Andrea Brigaglia
Biographic Data
| ID | 1402917 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Andrea Brigaglia |
| GIVEN NAMES | Andrea |
| FAMILY NAME | Brigaglia |
| SIGNATURE | BRIGAGLIA A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cape Town |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3770-4963 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 15 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 14 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Trajectories of Islamic Reform in West Africa
Islamic Reform in 20th Century Africa, written by Loimeier, Roman
“The Lapsed Abode of Unbelief”. The Takfīr Pendulum in Ǧihādī-Salafī Thought, Between the Caliphate and its West African Province
This paper reconstructs, in a parallel way, the continuous oscillations occurred in the interpretation of the notion of takfīr (excommunication), respectively in Abū Bakr al-Baġdādī’s Islamic State and in its West African province (the latter being in turn an offshoot of the Nigerian group known as “Boko Haram”). The paper combines an analysis of theological discourses as emerging from primary sources, with a sociological reading of the processes…
Reading on Boko Haram
Tarbiya and Gnosis in Hausa Islamic Verse
This paper contains a transliteration in Latin script, an English translation and an analysis of Al-Ṣābūn al-Muṭahhir ("The Cleansing Soap"), a poem on tarbiya (spiritual training) and ma'rifa (gnosis) originally written in the Hausa language using Arabic script by Muḥammad Balarabe (d. 1967) of Shellen, in Adamawa, Nigeria. Balarabe was a Sufi of the Tijāniyya order affiliated to the Jamā'at al-fayḍa of the Senegalese Ibrāhīm Niasse (d. 1975). I…
The Arts and Crafts of Literacy
During the last two decades, the (re-)discovery of thousands of manuscripts in different regions of sub-Saharan Africa has questioned the long-standing approach of Africa as a continent only characterized by orality and legitimately assigned to the continent the status of a civilization of written literacy. However, most of the existing studies mainly aim at serving literary and historical purposes, and focus only on the textual dimension of the …
Sufi Poetry in Twentieth-Century Nigeria
This article presents the translation and analysis of two poems (the first in Arabic, the second in Hausa) authored by one of the most famous twentieth-century Islamic scholars and Tijānī Sufis of Kano (Nigeria), Abū Bakr al-ʿAtīq b. Khiḍr (1909–74). As examples of two genres of Sufi poetry that are rather unusual in West Africa (the khamriyya or wine ode and the ghazal or love ode), these poems are important literary and religious documents. Fro…
Arts and Crafts of Literacy
Two Exegetical Works from Twentieth-Century West Africa
Central Sudanic Arabic Scripts (Part 2)
This article describes and analyzes barnāwī, the Arabic script of Borno (northeastern Nigeria) and most ancient prototype of what we define as the Central Sudanic family of scripts. Barnāwī shows paleographic features that clearly set it apart from some other West African Arabic scripts, thereby confirming the inadequacy of the label sūdānī, which often surfaces in literature to collectively brand a variety of scripts used in different regions of…
A Contribution to the History of the Wahhabi Daʿwa in West Africa
Shaykh Jaʿfar Mahmoud was one of the most popular voices of the Salafi/Wahhabi mission (daʿwa) in contemporary West Africa. This article reconstructs his career, from his studies in Nigeria and Saudi Arabia through the time of his teaching and preaching in Kano and Maiduguri, until his dramatic assassination in April 2007. After detailing the many conflicts and debates that accompanied his career as a public preacher and surveying the several hyp…
Central Sudanic Arabic Scripts (Part 1)
In this article, I want to draw attention to the Arabic calligraphic styles used in manuscripts and “market editions” produced in twentiethcentury northern Nigeria. While research on the origins and history of the Arabic calligraphic scripts of the Central Sudan still needs to answer many questions, this article contends that, instead of focusing only on the few available sixteenth- or seventeenth-century manuscripts, researchers could also benef…
Learning, Gnosis and Exegesis
