Realizing Islam The Tijaniyya in North Africa and the Eighteenth-Century Muslim World

• Main Author: Wright, Zachary Valentine (auth)
• Format: Electronic Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: The University of North Carolina Press 2020
• Subjects: Islam; Sufism & Islamic mysticism; African history; Ethnic studies; Tijāniyya; Aḥmad al-Tijānī; Ṭarīqa Muḥammadiyya; Neo-Sufism; Sufism; Islamic mysticism; Islamic sainthood; saintly hierarchy; seal of saints; Mawlay Sulayman; Ḥamdūn Ibn al-Ḥājj; Scholars of Fez (Fes); Muslim scholars of Algeria; Muslim scholars of Morocco; Muslim scholars and the state in precolonial North Africa; Sufism in Africa; Islam in Africa; Islamic scholarship in Africa; Eighteenth-Century Intellectual History; Islamic Intellectual History; Islamic Scholarly Renewal; Islamic Revivalism; Islamic Renaissance; Waḥdat al-wujūd; Sufi gnosis; ʿilm al-asrār; Islamic esotericism; Islamic occult; Sufism and Islamic law; dreams and visions in Islam; vision of the Prophet Muḥammad; Islamic Humanism; Islamic Actualization; Ibrāhim al-Kūrānī; Muḥammad Ḥayāt al-Sindī; Kūrānī School; ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī; Muṣṭafā al-Bakrī; Muḥammad al-Ḥifnī (Ḥifnāwī); Maḥmūd al-Kurdī; Khalwatiyya Sufi Order; Muḥammad al-Sammān; Sammāniyya Sufi Order; Al-Jawāhir al-maʿānī; al-Jawāhir al-khams; Salwat al-anfās.
• Online Access: OAPEN Library: download the publication; OAPEN Library: download the publication; OAPEN Library: description of the publication

The Tijaniyya is the largest Sufi order in West and North Africa. In this unprecedented analysis of the Tijaniyya's origins and development in the late eighteenth century, Zachary Valentine Wright situates the order within the broader intellectual history of Islam in the early modern period. Introducing the group's founder, Ahmad al-Tijani (1737 - 1815), Wright focuses on the wider network in which al-Tijani traveled, revealing it as a veritable global Islamic revival whose scholars commanded large followings, shared key ideas, and produced literature read widely throughout the Muslim world. They were linked through chains of knowledge transmission from which emerged vibrant discourses of renewal in the face of perceived social and political corruption. Wright argues that this constellation of remarkable Muslim intellectuals, despite the uncertainly of the age, promoted personal verification in religious learning. With distinctive concern for the notions of human actualization and a universal human condition, the Tijaniyya emphasized the importance of the realization of Muslim identity. Since its beginnings in North Africa in the eighteenth century, the Tijaniyya has quietly expanded its influence beyond Africa, with significant populations in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and North America.