Adab Colloquium with Oludamini Ogunnaike (University of Virginia) and Mamadou Diouf (Columbia University)

Adab Colloquium: All Muhammad, All the Time: The Poetic, Prophetic Cosmology and Epistemology of Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse in Three Treatises and Poems

As contemporary poet and scholar Joshua Bennett observed, “Historically poetry is at the center of black social and intellectual life.” Of perhaps no literary or intellectual tradition is this more true than that of the Fayḍa Tijāniyya, inaugurated by the Senegalese Sufi Shaykh and scholar, Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse (d. 1975). Through close readings of three short treatises and poems of Ibrahim Niasse, this paper attempts to outline Niasse’s prophetic poetics of spiritual realization: the closely-linked cosmology, epistemology, and anthropology converging on the Muhammadan Reality (al-ḥaqīqat al-Muḥammadiya) that animates and structures his literary oeuvre and shapes the spiritual, social, and intellectual lives of the members of the Fayḍa Tijāniyya. Building on earlier studies of the Tijānī tradition and Maghrebi/West African Sufism, this article concludes with an examination of the implications of this prophetic poetics for the conception of the “human.”