of other Muslims in the region.

Christine Thu Nhi Dang “The Politics of Love in African Performances of Sufi Poetry”

This presentation explores musical performances of Sufi love poetry, and the role of such performances in connecting local African communities to the transnational Islamic public sphere. Focusing on two Sufi poetic traditions that have spread throughout the Islamic world, it examines the ways in which the fusing of poetic and musical media links contemporary Africans to distant Muslim communities through shared discourses on religious aesthetics and political ethics. The first poetic tradition analyzed is “Majnun Layla”(“The Fool for Layla”), a love story from ancient Arabia, and the second is “Al Burda”(“The Mantle”), a classical text from medieval North Africa. Both poetic traditions depict erotic yearning for a human beloved as a metaphor of all-consuming passion for the divine; both traditions have, throughout Islamic history, inspired numerous indigenized versions across the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe. Looking closely at performances of “Majnun Layla” and “Al Burda” in Senegal, the paper shows how the musical indigenization of these texts emplaces Senegalese Muslims within a globalized discursive tradition of eroticism as piety—within a dynamic, pan-Islamic debate on the relationship between embodied experience, social ethics, and spiritual transcendence. Further situating “Majnun Layla” and “Al Burda” in Senegalese political contexts, the author argues that the polyvalence of meaning evoked by the act of singing poetry allows Senegalese Muslims to mediate the disjuncture between national citizenship and transnational religious belonging—to bridge the aesthetic and ethical distance between local social life and the pan-Islamic public sphere. While attending to the details of specific poems and performances, this presentation raises broader questions on the relationship between textuality, orality, and musicality; about language, indigeneity, and authenticity; and finally, about the role of social memory, expressive culture, and economies of desire in shaping the poetics and politics of African Muslim communities.

Panel 2: Prayers, Invocations and the Talismanic Tradition

Zachary Wright & Adam Larson “The Prayers of North and West Africa: Islamic Intellectual History through Pious Devotions”

Widely circulating prayer manuals are under-utilized sources for the intellectual history of Islamic societies. Such literature reveals individual devotional aspirations, the idealized role of religion in society, and initiatory connections between diverse intellectual traditions. This study of the published prayers of the Tijāniyya Sufi order in North and West Africa reveals diverse sources of inspiration outside the order, connecting practitioners to genealogies on both sides of the Sahara, in Arabia, and even India. It reads formative supplications in dialogue with these surprising genealogies and the asserted benefits dispersed in a range of primary sources. The authors argue that this type of analysis demonstrates the practiced inculcation of cosmopolitan Islamic identity that problematizes alleged regional specificities and ideological divides.

Paul Gerard Anderson “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered: A Reconsideration of the Evil Eye and Ruqyah through Ethnographic Analysis”

This paper makes use of ethnographic data of one particular ritual focusing on the culturally and religiously significant concept of the evil eye. Therein, the author uses questions brought up both by the actual ritual as well as the textual and cultural discourses that surround it to interrogate the usefulness of categories such as magic, and how we are to understand the relationship of the given ritual to the broader narrative of the evil eye and ruqyah. While the attempt is made to segregate the bukhūr rūs ritual from the internal normative notion of religion proper (i.e. the so-called “Great Tradition”), it is important to realize that along with the legitimacy for the ritual provided by the narrative of Pre-Islamic, natively Egyptian tradition, the reality is more complex. The ritual also draws upon a well-developed “Islamic” narrative of religiously invoked apotropaic practices and as such occupies many different layers of conceptual space at once. Furthermore, the paper concludes that the ritual does not fall into the category of “magic” because this term lacks any useful precision, nor is it siḥr, but rather falls under a broad rubric of healing ritual practices.

