Paper short abstract:

Our paper looks at instances of “occult sciences" (‘ulūm al-asrār) in the Islamic literature from mid-to-late 20th century Kano. It argues that, while often transmitted in popular religious literatures, the Kano tradition of ‘ulūm al-asrār draws prevalently on literate classical antecedents.

Paper long abstract:

Until recent times, the production of text-based talismans for a virtually infinite variety of purposes (healing, protection, fortune, etc) used to constitute one of the main sources of income of the ulama class of northern Nigeria (Lewis Wall 1988; Hassan 1992; Abdalla 1997). The esoteric practices followed by Muslim practitioners in the process of talisman-making, as well as the belief in the efficacy of talismans per se, have been often considered as a paradigmatic example of “popular religion" and, especially in West Africa, they have been associated to a purportedly “local” cultural substratum. Thanks to a recent turn in the scholarship, the field of historical Islamic studies has gradually reconfigured the occult as an important dimension of the classical, literate ulama culture of medieval and early modern Islam, in the Arab and Persian world (Melvin-Koushki 2017) just as in West Africa (Marcus-Sells 2022).

Our paper will look at two instances of the presence of “occult sciences" (‘ulūm al-asrār) in two sharply different sets of Islamic literary items from mid-to-late 20th century Kano: the pamphlets of talismanic recipes produced by Shaykh Husaybakar; and the Arabic poetry of Shaykh Abubakar Atiku. In reviewing these examples, we will argue that the term “popular" can, in the context of a taxonomy of Islamic literatures, identify a specific set of literary genres; but that it is not, on the other side, the correct category to describe the nature of occult sciences as such, their sources, and their transmission.