Of all scientific theories the theory of evolution arguably poses the greatest challenge to theistic religions because it threatens to undermine teleology and the central position of mankind in nature. Nevertheless, modernist thinkers among South Asian Muslims like Sayyid Aḥmad Khān and Abū l-Kalām Āzād strove to demonstrate its compatibility with the Qur’ān. Their efforts were rejected by Islamists like Mawdūdī and more traditional scholars writ…
The Radio Kaduna Tafs¥r (1978-1992) and the construction of public images of Muslim scholars in the Nigerian media
This paper looks at a public contest over Qur'anic interpretation that accompanied the emergence of Nigerian reformist activism in the late 1970s. This contest was staged on national radio at regular intervals during the months of Ramadan over several years. The events allowed a public negotiation of the issues involved by the then polarizing fracture between ‘Sufi' and ‘anti- Sufi' Nigerian Muslims. In addition to the demands of the familiar doc…
Two Published Hausa Translations of the Qur'ān and their Doctrinal Background
This article presents an analysis of two written Hausa translations of the Qur'ān. Though emphasizing that these endeavours were strictly linked to their authors' previous careers as oral exegetes, the article argues also that a certain shift may take place in the significance of tafsīr through the importance assumed by written translation. These translations were published when a broad dogmatic conflict was taking place in Nigeria, and they feat…
A Contribution to the History of the Wahhabi Daʿwa in West Africa
Shaykh Jaʿfar Mahmoud was one of the most popular voices of the Salafi/Wahhabi mission (daʿwa) in contemporary West Africa. This article reconstructs his career, from his studies in Nigeria and Saudi Arabia through the time of his teaching and preaching in Kano and Maiduguri, until his dramatic assassination in April 2007. After detailing the many conflicts and debates that accompanied his career as a public preacher and surveying the several hyp…
Two Published Hausa Translations of the Qur'ān and their Doctrinal Background
This article presents an analysis of two written Hausa translations of the Qur'ān. Though emphasizing that these endeavours were strictly linked to their authors' previous careers as oral exegetes, the article argues also that a certain shift may take place in the significance of tafsīr through the importance assumed by written translation. These translations were published when a broad dogmatic conflict was taking place in Nigeria, and they feat…
Central Sudanic Arabic Scripts (Part 2)
This article describes and analyzes barnāwī, the Arabic script of Borno (northeastern Nigeria) and most ancient prototype of what we define as the Central Sudanic family of scripts. Barnāwī shows paleographic features that clearly set it apart from some other West African Arabic scripts, thereby confirming the inadequacy of the label sūdānī, which often surfaces in literature to collectively brand a variety of scripts used in different regions of…
Learning, Gnosis and Exegesis
Of all scientific theories the theory of evolution arguably poses the greatest challenge to theistic religions because it threatens to undermine teleology and the central position of mankind in nature. Nevertheless, modernist thinkers among South Asian Muslims like Sayyid Aḥmad Khān and Abū l-Kalām Āzād strove to demonstrate its compatibility with the Qur’ān. Their efforts were rejected by Islamists like Mawdūdī and more traditional scholars writ…
Two Published Hausa Translations of the Qur'ān and their Doctrinal Background
This article presents an analysis of two written Hausa translations of the Qur'ān. Though emphasizing that these endeavours were strictly linked to their authors' previous careers as oral exegetes, the article argues also that a certain shift may take place in the significance of tafsīr through the importance assumed by written translation. These translations were published when a broad dogmatic conflict was taking place in Nigeria, and they feat…
The Radio Kaduna Tafs¥r (1978-1992) and the construction of public images of Muslim scholars in the Nigerian media
This paper looks at a public contest over Qur'anic interpretation that accompanied the emergence of Nigerian reformist activism in the late 1970s. This contest was staged on national radio at regular intervals during the months of Ramadan over several years. The events allowed a public negotiation of the issues involved by the then polarizing fracture between ‘Sufi' and ‘anti- Sufi' Nigerian Muslims. In addition to the demands of the familiar doc…
Learning, Gnosis and Exegesis
