The Tijanya brotherhood founded by Cheikh Ahmed TIJANI in the second half of the XVIIIth century achieved a spectacular breakthrough in West Africa by the middle of the XIXth century. It was adopted and championed by the main figures of the resistance to the French colonial penetration : Cheikh Umar al-Futi TALL and Ahmadou Mahdiyu BA who were introduced to it respectively by Mohamed el-Ghali in Medina and Mohamed el-Hafez, and Id-on-Ali in Mederdra, Mauritania. Mamadou Lamine Dramé from the Gajaaga and Samba Diadana Ac also were figures of the anticolonial resistance who embraced Tijanya. Ahmadou Cheikhou, Cheikh Umar TALL's successor and eldest son, too was a tijane anticolonial hero whom Archinard's men killed in 1891, after his empire had gone through a long period of turmoil.
Non-Europhone Intellectuals
(2011)
The history of Arabic writing spans a period of eight hundred years in sub-Saharan Africa. Hundreds of thousands of manuscripts in Arabic or Ajami (African languages written with the Arabic script) are preserved in public libraries and private collections in sub-Saharan Africa. This 'Islamic Library' includes historical, devotional, pedagogical, polemical and political writings, most of which have not yet been adequately studied. This book, Non-Europhone Intellectuals, studies the research carried out on the Islamic library and shows that Muslim intellectuals, in West Africa in particular, have produced huge literature in Arabic and Ajami. It is impossible to reconstitute this library completely. As the texts have existed for centuries and are mostly in the form of unpublished manuscripts, only some of them have been transmitted to us while others have perished because of poor conservation. Efforts toward collecting them continues and the documents collected thus far attest to an intense intellectual life and important debates on society that have been completely ignored by the overwhelming majority of Europhone intellectuals. During European colonial rule and after the independence of African nations, Islamic education experienced some neglect, but the Islamic scholarly tradition did not decline. On the contrary, it has prospered with the proliferation of modern Islamic schools and the rise of dozens of Islamic institutions of higher learning. In recent years, the field of Islamic studies in West Africa has continued to attract the attention of erudite scholars, notably in anthropology and history, who are investing in learning the languages and working on this Islamic archive. As more analytical works are done on this archive, there will be continued modification in terms of the debate on knowledge production in West Africa.