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

FAIN: DR-292427-23

Pennsylvania State University (University Park, PA 16802-1503)
Eleanor Goodman (Project Director: November 2022 to present)

In Sorcery or Science? Ariela Marcus-Sells focuses on the scholars known as the Kunta who rose to prominence in the Western Sahara Desert in the late eighteenth century. The book shows how their prolific Arabic writings and pedagogical networks decisively influenced the development of Sufi Muslim though in West Africa. These scholars rose to prominence under the leadership of Sidi al-Mukhtar al-Kunti (d.1811). First Sidi al-Mukhtar, and then his son, Sidi Muhammad (d. 1826), established a vast pedagogical network; they produced prolific manuscript texts covering the breadth of the classical Islamic disciplines; and argued for their social authority as Sufi friends of God. Marcus-Sells demonstrates that the Kunta scholars understood human life as governed by the overlapping forces of the material, visible world and a vast invisible realm that both surrounds and interpenetrates with the world of the senses. These theologians presented and provided explicit instructions for practice.

Media Coverage

Book Review: Sorcery or Science? Contesting Knowledge and Practice in West African Sufi Texts (Review)
Author(s): Beatrice Bottomley
Publication: Journal of Islamic Studies
Date: 5/1/2023
Abstract: Book review of Ariela Marcus-Sells "Sorcery or Science? Contesting Knowledge and Practice in West African Sufi Texts"
URL: https://www.psupress.org//Reviews/63822422786/MarcusSells_JIS.pdf

Associated Products

Single Publication (Open Access eBook or Collection)
Publication Type: Single Publication
Title: Sorcery or Science? Contesting Knowledge and Practice in West African Sufi Texts
Year: 2022
ISBN: 9780271093062
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press
Author: Ariela Marcus-Sells
Editor: Eleanor Goodman
Translator: n/a
Abstract: In Sorcery or Science? Ariela Marcus-Sells focuses on the scholars known as the Kunta who rose to prominence in the Western Sahara Desert in the late eighteenth century. The book shows how their prolific Arabic writings and pedagogical networks decisively influenced the development of Sufi Muslim thought in West Africa. These scholars rose to prominence under the leadership of Sīdi al-Mukhtār al-Kuntī (d.1811). First Sīdi al-Mukhtār, and then his son, Sīdi Muḥammad (d.1826), established a vast pedagogical network; they produced prolific manuscript texts covering the breadth of the classical Islamic disciplines; and argued for their social authority as Sufi friends of God. Marcus-Sells demonstrates that the Kunta scholars understood human life as governed by the overlapping forces of the material, visible world and a vast invisible realm that both surrounds and interpenetrates with the world of the senses. These theologians presented and provided explicit instructions for practices—ranging from supplicatory prayer, to the creation of amulets and talismans, to communication with the jinn and spirit beings—that drew on this “realm of the unseen,” with the goal of affecting tangible changes in the visible world. They acknowledged that other Muslim scholars might consider these practices to be acts of “sorcery," but argued that they should instead be classified as “the sciences of the unseen,” and considered as legitimate Muslim practices. Sorcery or Science? situates the Kunta scholars’ understanding of the sciences of the unseen within the historical and cultural context of the Sahara Desert, relative to the cosmology and metaphysics of the realm of the unseen, and in relation to the history magical discourses within the Hellenistic and Arabo-Islamic worlds.
Primary URL: https://directory.doabooks.org/handle/20.500.12854/113511
Primary URL Description: PSU Press, link to directory of open access books
Secondary URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/book/99973
Secondary URL Description: Project Muse
URL 3: https://doi.org/10.5325/j.ctv2cc5rgr
URL 3 Description: JSTOR
Type: Single author monograph

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