A new book by Zachary Wright (pictured), an associate professor in residence at Northwestern University in Qatar (NU-Q) explores 18th-century Islamic scholarship in North Africa, with a particular focus on the founding of Africa’s largest Sufi order, the Tijaniyya. Realizing Islam: The Tijaniyya in North Africa and the Eighteenth-Century Muslim World argues that Muslim scholars from India to West Africa shared in intellectual debates and exchanges, collectively motivated by the desire to verify the foundations of law, theology and mysticism. But local contexts dictated that Islamic revivalist thinkers went about this project of verification in divergent ways. His latest book takes his research further, he said, by drawing connections between “Muslim communities in the Arab world and those in sub-Saharan Africa,” an observation that he claims, refutes the notion that the Sahara desert was a barrier rendering sub-Saharan Africa intellectually peripheral to the rest of the Muslim world. Realizing Islam: The Tijaniyya in North Africa and the Eighteenth-Century Muslim World’ is being published by the University of North Carolina Press.

Source: The North Africa Journal August 04, 2020 22:52 UTC