James C. Riggan “Doing Things with (Divine) Words: al-Ruqya al-Shar’iyya and the Creation of an Islamic Modernity”

The Qur’an is centeral for all Islamic traditions, a unique eruption of the divine into the material world. Evidence from the early and medieval periods indicates that Muslim societies have long recognized the Qur’an’s distinct power and developed a corresponding science for doing practical things with its holy words. This paper argues that healers in Morocco and West Africa use Qur’anic exorcism to create a transnational healing space by bringing the material substance of the Qur’an into contact with Muslim bodies. Based on Thomas Csordas’ (1990) concept of embodiment and Manuel Vasquez’s (2011) non-reductive materialism it approaches al-ruqya al-shar’iyya (“legitimate incantation”) as a coherent system of healing that aims to fuse the Qur’an, as a material object, with the human body. Through this process the Qur’an disinfects human bodies that then purify the places they enter. Subsequently, healers and patients create Islamic spaces defined by a Qur’anic presence. In the mid-1980s, a broad trend of reform and dissatisfaction with modernity emerged across the Muslim world that perceived contemporary society as increasingly oppressive, dangerous, and threatening. Part of the movement identified a corresponding increase in illness. Subsequently, some healers aimed to cure a widespread dis-ease with modernity that manifested itself as disease in the body. The movement revitalized a key technique of Prophetic Medicine. Healers applied powerful Qur’anic verses to patients’ ailments to cure them of illnesses that included headaches, cancer, and spirit possession. Patients imbibe the Qur’an through their skin, nose, ears, and mouths to consume the scriptural text. Today, al-Ruqya al-Shar’iyya is a global practice, often associated with Salafist reform. Healers, however, are a diverse group and come from the ranks of imams, students of the Qarawiyyin University, and Sufi sheikhs.

Oludamini Ogunnaike “Poetry in Praise of Prophetic Perfection: A Study of West African Madīḥ Poetry and Its Precedents”

The vibrant tradition of West African Arabic poetry is dominated by the genre of madīḥ (praise poetry), especially Sufi panegyrics of the Prophet. Unfortunately, due to certain theoretical limitations and racist assumptions, scholars of Arabic literature and Islam in Africa have generally dismissed this vast body of work as mere “pious praise” or “devotional flattery,” even leading some to categorize the tradition as lacking any significant intellectual content. In spite of these characterizations, this genre contains some of the most clever and evocative descriptions of Sufi cosmology, ontology, and epistemology in their description of the goal of the Sufi tradition: the achievement of the ideal human state. This paper will first try to explain the theoretical reasons underlying the misrecognition of this tradition in contemporary academic literature and then develop an alternative theoretical model based on the linguistic, poetic, and anthropological theories of the Sufi tradition itself. Next, it will employ these theories to illustrate the various ways in which the poems of this tradition both describe and facilitate the ultimate fulfillment of human potential which is their subject and object.
 

Panel 3: Re-evalutating the Historic Core Curriculum

Ismail Warscheid, “Scholarly Networks, Legal Debates, and Territorial Integration in the Early Modern Sahara (Algeria, Mauritania, Mali, Niger), 1600-1800”

The mobility of people and ideas across the Sahara has been a key factor for the integration of pre-modern West African Muslim societies within the wider world of Islam. Since at least the late Middle Ages, extensive intellectual networks have connected Muslim scholars in West and North Africa. Such networks were the product of an academic culture that emphasized the merits of “traveling in the pursuit of knowledge” (riḥla li-ṭalab al- ʿilm) and that relied on the interregional circulation of the written word in various forms, most importantly manuscript books, but also letters, legal documents or teaching certificates (ijāza, pl. ijāzāt). Until now, our knowledge of these cultural interactions remains largely restricted to a certain number of ‘big events,” such as al-Maghīlī’s stay in the fifteenth-century Sahel, Aḥmad Bābā’s forced exile in Marrakech between 1594 and 1606, or al-Ḥājj ʿUmar’s journey to Egypt and the Hijaz. Although there can be no doubt that these events have been highly influential in the history of West African Muslim scholarship, they should not make us overlook the importance of more regional forms and patterns of trans-Saharan intellectual exchange. A case in point are the multiple links connecting scholarly groups in the western parts of the Sahara with their colleagues in southern Morocco and Algeria in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a period that remains understudied in West African historiography. This presentation will explore these linkages in the field of Islamic legal studies (fiqh), using unedited travelogues, fatwa compilations, and biographical dictionaries collected from both private and public collections in Mauritania, Niger, and Algeria. The author will first illustrate the development of a shared intellectual space through master-disciple relationships, epistolary correspondence, and other forms of academic communication. He will then discuss how trans-Saharan scholarly practices contributed to both conflict and integration in interregional organization, by taking the example of an eighteenth-century debate among scholars from the oases of Tuwāt in southern Algeria and their colleagues in the Azawad (present-day Mali) concerning trade relations between the two regions.

