Imam Fakhruddin Owaisi and Adnan Adrian Wood Smith join us to discuss of the Poetry of Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse (d. 1975). Probably the most popular and influential African poet of the 20th century in any language, Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse was born in 1900, Tayba in Senegal, a town founded by his father, the Sufi master and scholar Abdoulaye Niasse. The young Ibrahim Niasse was something of a prodigy, quickly mastering all of the Islamic disciplines his father taught him, including classical Arabic poetry. Niasse excelled in writing poetry praising the Prophet Muḥammad (madīḥ nabawī), and as Niasse became recognized as the Ṣāhib al-Fayḍa, the Possessor of the Flood (a prophesied outpouring of mystical knowledge in the Tijani Sufi order), his branch of the order and his poetry spread throughout the African continent, the Middle East, and beyond. Niasse was active in the decolonial movements on the continent, advising leaders like Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Touré, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and King Faisal. Given the title “Shaykh al-Islam” by the scholars of al-Azhar University due to his impressive erudition, Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse also served as the Vice-President of the Muslim World League, and by the time he passed away in 1975, he had tens of millions of disciples, and his poetry was memorized and recited all over the African continent, from Mauritania and Senegal to Nigeria to Sudan to South Africa to Morocco, and is even more popular today.
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Links and Further Reading/Listening:
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Oludamini Ogunnaike, Poetry in Praise of Prophetic Perfection: A Study of West African Madīḥ Poetry and Its Precedents (ITS, 2020)
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Rudolph Ware, Zachary Wright, Amir Syed, The Jihad of the Pen: The Sufi Literature of West Africa (AUC Press, 2018)
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Ogunnaike, “All Muhammad, All The Time: Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse’s Prophetic Poetics of Praise in Three Treatises and Poems.” Journal of the Institute of Sufi Studies 1, no. 2: 66-111.
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Ogunnaike, “The Presence of Poetry, the Poetry of Presence: Meditations on Arabic Sufi Poetry Performance and Ritual in Contemporary Dakar.” Journal of Sufi Studies 5, no. 1 (2016): 58-97.
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Wright, Zachary. “Islam, Blackness, and African Cultural Distinction: The Islamic Négritude of Shaykh Ibrāhīm Niasse.” Journal of Africana religions 10, no. 2 (2022): 237-265.
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Brigaglia, Andrea. “Sufi Poetry in Twentieth-Century Nigeria: A Khamriyya and a Ghazal by Shaykh Abū Bakr al-ʿAtīq (1909–1974).” Journal of Sufi Studies 6, no. 2 (2017): 190-232.
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Brigaglia, Andrea. “Tarbiya and Gnosis in Hausa Islamic Verse: Al-Ṣābūn al-Muṭahhir by Muḥammad Balarabe of Shellen (Adamawa, Nigeria).” Die Welt des Islams 58, no. 3 (2018): 272-325.
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Brigaglia, Andrea. “Sufi revival and Islamic literacy: Tijani writings in twentieth-century Nigeria.” Annual Review of Islam in Africa 12, no. 1 (2014): 102-11.
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Dang, Christine Thu Nhi. “Erotics, poetics, politics: the spheres of action of Senegalese Sufi voices.” In Ethnomusicology Forum, vol. 26, no. 3, pp. 349-372. Routledge, 2017.
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Ibrahim Niasse, The Removal of Confusion: Concerning the Flood of the Saintly Seal Aḥmad Al-Tijānī : a Translation of the Kāshif Al-Ilbās ʻan Fayḍa Al-khatm Abī Al-ʻAbbās trans. Zachary Wright and Abdullahi el-Okene, Fons Vitae, 2010.
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Seesemann, Rüdiger. The Divine Flood: Ibrahim Niasse and the roots of a twentieth-century Sufi revival. Oxford University Press, 2011.
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Wright, Zachary Valentine. Living Knowledge in West African Islam: The Sufi Community of Ibrāhīm Niasse. Brill, 2015.
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Niang, Cheikh E. Abdoulaye. “Globalization and Missionary Ambition in West African Islam. The Fayda after Sheikh Ibrahim Niasse.” Religions 12, no. 7 (2021): 515.
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Ogunnaike, Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Two West African Intellectual Traditions (PSU Press, 2020).
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Host: Oludamini Ogunnaike
Guests: Imam Fakhruddin Owaisi and Adnan Adrian Wood-Smith
Edited By: Alana Bittner, WJTU