Theology from the Margins: Sīdī Riḍwān al-Januwī and his Community of Outsiders

Abstract

Abstract This article will examine how Tuḥfat al-ikhwān wa-mawāhib al-imtinān fī manāqib Sīdī Riḍwān ibn ʿAbdallāh al-Januwī, the biography of the Moroccan Sufi Sīdī Riḍwān al-Januwī (d. 1583), constructs, through the exemplary figure of Sīdī Riḍwān, a theological model where marginality becomes a vehicle for religious authority. Sīdī Riḍwān, unlike other Moroccan Sufis of the period whose claim to legitimacy was partly based on their status as descendants of the Prophet Muḥammad, was the son of a Genoese convert to Islam and a Jewish refugee from Iberia. Perhaps due to his origins, he took up the cause of the poor and the excluded and advocated on their behalf. Biographical dictionaries frequently remark upon Sīdī Riḍwān’s extreme scrupulousness and aversion to praise and political power. Furthermore, he demanded respect for religious minorities, all the while advocating for a strong defense against Portuguese invasion. Through the hagiography, the sheikh emerges as a religious figure whose power and spiritual virtue, paradoxically perhaps, rest in his embrace of marginality—his own and that of others.