Introduction

Summary

Issues of orality and textuality have been of central concern to the academic study of Islam in Africa from its origins in the accounts of colonial officials, orientalists, and Africanists. On the one hand, the pervasive Hegelian racial mythologies of Islam noir divided the continent into a ‘white’ region north of the Sahara of textuality and written history, and a ‘black’ sub-Saharan region of ‘orality’. Well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, some Africanists spoke of sub-Saharan African intellectual traditions as being ‘oral’ and ‘having no written legacy’, while some of the scholarship that sought to correct this error by focusing on the written traditions of Islamic learning in sub-Saharan Africa – what Ousmane Kane has dubbed ‘Timbuktu studies’ – neglected the importance of orality in cultures of Islamic learning both on the continent and abroad, subtly equating intellectual activity with literary production. More recent works on Islamic epistemology and pedagogy in Africa have emphasized the importance of personal transmission and non-discursive practices of the cultivation of adab in Islamic learning, emphasizing that performative and oral dimensions of texts – the way in which they are memorized, recited, held and used – tell us just as much, if not more, about the traditions in which they operate, as do their written content. As Walter Ong argued in his famous Orality and Literacy, writing allows for a kind of separation of knowledge, knower, and the known difficult to conceive of in an oral culture, and it is precisely this kind of separation between knowledge and knower that traditional Islamic pedagogies and epistemologies sought to prevent. However, as Ruth Finnegan's work demonstrates, orality and literacy are not two distinct and opposing ‘things’, but rather operate as mutually influential poles of a continuum, especially in the case of Islamic literatures. The entries in this section each develop new, nuanced approaches to this theme of orality and textuality, challenging many other schemas and much of the received wisdom about Islamic scholarship in Africa in exciting ways.

Ismail Warscheid's ‘“Those Who Represent the Sovereign in his Absence”: Muslim Scholarship and the Question of Legal Authority in the Pre-Modern Sahara’ explores the debates surrounding the application of Islamic Law in nomadic, Saharan contexts, specifically those contexts in which there is no legitimate Islamic ruler (imām) to appoint judges and enforce their rulings