Alexis Trouillot “The Study of Mathematics in the Sahel from the 15th to the 20th C.”

In this paper, Trouillot will present a corpus of mathematical manuscripts found in west Sahelian libraries, written between the 15th and 20th centuries. For the most part, those texts have been written by authors from North Africa and in particular Morocco. The texts written by local authors are mainly commentaries and manuals of mathematics. However, compared to the little that is known of mathematics in North Africa, the corpus seems to present an interesting difference: there is a relative absence of geometry compared to arithmetical procedure. This absence is congruent to a lack of texts related to quantitative astronomy. An even more puzzling absence is that of Euclid’s Elements, widely known and commented upon in North Africa. While there is no catalogued version of the Elements in West Africa, it is possible to find commentaries on it. This raises questions regarding the exact modality of the circulation of knowledge between North and South. Beyond explicitly mathematical texts detailing specific arithmetical procedures, mathematics are also found in legal texts, as Ulrich Rebstock has shown. These texts allow us to consider mathematics as a means of showcasing intellectual prowess for scholars of the region. Finally, it is important to note that the corpus analyzed does not end with the era of colonization. Ahmed Djebbar worked on a fragment of a mathematic manual written by Al-Arawani, who died in 1997 and the author is also working on another manual from the late 20th century that seems to be the translation of a French text which will be discussed in this paper.

David Owen “Of Radd and Sharḥ and Ṭurra : The Long and Late Dynamism of the African Commentary Tradition on Akhḍarī's Sullam on Avicennian Organon Logic”

Among Arabic works on logic written in the last five centuries, arguably the most widely studied and commented source-text (matn) is a didactic poem called al-Sullam al-murawnaq (or: al-munawraq). The author of al-Sullam ("The Ladder") is the 10th/16th century North African scholar al-Akhḍarī, the author of multiple source-texts taught from Conakry to Cameroon to Khartoum. Thus far, the best representation available for the reception of al-Sullam is offered by the “Post-classical Islamic Philosophy Database Initiative (PIPDI)” led by Robert Wisnovsky (http://islamsci.mcgill.ca/RASI/docs/pipdi.htm#_ftn19). Notwithstanding, numerous African commentators on al-Sullam are omitted from the PIPDI list. This paper describes additional contributions to the family tree of Sullam commentaries. In the process, it sheds light on neglected personalities and epistemological trends at the confluence of logic, philosophy, and law among Muslim scholars in Africa from the 18th century till today. To put these contributions in perspective, he describes the structure and content of al-Sullam and two major Mauritanian commentaries thereon (from the Banī Daymān and Ibn al-Mukhtār Fāl) from the 19th and 20th centuries, in connection with one perhaps surprising strain of Mālikī legal epistemology. Using his translation of the Sullam and its untranslated commentaries, the author focuses in particular on the criteria for apodictic proof (burhān) and the sources of certainty (yaqīn) in a particular subset of the Sullam commentary tradition. He shows that the Sullam commentators' interest in apodictic proof and certainty parallels cognate conceptions of epistemology among African writings on law, logic, and theology, both in 'ajamī expression and in at least one non-classical variety of Arabic. Finally, he presents new visual evidence of the continued dynamism of the Mauritanian Sullam commentary tradition, albeit amid the shifting material and institutional conditions of today.

Abubakar Sadiq Abdulkadir, “Islamic Scholarship and Versification Tradition of Mauritania”

Before the 18th century, the religious texts studied and taught at traditional centres of Islamic learning in Mauritania, colloquially known as balad milyūn shāʿir (land of million poets), were mostly in the prose genres and were written by scholars outside the region. However, the emergence of the Mauritanian poetic tradition in the 18th century led to a paradigm shift in the medium of Islamic knowledge transmission. This emergent tradition did not only transform the medium of transmission of religious knowledge, but would later revolutionize and characterize Islamic scholarship and intellectual expression in Mauritania (and the broader West African region). The synthesis of Islamic sciences and concentration on Arabic prosody had a profound influence on Islamic pedagogy in the region. Mauritanian scholars began versifying (tanẓīm) pedagogical prose works in the 18th century, but by the 19th century, scholars were composing these pedagogical texts (nuṣūṣ) primarily in verse (naẓm). From that time, poetry became the dominant medium of religious instruction. While this tradition remains vibrant in the hands of contemporary Mauritanian scholars, Muslim scholars in other parts of the world continue to produce more texts in prose genres.

