Abstract
‘Poised on the Higher Horizon’
Highlights
In an untitled manuscript work from the late eighteenth century, a Sufi Muslim teacher from the Western Sahara Desert offers a piece of “advice” about the Sufi practice of retreat
The text brings together two relevant Qur’anic passages, verses 7:142-143 in which Moses requests to see God, and the ambiguous visionary encounter depicted in the first eighteen verses of Surat al-Najm, the Star. After advising his audience of the appropriate performance of the practice of retreat, the narrative voice of Sīdī al-Mukhtār uses a series of homiletic and Qurānic references to argue that, while Moses failed to maintain the proper humility in the presence of the divine, Muḥammad embodied perfect etiquette and as a result did receive a direct vision of God
The remainder of this article situates “Khalwa” within the life and work of Sīdī al-Mukhtār and puts the text into conversation with other works by the same write and his son. This intertextual reading demonstrates both how Sīdī al-Mukhtār linked the question of seeing God to legitimate knowledge acquired from the realm of the unseen and how he positioned privileged access to that realm as the source of his family’s socio-religious authority. This analysis relates to other scholarship which has identified the centrality of the two sections from the Qurān brought together in “Khalwa” to Islamic conceptions of the afterlife
Summary
Recommended Citation Marcus-Sells, Ariela (2020) "‘Poised on the Higher Horizon’: Seeing God in the Sahara," Journal of Islamic and Middle Eastern Multidisciplinary Studies: Vol 6 : Iss. 1 , Article 5.
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