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Paper long abstract:

Islam in South Africa has been dominantly narrated and represented by the Indian and Malay Muslim communities and has sidelined or ignored the long history of Black African Muslims. This problematic seems to be linked to oriental and colonial discourses that view Islam as incongruent with Africa, that African Muslims are either new comers to Islam through conversion or their Islamic practices are syncretic. However, these narratives and discourses occlude a crucial aspect of Muslim Africans originality in their Islamic praxis. In South Africa, settler colonialism or colonial modernity has structured Islam according to race: Indian, Coloured/Malay, and Black African, these longstanding classifications have an impact on the post-apartheid South African society and the experience of being Muslim. Our argument is that Black African Muslims in South Africa embraced Islam during the anticolonial resistance struggles in order to articulate their subjectivity outside the missionary Judea-Christian framework and to embody freedom outside of the nationalist post-colonial post-apartheid secular framework. This is exemplified by three Jazz musicians Abdullah Ibrahim, Johnny Akhir Dyani and Zim Ngqawana who all performed Islam in order to expand the imaginary, history and geography of Blackness in South Africa. These sound scientists show us how Islam and being African is not incommensurable rather their music opens the myriad of connections between Africa, the Atlantic slave trade, the East and geographies of preconquest. These artists attest to Ware’s (2018) observation that Islam is about educating the whole of the human being rather than a narrow transmission of discursive knowledge.

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Paper short abstract:

The presentation will discuss the Sufi poetry in 20th Century Nigeria and how it different from the mainstream Sufi poetry in the east, and how African context shape its form and functions.

Paper long abstract:

The themes of Rūmi's self-realization, Ibn al-Fārid's divine love, and Ibn 'Arabi's longing typically come to mind for Western scholars discussing Sufi poetry. Yet, when the term 'Africa' is introduced into our title, particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries, the expectations shift. Panegyrics, devotional intercession, and even talismanic studies may take precedence in our exploration. Given that some scholars perceive African Islamic poetry as lacking philosophical depth, a fundamental question arises: Does African identity and culture play a role in reshaping the trajectory of Sufi poetry, fostering a cultural dialogue between Islam and African identity that leads to the adoption of an African Sufi model? To address this inquiry, my paper will analyze the poetry of Tijani, a prominent scholar in 20th-century Nigeria Sheykh Abū Bakr Atiƙu Sanka (d.1974), to identify the main themes and their functions within West African society.

The analysis will concentrate on three prevalent themes in African poetry: Madīh, intercession, and Talismanic asrār. The central argument in my presentation posits that, despite lacking profound philosophical insights, Sufi poetry in Africa retains its essence derived from the East. However, it undergoes a transformation in terms of its "functionality", exhibiting a new dimension that is seldom observed in Middle Eastern societies.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper delves in the complex structures within the ḥaḍra of the Wazzāniyah in Morocco embedded in their practices of poetry production and performance, which constitute a process of meaning-making and contribute to the identity formation of this Sufi ṭarīqa.

Paper long abstract:

Al-Ḥaḍra (presence [of God] arab.) is a spiritual Sufi performance that involves a unique experience of expanded consciousness accessed through meditative liturgical recitation in a collective ritual; a journey toward God in the hope of being in his divine presence. For the Wazzāniyah disciples in Morocco, the ḥaḍra poetry performance constitutes the aesthetic and performative enactment of their ṭarīqa (Sufi path/Sufi Brotherhood, arab.) in the absence of a detailed and generalized doctrine amongst its disciples. Relying on the performative ḥaḍra to preserve their doctrine, the ṭarīqa moves from a text practice into embodying the doctrine through a fluid and ever-changing ritual; a semi-conscience choice to abandon a long-established logocentric tradition and express an identity which inherently adopts fluidity and renewal as its main pillars. In this research, I delve into the complex layers and structures of power and authority within the ḥaḍra as a result of constant acts of re-inscription and erasure that are embedded in their practices of textual production, transmission, and performance, which in turn constitute a process of meaning-making and contributes to the identity formation of this community.

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Paper short abstract:

Just like Pan-Africanism, Andalusia is a unionist imagination marveling for a lost ‘pure’ land which can say a lot for Afrofuturism without falling into the trap of ‘romantic gloriana and romantic primitivism’ à la Ali Mazrui.

Paper long abstract:

Andalusia was the gate to Europe opened by Africa. This ‘unsullied’ ‘pure’ history was poetically invented. Rundi’s The Fall of Seville, Muhammed Iqbal’s The Great Mosque of Cordoba, Mahmood Darwish’s Eleven Stars, Imtiaz Dharker’s Remember Andalusia, and Shadab Zeest Hasmi’s The Baker of Tarifa produced a collective memory for Andalusia. It became the lost paradise. 1492 ended Andalusia to commence modern nation-state by expelling Jews and Muslims while Christians, Muslims, and Jews were living peacefully before thanks to color-blind Islamic epistemology. Accordingly, Jewish people were sent from one Muslim State (Andalusia) to another (Ottomans). Andalusia faces ‘invasion’ again. Now, its gate is crowded with immigrants. It unifies Arabs and Africans again who become Subalternized migrants this time instead of ‘conquerors’. Following Darwish’s The Last Sky, this paper goes beyond the horizons for an Arab, African, Christian, and Jewish co-existence. This decolonized option resists the colonial modernist discourses like ‘colonialism in reverse’. The same epistemology portrays Andalusia as an Arabic colonization of Spain after the colonization of Northern Africa. Andalusia, nevertheless, moves beyond Arabness or Africanness. Just like Pan-Africanism, it is a unionist imagination marveling for a lost ‘pure’ land which can say a lot for Afrofuturism without falling into the trap of ‘romantic gloriana and romantic primitivism’ à la Ali Mazrui. Tariq Ali failed to imagine a non-Western land because of his colonial language. It portrays Andalusia as a secular state. This paper decolonizes secularism in his fiction to uncover how dualization in Andulisian madrasa was another epistemology.