By conducting a literary archaeology of the poetic tradition in Mauritania, the author will attempt to provide a historical background on this transformation from prose to verse genres in Mauritanian scholarly and pedagogical texts, and investigate why this tradition arose and has remained popular in West Africa. He will also examine why and how the naẓm tradition was deemed to be the most felicitous for developing a new pedagogical paradigm and dominated the medium of transmission of Islamic knowledge in Mauritania (and by extension in Islamic West Africa).

Panel 4: Jihadi Ideology: What is new, what is not?

William F.S. Miles “Jihads and Borders. Social Networks and Spatial Patterns in Africa, Present, Past and Future”

This paper examines past waves of jihad in Africa in terms of their implications for space and networks. Both prior to and coterminous with early European colonial rule, several movements in Muslim Africa that today we would characterize as “extremist” and “transnational” organized and acted to destroy established political systems and remodel them according to Islamic principles. These jihads “by the sword” succeeded, at least to some extent and for some time, either by forming or tapping into (often trans-ethnic) networks of religious radicals. They exploited the ungoverned frontiers and borderlands on the margins of the empire that they targeted. By the time the Organization of African Union (OAU) embedded in its founding charter the principle of inviolability of inherited colonial borders, memories of these earlier jihads had recessed from the memories of Africa’s new ruling elites. OAU framers feared territorial expansiveness by potentially aggressive states and ethnic irredentists: the last thing they anticipated was threat to sovereignty by organized and transnational religious extremists. The paper argues that what we are now experiencing is a resurgence of earlier jihadism explicitly invoked by contemporary jihadists but usually ignored by counterterrorist analysts.

Abdulbasit Kassim ‘Who Is a Muslim’? Jihadi-Salafism and the Discourse of Takfīr in the 21st Century Hausaland and Bornu”

A considerable body of literature describes the ideational features of jihādi-salafī movements in Sub-Saharan Africa as externally induced phenomena birthed by the cross-fertilization of different religious philosophies from the Middle East into Sub-Saharan Africa. The facile utilization of the corpus of theological literature produced by jihādi-salafī movements in the Middle East to explain the rise and expansion of jihādi-salafī movements in Sub-Saharan Africa is common. This scholarly approach, which places jihādi-salafī movements in Sub-Saharan Africa as proxies and local clients doing the bidding of the Islamic State or al-Qaeda on the ground in Africa, have neglected how jihadi-salafī movements in Sub-Saharan Africa appropriate historical narratives and theological literature on takfīr, Dār al-Islām, Dār al-Kufr, hijrah, al-walāʾ wa-l-barā and jihād written by Muslim scholars during the jihadist campaigns of the 1800s in Sub-Saharan Africa. Drawing upon the literature on takfīr debate in Islamic Africa written by Murray Last, M.A. al-Hajj, B.G. Martin and Rüdiger Seesemann, this paper compares and contrasts the takfīr discourse of the contemporary jihādi-salafī movements such as Boko Haram and Ansaru with the takfīr discourse of the 19th and 20th century in Hausaland and Bornu. The paper shows that although jihādi-salafī movements such as Boko Haram and Ansaru often cite theological literature of Middle Eastern scholars to legitimize their campaign and boost their scholarly credentials, the sociopolitical and religious milieu that gave rise to their politics of accusations of unbelief evolved from local religious contestations on the theological debate on ‘who is a Muslim,’ a debate whose historical precedent dates back to the 19th and 20th century in Hausaland and Bornu. Using primary texts, this article discusses the genealogy of the doctrine of takfīr in Hausaland and Bornu from Shaykh Jibril `Umar, Shaykh `Uthmān Ibn Fūdī, Shaykh Abubakar Gumi, Shaykh Ibrahim Saleh, the Saudi returnees, Muhammad Yusuf, Abubakar Shekau, Mamman Nur to Abu Mus`ab al-Barnawi.

