The Biography of Ḥājj ʿumar Tāl by Shaykh Mūsā Kamara
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Compositions of Sainthood: The Biography of Ḥājj ʿUmar Tāl by Shaykh Mūsā Kamara Wendell Hassan Marsh Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2018 © 2018 Wendell Hassan Marsh All rights reserved ABSTRACT Compositions of Sainthood: The Biography of Ḥājj ʿUmar Tāl by Shaykh Mūsā Kamara Wendell Hassan Marsh Compositions of Sainthood explores the role performed by texts in the making of Muslim sainthood in its spiritual and worldly dimensions by interpreting Shaykh Mūsā Kamara’s biography of Ḥājj ʿUmar Tāl and situating this Arabic-language work within the problem-space of the founding moment of Senegalese modernity. In writing about the life, lineage, and legacy of one of the most memorialized figures in the colonial federation of French West Africa, Kamara intervened within an anti-historical space of signification that has been characterized by difference in representation and interpretation of the nature of saintly authority, its means of transmission, and the relationship between Islam and colonialism. Because of the specificity of Kamara’s Ashhā l-ʻulūm wa aṭayab al-khabar fī sīrat al-Ḥājj ʿUmar, the text is a problem: a contradictory, paradoxical, and exceptional composition that demands questions that are worth asking. This problem has three parts and corresponds to Ashha’s three textual modes. It narrates the Umarian contradiction as the conflict between a form of saintly authority based on righteous piety and another based on temporal power. It also archives differing arguments that sought to resolve the contradiction of the ideality of friendship with God and the materiality of authority on earth during the Umarian moment. Finally, the text contests the naturalization of power ʿUmar’s descendants during the colonial period and instead insists on a model of the transmission of authority based on intellectual and spiritual affiliation. Taken together, this problem of the composition of sainthood reveals the problem-space defined by the negotiation of saintly lineages and the colonial state, which used filial descent to authorize the former’s place in the management of colonial production and the administration of colonial order. Table of Contents Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................................. iii Dedication ................................................................................................................................................. viii Introduction ................................................................................................................................................ 1 The Three Paradoxes ...................................................................................................................................... 9 Textual Corpus ............................................................................................................................................... 17 Literature Review ......................................................................................................................................... 21 Islam Noir and its Durable Afterlives ........................................................................................................................................ 24 Islam Noir in the Literature of Islam in Africa ...................................................................................................................... 35 The Promise of Arabic Writing in Francophone West Africa ......................................................................................... 51 Chapter Breakdown ..................................................................................................................................... 62 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................................... 67 Chapter 1: Sources of the Umarian Tradition ............................................................................... 68 Introduction .................................................................................................................................................... 68 A sketch of the basic Umarian narrative ............................................................................................... 70 ʿUmar's self-representation ....................................................................................................................... 74 Performing Sainthood in Poetry ................................................................................................................................................. 75 Arguing Saintly Authority .............................................................................................................................................................. 77 Politics and the Language of Love .............................................................................................................................................. 83 Problematics of the Umarian Contradiction .......................................................................................................................... 88 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................................... 95 Chapter 2: The Making of the Umarian Tradition ....................................................................... 96 Introduction .................................................................................................................................................... 96 Vernacular representations of ʿUmar .................................................................................................... 97 Counter-Representations of Umar ........................................................................................................ 103 ʿUmar’s death and the elaboration of the Umarian tradition ...................................................... 112 Defining the Umarian succession .............................................................................................................................................. 114 Islamic peril and the Umarians .................................................................................................................................................. 123 A convergence of the tradition ................................................................................................................................................... 128 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................................... 130 Chapter 3: Narrating the Contradictions of Sainthood ........................................................... 132 Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 132 The limits of translation ........................................................................................................................... 135 The explicit terms of the text: Manāqib, karāmāt, faḍāʾil .............................................................. 139 i Implicit categories and the contradictions of sainthood ............................................................... 151 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................................... 163 Chapter 4: The Archiving of Argumentative Difference: A Dialogical Approach ........... 165 Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 165 Dialogical structure, form, and the archival function ..................................................................... 167 The arguments from the Bayān .............................................................................................................. 178 The arguments in Tabkiyyāt al-Bakkāy ............................................................................................... 183 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................................... 191 Chapter 5: Genealogies of Contestation ....................................................................................... 193 Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 193 Description of the genealogical textual mode ................................................................................... 195 Genealogy of traditional filiation .............................................................................................................................................. 195 Genealogy of Islamic affiliation .................................................................................................................................................. 197 Descent, kinship, and the naturalization of social difference ...................................................... 198 Why is genealogy ideological? ...............................................................................................................