On Feet, Necks and the “Greatest Saint”: Debating Sufism in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Africa

While the history of Sufism is teemed with lofty claims regarding the spiritual status of their owners, not many Sufi masters declared themselves as the supreme saints of all times. This paper elaborates on two declarations of such nature, one in thirteenth the other in late eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries, made by two highly influential Sufi shaykhs al-Jilānī and al-Tijānī who happened to establish arguably the most dominant brotherhoods in the Muslim world, namely the Qādiriyya and the Tijāniyya. The issue has been the bone of contention between the two for past two centuries in Africa. As the puritanical Salafi movement started to spread in the continent, protagonists of the Tijāniyya found it less easy to promote the controversial and less elegant statement, “my two feet are upon the neck of each and every divinely elected saint from the time of Adam until the blowing of the trumpet”, of their supreme master. Therefore, the picture they provide is less of a united and more of a fringed one.

Anahtar Kelimeler:

Sufism, Debate, Tijaniyya, Greatest Saint, Africa, Feet and Necks

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