Anouar Boukhars The Strategic Incentives for Insurgents to Embrace Extreme Ideology: The Case of the Sahel and Maghreb”

One of the nagging questions about the persistent wave of insurgencies in the Sahel-Sahara region is that they continue to be characterized and defined by extremist ideologies. After violent jihadists discredited Algeria’s insurgency in the late 1990s, the assumption was that dissident rebels may want to avoid the adoption of extremist ideology, as it alienates the majority of local populations, fragments the ranks of rebels, and scares away external supporters. Given such negative marginal returns, it is puzzling that transnational and local jihadi Salafism remains the insurgent repertoire in the Maghreb-Sahel crises. More perplexing is that this extremist ideology has become the tool of war par excellence as well as the ideological focal point that rallies the support of different kinds of aggrieved populations. Since Algerian terror groups relocated to Northern Mali in the early 2000’s, rebel leaders evolving in the Sahel have become more inclined towards adopting jihadi Salafism as a means to survive, recruit and outcompete other contending armed actors. This is a strategic choice that is more informed by strategic conditions on the ground than by automatic commitments to a core set of extreme beliefs. In other words, rebel entrepreneurs and their rank-and-file supporters and sympathizers do not have to be die-hard ideologues or violent religious extremists to lead or buy-into transnational or local groups defined by a radical ideological platform. They just need to think that that their choice would yield dividends in contexts of state fragility and societal upheaval. As such, this article would focus mostly on the benefits that rebels and their supporters calculate they may accrue from adopting jihadi Salafism as a tool of insurgency in the Sahel-Maghreb crises.

Zekeria Ould Ahmed Salem “Assessing the Salafi Current in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania”

Drawing on recent fieldwork conducted in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, this paper offers an assessment of the Salafi current in today Mauritania. It explores question such as: what has been the history of Salafism in Mauritania, especially in post-colonial times? Who are the main Salafi groups in this country and what are their religious and ideological underpinnings? How much is the Salafiyya in Mauritania an indigenous phenomenon? What role if any do Mauritanian Salafis play in global Salafi circles? What is the scope of their influence at home? How diverse is the Salafi current and to what extent does such diversity affect Muslim politics in Mauritania? What are the religious goals and political strategies of such Salafi groups? The paper challenges the notion of an “African Salafism” insulated from global Islamic currents and essentially immune to change and transformation.

 

Panel 5: New Intellectual Connections

Fatima Harrak, “Research on Moroccan-African Relations at the Rabat Institute of African Studies”

The creation of the Institute of African Studies (IAS) at Mohammed V University (Rabat) following Morocco’s withdrawal from the Organization of African Unity (OAU) was justified by the need for a re-appraisal and advancement of the common Moroccan-African historical and cultural heritage. This necessarily entailed challenging the colonial division of Africa and an implication in the long process of decolonizing the African minds and curricula. Has the Institute lived up to this mandate? This paper will assess the performance of IAS in this regard through the analysis of its various activities and publications, starting from its founding years when it functioned as an African human and social science research center (1990-2008). The paper then examines the pursuits of the Institute as it gradually developed into a teaching establishment and a multidisciplinary forum for all African stakeholders, with African research being taken up by newly established institutions and think tanks. Finally, the challenges facing IAS are discussed as well as the enduring issue of the relevance of “African Studies” for Africa.

 

Robert P. Parks “American Research Centers in North Africa and Sahara-Sahel Studies” 

Though the historical links between West and North Africa are well documented, administrative geography has separated greater inquiry into the historical and contemporary links between the two regions. Colonial administrative borders and the affirmation of post-colonial state sovereignty certainly played a major role in idealizing distinctive national and regional frontiers, though just as important drivers in the creation of two discrete regions are post-Second World War technocratic divisions (e.g. US State Department, Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and later the EU External Division). In the construction of those regions by international players, the Saharan Desert as a vast natural boundary (and inhospitable hinterland) is frequently used to justify regional divisions as distinct, or at worst is seen as a no-man’s land occupied by smugglers and jihadists. To be sure, there are many good reasons to look at the administrative construction of ‘regions’ as natural. Doing so, however, fails to understand the ways in which the Saharan Desert acts as an organic and living link between the two regions, or how “‘islands’ in the Sahara” too make it a “space of interaction and connection” An on-going joint initiative of the American Institute for Maghrib Studies and the West African Research Association, ‘Saharan Crossroads,’ has sought to compliment Maghribi (e.g. Centre National de Recherche en Anthropologie Sociale et Culturelle in Algeria and the Institut d’Études Africaines in Morocco) and West African (e.g. CODESRIA) projects to understand the enduring links the living Sahara provides to both regions. This paper will give a brief overview of the role played by American Research Centers in North Africa to the study of West African-North African relations, across the disciplines. Specifically, it will look at the history of the Saharan Crossroads program, as well as outline specific initiatives engaged at the Centre d’Études Maghrébines en Algérie, in Oran, Algeria toward the study of Saharan interconnectivities.

