Southern Saharan Scholarship and the Bilad Al-Sudan

Datos Bibliográficos

ID8976313
AutoresC C Stewart (0000-0003-0734-102X), Cindy Stewart (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, autor de correspondencia)
Año1976
Volumen17
Número1
Páginas73-93
Fecha de publicación1976-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaThe Journal of African History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0021-8537 • E-ISSN: 1469-5138
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0021853700014778
OpenAlexW2090353014
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas15
Referencias citadas10

By way of drawing attention to a neglected theme in West African history this article focuses upon southern Saharan society and the intellectual tradition of its scholarly ( zawiya and insilimen ) lineages. It is argued that societies of the southern Sahara have remarkably similar social, political and economic organizations and that the zawiya/insilimen scholars were therefore the product of comparable political and economic milieus. One result of this was that these scholars, at least by the late eighteenth century, seem to have evolved similar patterns of scholarship which emphasized two highly functional Islamic sciences, jurisprudence and mysticism. It is suggested that this intellectual tradition was shared with other scholars in the desert-edge economic region, and that as a result there existed a basic unity in the intellectual traditions of many western and central Sudanese Islamic communities which is distorted by distinctions between ‘militant’ and ‘quietist’ traditions of legal reform in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century West Africa

Archaeology · Intellectual history · Islam · Jurisprudence · Militant · Mysticism · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Theme (computing · African history and culture analysis · African Studies and Geopolitics · Anthropology · History · Language, Linguistics, Cultural Analysis · Law