Sorcery or Science? Contesting Knowledge and Practice in West African Sufi Texts By Ariela Marcus-Sells

Abstract

In late eighteenth-century West Africa, cycles of increasing violence and slave raiding sparked a desire for new modes of political organization. In the Sahel and savannah lands, there was a wave of military campaigns to establish Muslim-ruled states. In the western Sahara Desert, however, the Sufi Muslim theologians Sīdī al-Mukhtār (d. 1811) and his son and successor Sīdī Muḥammad al-Kuntī (d. 1826)—founders of the Kunta scholarly network—adopted a different model. Drawing on material and social capital acquired through trans-Saharan trade and pedagogical networks, they consolidated their position as socioreligious leaders, playing a pivotal role in the political developments of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. In Sorcery or Science? Ariela Marcus-Sells tells the story of Sīdī al-Mukhtār and Sīdī Muḥammad al-Kuntī through the prism of their writings on ‘the sciences of the unseen’ (ʿulūm al-ghayb). Through close analysis of these texts, Marcus-Sells looks at how the Kunta scholars defined and limited access to legitimate knowledge and practice, thus responding to—and shaping—the social authority under which they lived.