2 - Muḥammad al-Kashnāwī and the Everyday Life of the Occult

Summary

Sometime before 1730, a scholar left his native Katsina (in today's Northern Nigeria) to embark on the pilgrimage and fulfil the ethical injunction of seeking knowledge. He sojourned in the Holy Cities and then in Cairo where he taught as a guest of the shaykh of an East African student lodge at the illustrious mosque-seminary al-Azhar, in whose home he died in 1741. The shaykh's son, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān al-Jabartī, would later write what was to become one of the most renowned historical works of Ottoman Egypt wherein the name of his father's visitor, Muḥammad b. Muḥammad al-Kashnāwī al-Sudānī al-Danrankāwī al-Mālikī al-Ashʿarī – the ‘unequaled imām’, ‘broad sea of learning … and treasury of mystical graces’ – was forever immortalized.

Despite such acclaim, al-Kashnāwī has received little to no critical attention in the scholarship. This chapter is an attempt in that direction. It follows two separate but related threads of analysis. It locates al-Kashnāwī within the broader historical and conceptual frameworks of the scholarly field ‘Islam in Africa’, where a binary logic has tended to oppose Arab to African and occult science to other forms of knowledge. These dualities have largely defined how the author and his work have been apprehended. The chapter then moves to a close reading of al-Kashnāwī's main work on the ‘secret sciences’, al-Durr al-manẓūm wa khulāṣat al-sirr al-maktūm fī ‘ilm al-ṭalāsim wa’l-nujūm. Read in juxtaposition to al-Kashnāwī's own words, the historiography's analytical frames quickly give way to reveal an altogether different epistemic configuration where modern racial categories were inoperative, where knowledge was understood as an organic indivisible whole – and where, crucially, disciplines of knowledge were intricately bound to disciplines of the self and the everyday life of their practitioners.

Information on al-Kashnāwī's early years is hazy, and little can be glimpsed from the biographical dictionaries. While the date of his birth is unknown, it is generally accepted that he was born in Katsina, and most probably (given the affiliative nisba, al-Danrankāwī) in Kurmin Dan Ranko, a Katsinan town noted for its scholarship. An extended province of Hausaland, Katsina had from the late seventeenth century onwards reached a zenith of power that was at once political, economic, and scholarly, attracting students and visitors from all corners of the continent and beyond. It is in this world that al-Kashnāwī had been nurtured, as he completed studies in the classical disciplines: Qur’ān, ḥadīth, theology, fiqh.