Of all scientific theories the theory of evolution arguably poses the greatest challenge to theistic religions because it threatens to undermine teleology and the central position of mankind in nature. Nevertheless, modernist thinkers among South Asian Muslims like Sayyid Aḥmad Khān and Abū l-Kalām Āzād strove to demonstrate its compatibility with the Qur’ān. Their efforts were rejected by Islamists like Mawdūdī and more traditional scholars writ…
Central Sudanic Arabic Scripts (Part 1)
In this article, I want to draw attention to the Arabic calligraphic styles used in manuscripts and “market editions” produced in twentiethcentury northern Nigeria. While research on the origins and history of the Arabic calligraphic scripts of the Central Sudan still needs to answer many questions, this article contends that, instead of focusing only on the few available sixteenth- or seventeenth-century manuscripts, researchers could also benef…
A Contribution to the History of the Wahhabi Daʿwa in West Africa
Shaykh Jaʿfar Mahmoud was one of the most popular voices of the Salafi/Wahhabi mission (daʿwa) in contemporary West Africa. This article reconstructs his career, from his studies in Nigeria and Saudi Arabia through the time of his teaching and preaching in Kano and Maiduguri, until his dramatic assassination in April 2007. After detailing the many conflicts and debates that accompanied his career as a public preacher and surveying the several hyp…
Two Exegetical Works from Twentieth-Century West Africa
Central Sudanic Arabic Scripts (Part 2)
This article describes and analyzes barnāwī, the Arabic script of Borno (northeastern Nigeria) and most ancient prototype of what we define as the Central Sudanic family of scripts. Barnāwī shows paleographic features that clearly set it apart from some other West African Arabic scripts, thereby confirming the inadequacy of the label sūdānī, which often surfaces in literature to collectively brand a variety of scripts used in different regions of…
The Arts and Crafts of Literacy
During the last two decades, the (re-)discovery of thousands of manuscripts in different regions of sub-Saharan Africa has questioned the long-standing approach of Africa as a continent only characterized by orality and legitimately assigned to the continent the status of a civilization of written literacy. However, most of the existing studies mainly aim at serving literary and historical purposes, and focus only on the textual dimension of the …
Sufi Poetry in Twentieth-Century Nigeria
This article presents the translation and analysis of two poems (the first in Arabic, the second in Hausa) authored by one of the most famous twentieth-century Islamic scholars and Tijānī Sufis of Kano (Nigeria), Abū Bakr al-ʿAtīq b. Khiḍr (1909–74). As examples of two genres of Sufi poetry that are rather unusual in West Africa (the khamriyya or wine ode and the ghazal or love ode), these poems are important literary and religious documents. Fro…
Arts and Crafts of Literacy
Tarbiya and Gnosis in Hausa Islamic Verse
This paper contains a transliteration in Latin script, an English translation and an analysis of Al-Ṣābūn al-Muṭahhir ("The Cleansing Soap"), a poem on tarbiya (spiritual training) and ma'rifa (gnosis) originally written in the Hausa language using Arabic script by Muḥammad Balarabe (d. 1967) of Shellen, in Adamawa, Nigeria. Balarabe was a Sufi of the Tijāniyya order affiliated to the Jamā'at al-fayḍa of the Senegalese Ibrāhīm Niasse (d. 1975). I…
Islamic Reform in 20th Century Africa, written by Loimeier, Roman
“The Lapsed Abode of Unbelief”. The Takfīr Pendulum in Ǧihādī-Salafī Thought, Between the Caliphate and its West African Province
This paper reconstructs, in a parallel way, the continuous oscillations occurred in the interpretation of the notion of takfīr (excommunication), respectively in Abū Bakr al-Baġdādī’s Islamic State and in its West African province (the latter being in turn an offshoot of the Nigerian group known as “Boko Haram”). The paper combines an analysis of theological discourses as emerging from primary sources, with a sociological reading of the processes…
Reading on Boko Haram
Trajectories of Islamic Reform in West Africa
History (11 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Islam (9 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Political science (7 works) · Ancient history (6 works) · Linguistics (6 works) · Religion and Sociopolitical Dynamics in Nigeria (6 works) · Theology (6 works) · Archaeology (5 works)