 

Ebrima Sall “CODESRIA and the New Pan Africanist Intellectual Connections Across the Sahara”

That the leading pan African social research council (CODESRIA, head-quartered in Dakar) was founded by an Egyptian intellectual (Samir Amin), and had a Kenyan Arab (Abdalla Bujra), as its second executive secretary who headed the Council for ten years, speaks volumes about the perception that most African intellectuals had of the African continent as a single, if complex, social space (a physical space, and a space for production, reproduction and representations). In seeking to be a continental council involving all African intellectuals, CODESRIA was not merely imitating the Organization of African Unity (that later became the African Union), the founders of CODESRIA had a deep understanding of the intellectual history of the continent, and were aware of the complexity of what Ali Mazrui called the ‘triple heritage’ of Africans, the strength of the linkages and the intensity of the exchanges among intellectuals across the Sahara. CODESRIA’s ambition was to boost knowledge production from within Africa and, in the process, build a community of scholars across the linguistic, regional, disciplinary, gender and other kinds of barriers that would otherwise become epistemological obstacles. CODESRIA research networks therefore cover and involve large numbers of intellectuals from North Africa. Training programs are located and many conferences, symposia and workshops held in North Africa. The Africa Review of Books, a bi-lingual (English-French) CODESRIA journal, is jointly edited and managed by the Center for Anthopological, Social and Cultural Research (CRASC) of the University of Oran, in Algeria, and the Forum for Social Studies in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. A growing number of CODESRIA publications in the Arabic language are now coming out of Cairo. These include a journal, Afro-Arab Selections in the Social Sciences; the Arabic edition of CODESRIA Bulletin, and Arabic translations of CODESRIA books and working papers.

Despite the challenges posed by the nature of the research funding regimes, the push for Arabization in some countries, and narrow nationalism, CODESRIA did succeed in building many research networks that linked North African scholars with those of the rest of the continent. Beyond the notion of a relationship between different communities of scholars located to the north and south of the Sahara, and using different working languages, CODESRIA also launched what it called an Arabophone program whose aim was to promote the study the intellectual and social history and current presence and influence of Arabic, Islam, and North African cultures in the rest of Africa, and how such presence impacts on education, politics and social life. This paper argues that new phenomena such as the migration crises, the security challenges in the Sahel, the deployment of North African business enterprises across the region, and the internationalization of higher education in Africa make the strengthening of new pan Africanist intellectual connections across the Sahara not only a strong likelihood, but also a necessity.

 

Mansour Kedidir, “Connections of Sub-Saharan and Maghreb Intellectuals: Trajectories and Representations”

Struggling with the complex reality of their countries facing multifaceted crises, the intellectuals of the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa are perplexed. Moreover, this highly instructive situation should address them to reflect together on the current upheavals of their societies. Nevertheless, in front of the complexity and heterogeneity of problems, these intellectuals find themselves divided. Yet, they were bound in the past by the same objectives. Thus, if the Maghreb religious elites have established ties during the 15th century with sub-Saharan Africa scholars, a second wave of intellectuals followed them to weigh up, in a colonial and post-colonial context, the liberation of Africa and the pan African ideal. However, as soon as this generation disappeared, the following one did not withstand the disenchantment of the population or the expansion of Arabism that influenced the training of a generation of Maghreb thinkers. With the failure of the socialist regimes, this gap indicated a crumbling era of the intellectuals with the result that the development of globalization in the 21st century and the arrival of a plurality of questions, the intellectuals of these countries have found themselves helpless. Except for some attempts of common frames of thinking such as the CODESRIA or the Esprit Panaf pavilion of the Algiers International Book Fair, the relationships between intellectuals of the Maghreb and those of sub-Saharan Africa are few and far between.

Opposed to this largely francophone and secularized type of intellectuals, dominates currently a second type of intellectuals, rather Islamized and sharing the same representations, in the countries concerned. This paper explores the historical trajectory of these two types of scholars in order to explain why such a connection would have marked the future of the relationship between the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa over the past decades.

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