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203 Walking to Saudi Arabia In 1940, a Fulɓe man, Maḥmūd Ba, began teaching the Qurʾan in an unusual way in his hometown of Jowol, along the Senegal River, where the freedmen of the Almaami (see chapter 3) had once taken refuge from a cynical attempt to rob them of their liberty. Ba was descended from humble origins as well; he was not from the Tooroɓɓe clerical elite but rather was from a family of pastoralists. He began Qurʾan study at the late age of sixteen but memorized the Book quickly and began study of the Islamic sciences before setting out on an overland pilgrimage to Mecca.1 To this point, his story is unusual but hardly unprecedented. Some people from outside the clerisy became religiously inspired and memorized the Book. These Walking Qurʾan—whether from the clerisy or not—occasionally literally walked all the way to the Ḥijāz in pursuit of Islamic knowledge. Ba personified many of the contradictions of French colonial rule in Islamic West Africa. He was typical of the phenomenon driving chapter 4— people without conventional ties to the clerisy who made new claims on Islamic knowledge under French colonial rule. But he was also an outlier: the French tightly controlled the pilgrimage, making it a rarely observed pillar of Islam from the 1880s until the 1940s.2 Inspired Muslims from the Senegal River Valley had been making overland pilgrimages since the tenth century, but these journeys were rare under colonial rule. Much had changed. THE NEW NORMAL What had changed the most from earlier centuries was not the West Africa that Ba left but the Ḥijāz that he found. The ideological content and epistemic mooring of Islamic knowledge had been transformed, perhaps irrevocably , by the establishment of the Saudi state. Ba completed his study of the DISEMBODIED KNOWLEDGE? “REFORM” AND EPISTEMOLOGY IN SENEGAL, –PRESENT A man without any bit of the Qurʾan in his belly is like a broken-down house. —Saying attributed to the Prophet Muḥammad 5 204 | Disembodied Knowledge? Islamic sciences in the 1930s as the modern kingdom of Saudi Arabia was taking shape. The Saudis had reconquered the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in the mid-1920s, and petroleum, which was quickly becoming the most important industrial lubricant and fuel in the world, was discovered in the kingdom early in the following decade. The court clerics of the Saudi regime, all of them followers or descendants of Muḥammad b. ʿAbdul-Wahhāb, were building and generously financing educational institutions to shatter the prevailing impression that they were unlettered tomb-smashing heretics.3 French colonial surveillance of the Arab and Muslim press in the 1920s (an important part of the quarantine policies of Islam Noir) provides massive evidence of Wahhabi disrepute. The French translated, summarized, and reproduced fatwas from all over the Muslim world that declared that the fifth pillar of Islam was not obligatory until the infidels could be driven from the Holy Cities. Some of the fatwas went so far as to suggest that the pilgrimage was explicitly forbidden until the Wahhabis were ousted!4 Al-Ḥājj Maḥmūd Ba was exposed to the novel pedagogies employed in the Wahhabi educational institutions that were beginning to flourish at that time. When Ba returned, he opened his school in Fuuta Tooro. On a handcarved wooden blackboard, he dispensed lessons to beginning students in Arabic language and grammar, devoting a relatively small portion of the time to memorization of the Qurʾan. He dressed his students in white uniforms instead of tattered rags, and he forbade them from seeking alms. He put the burden of maintaining them on their families instead of the community as a whole. Parents were to pay regular tuition. In 1944, he moved a portion of his school to the new capital of Dakar before leaving Senegal for the town of Kayes in neighboring French Soudan (Mali) in 1945. In less than a decade, graduates of his al-Falāḥ school were operating similar establishments throughout northeastern Senegal, southern Mauritania, and western (French) Soudan.5 This was the beginning of the Ḥarakat al-Falāḥ Li-lThaq āfa al-Islāmīyya al-Salafīya bi Sinighāl (Success Movement for Salafi Islamic Culture in Senegal). Ẓāhir and Bāṭin In a recent seminal work on Islamic schooling in West Africa, Louis Brenner argues quite persuasively that “a fundamental epistemic shift has been taking place in Mali...

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