Description
Book SynopsisSorcery or Science? examines how two Sufi Muslim theologians who rose to prominence in the western Sahara Desert in the late eighteenth century, Sidi al-Mukhtar al-Kunti (d. 1811) and his son and successor, Sidi Mu?ammad al-Kunti (d. 1826), decisively influenced the development of Sufi Muslim thought in West Africa. Known as the Kunta scholars, Mukhtar al-Kunti and Mu?ammad al-Kunti were influential teachers who developed a pedagogical network of students across the Sahara. In exploring their understanding of the realm of the unseena vast, invisible world that is both surrounded and interpenetrated by the visible worldAriela Marcus-Sells reveals how these theologians developed a set of practices that depended on knowledge of this unseen world and that allowed practitioners to manipulate the visible and invisible realms. They called these practices the sciences of the unseen. While they acknowledged that some Muslimsparticularly self-identified white Muslim elitesmight consider these
Trade Review“This work is a substantial contribution to the studies of Sufism, West Africa, the Sahara, and the histories of magic and the occult. It is refreshingly interdisciplinary, is extremely well researched and informed, and draws on impressive manuscript work and textual analysis to make a number of important interventions across several fields.”
—Oludamini Ogunnaike,author of Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions
“From its extensive engagement with a vast, and understudied, corpus of primary sources and the contexts of their production to its thoughtful reflections on the scholar’s position and approach, Sorcery or Science? represents an exciting model for future scholarship across disciplines.”
—Beatrice Bottomley Journal of Islamic Studies
