The Qurʾān and Knowledge of God in West Africa: The Sufi Tafsīr of Shaykh Ibrāhīm Niasse

Abstract

Abstract Qurʾān exegesis (tafsīr) in African Muslim societies represented the pinnacle of scholarly achievement, and public explanation of the Qurʾān was the event that marked the emergence of one of Africa’s most successful Sufi revivals, the “Community of the Flood” of the Senegalese Shaykh Ibrāhīm Niasse (d. 1975). Niasse’s network of knowledge transmission, foregrounding the direct experiential knowledge of God (maʿrifa bi-Llāh), continued to emphasize Qurʾān learning, but Niasse’s own recorded Arabic tafsīr demonstrated a shift away from traditional West African sources in this field. Prior understandings of the West African tafsīr discipline locate the fifteenth-century Egyptian Tafsīr al-Jalālayn as the primary influence on West African understandings. But Niasse’s tafsīr exhibits a clear preference for an early eighteenth-century Ottoman multivolume work, Ismāʿīl Ḥaqqī’s “Spirit of Explanation” (Rūh al-bayān), one of the most comprehensive summaries of Sufi understandings of the Qurʾān. This paper not only demonstrates the globally-connected nature of Islamic knowledge production in West Africa but also argues that Niasse’s emphasis on gnosis built on the Rūḥ al-bayān to ultimately occasion a noteworthy addition to the existing literary corpus of Qurʾān exegesis.