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

FAIN: DR-292427-23

Penn State (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.