Book Review: The writings of Mauritania and the western Sahara

Abstract

The writings of Mauritania and the western Sahara, compiled by Charles C. Stewart with Sidi Ahmed Wuld Ahmed Salim, Arabic Literature of Africa vol. 5, (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2016), 2 vols.This was worth the wait. It is like a vast and deep sea of scholars and texts holding a dynamic history of learned discourse and disputation over a 350-year period. It is a tradition of scholarship that continues and the two parts that make up this work have entries on scholars who wrote in the early seventeenth century through to scholars who wrote well into the twentieth century, and even a few in the present century. The Arabic Literature of Africa (ALA) series gave us its first volume in 1994, on eastern Sudanic Africa. The ALA volume 4 which appeared in 2003, on western Sudanic Africa, covers a space adjoining the area covered here. The two volumes together provide an impressive perspective on Islamic scholarship on a vast swath of West African geography and history. There are points of connection and 'conversation,' so to speak, between ALA 4 and this ALA 5. However, these two volumes (the work is divided into two parts and totals a staggering two thousand pages) have benefitted from arriving later because they have improved upon the earlier ones in the series, as a research tool. For instance, the indices are over three hundred pages long, giving the researcher an Index of Authors of Derivative Works, Authors, Subjects, and finally a General Index. The index of "Authors of Derivative Works" is the first of its kind for the region; it is an important indicator of the place of the classical works of Islamic learning within the scholarship of the western Sahara. It is a tremendously useful way to sample those classical texts which the writers of the region were reading and commenting on. For classical 'Islamic studies' philologists, it is also a valuable resource for it points to which works travelled into the Sahara and were closely studied and commented upon. Other features also distinguish it from the earlier works in the series. In its own terms, it is simply outstanding and an excellent instrument for advanced research. Teaching students about the region's intellectual history and practices is helped immeasurably by the appearance of this work.An introduction and a background essay set the political and intellectual context for the scholars and their works in the bibliography. It is a concise and informative statement covering numerous topics such as the earliest writings in the region, the rise of Arabophone literacy and scholarship, the wars or skirmishes known as "Shurr Bubba" in the sixteenseventies, a turning-point in the region's history, and the development of education in a nomadic society without a central authority or state. This is followed by a survey of the educational system, the Mahazra and its curriculum, in which generations of students were schooled and the tradition of learning captured in this bibliography was reproduced.The authors are referenced in most instances by their so-called "tribal" grouping, which makes the contents pages rather slim: three pages giving 77 groupings. It might be hard for scholars to access a title or scholar if they do not know this affiliation but it makes for a less unwieldy listing. Thus, the importance of the extensive indices that follow in part II. At one stage, I felt that those indices deserved their own volume and I became stuck on that tail-end for a long time. The work is thoroughly crossreferenced; thus, it cross-references within the work and also to other, previous catalogues and the AMMS (West African Arabic Manuscript Project) online database.In order to test the quality of a bibliography, one has to use it. I looked at a number of entries in some detail. For example, one finds Shaykh Sidiyya 'al-Kabir' (d.1867/68) under the 'tribal' name Abyayri where he is scholar number 70 in the work (pp. 133-145). Not knowing his 'tribal' grouping, I encountered him there as I worked through volume 1 alphabetically. …