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163 4 BODIES OF KNOWLEDGE SCHOOLING, SUFISM, AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN COLONIAL SENEGAL, – The nobility of my community are the bearers of the Qurʾan. —Saying attributed to the Prophet Muḥammad Bodies of Knowledge Even as some fought a desperate battle to prevent the enslavement of Muslims by Muslims, precolonial Senegambia had been transforming itself into a slave society. Part of what made the rhetoric and reality of the revolutionary movements so powerful was that they had called on Muslim identity to cut across what everyone knew to be deeply rooted hierarchical distinctions of social status. These distinctions were powerfully embodied. Enslaved and “casted” people were not made from the same stuff as the free and noble. Slaves and other lowborn people had bodies and beings that were impure. Even in twenty-first-century Senegal, the corporeal taint of low birth remains a salient factor in social life, particularly affecting marriage patterns. At the end of the nineteenth century, such distinctions were even more firmly rooted, but the political order that upheld them was already crumbling. The French had begun to extend their military dominance from isolated coastal trading entrepôts to the mainland by annexing the Wolof state of Waalo in 1855. In 1895, after forty years of conquests, French authority encompassed much of the African West in a vast new imperial state, Afrique Occidentale Française (AOF).1 This expansion fatally undermined the Senegambian martial monarchies that composed the old political order. The power relations that upheld systems of slavery and caste were irrevocably altered. Just as important perhaps, the rhetoric of a French mission civilisatrice was accompanied by a commitment to end slavery in French West Africa.2 This commitment was always incomplete, frequently half-hearted, and sometimes quite cynical. Yet even this effort was enough to create a space within which the enslaved could stake claims. They sought not only an abstract colonial legal status as “free” but also honor and dignity in the societies that had held them in bondage. Learning the Qurʾan came to play a special role 164 | Bodies of Knowledge in this process. The esteem enjoyed by Qurʾan reciters made schools ideal places for people of low status to earn respect. But from within an epistemology of embodiment, this went beyond mere social climbing. Shared belief in the transformative capacities of the Word made this something more. Embodying the Qurʾan might allow slaves to redefine their beings. Some, it seems, dared to believe that the stain of slavery could be washed away with the water from the slate board. For if the bodies of the lowborn were not made from the same stuff as those of the free, could they not be made noble with knowledge? Would it not be possible—through internalization of the Qurʾan—to remake the bodies of the enslaved and casted as free bodies? As Muslim bodies? As bodies of knowledge? A PATH TO HONOR The model had precedent. It was something of an open historical secret that much of theTooroɓɓe clerisy in Fuuta Tooro came from humble origins.3 The clerisy as a whole was not immune to embodied distinctions of caste; like other occupational groups, it tended to reproduce itself through endogamy. Moreover, its hereditary claims to Islamic knowledge could be decidedly proprietary and bodily, with embodied grace (baraka) seen as passed from one generation of scholars to the next.4 Nonetheless, stories of individuals of low or slave birth who earned freedom and dignity through Islamic learning were not uncommon. Though only rarely, some from humble backgrounds did go on to become honored clerics. Certain clerics perpetuated hereditary claims to an embodied grace but were nonetheless prepared—even eager—to accommodate the yearnings of the multitudes newly freed in law by the French. Indeed, many Muslim intellectuals had long felt ambivalent about the role of slavery in Senegambian society. This group included Amadu Bamba Mbakke. Murid oral tradition reports that an enthusiastic disciple once came to him offering the gift of a slave. He responded, “If you own him, then you own me, because he and I have the same Master.”5 The story may or may not be apocryphal, but the Murīdiyya’s role in offering dignity and Muslim identity to people of all sorts of backgrounds is not.6 Nor were the Murids alone in developing a more inclusive vision of Muslim identity. Sufi leaders transformed and channeled a process of social change that was fundamentally...

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