scholarly journals Fisibilillah: Labor as Learning on the Sufi Path

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 3
Author(s):  
Youssef Carter
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Community Service ◽  
Charitable Giving ◽  
American South ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
West African ◽  
The Body ◽  
Bodily Practice ◽  
The American South ◽  
Spiritual Empowerment

At the core of this study of spiritual empowerment and Black Atlantic Sufism lies the pre-occupation of understanding precisely the manner by which particular Muslim subjectivities are fashioned within the bounds of the Mustafawi Sufi tradition of religious cultivation through charitable giving and community service in Moncks Corner, South Carolina. This article examines Black Atlantic Muslim religiosities and argues that West African Sufism in diasporic context—which draws upon nonwestern theories of the body and theories of the soul—can be theorized as a philosophy of freedom and decoloniality. In the American South, spiritual empowerment becomes possible through varying forms of care and bodily practice that take place in a mosque that is situated on a former slave plantation. Meanwhile, that empowerment takes place through discourses on Islamic piety and heightened religiosity in a postcolonial Senegal. Spiritual empowerment occurs, as I show, through attending to the body and spirit as students connect themselves, via West African Sufism, to a tradition of inward mastery and bodily discipline through philanthropic efforts.

Black Muslimness Mobilized

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Youssef J. Carter
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
Religious Study ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
West African ◽  
Religious Leader ◽  
American Muslims ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Sufi Order

The Mustafawi Tariqa is a transnational Sufi Order that was initiated in 1966 by the late Cheikh Mustafa Gueye Haydara (d. 1989) in Thiès, Senegal. Yet, only since 1994 has this specific Sufi network reached westward across the water, bringing American Muslims—many of whom are converts—into the larger network. In the United States, the majority of students who have entered the Tariqa and have declared allegiance (bayah) to Shaykh Arona Rashid Faye Al-Faqir are African-Americans who have inserted themselves religiously, culturally, and pedagogically into a West African Sufi tradition which emphasizes religious study and the practice of dhikr (remembrance of God). Shaykh Arona Faye is a Senegalese religious leader who relocated to the southeastern region of the United States from West Africa to spread the religion of Islam and expose American Muslims to the rich West African tradition of spiritual purification and Islamic piety. At the same time, many of those who are African-American members of this tradition have made it a point to travel to Senegal themselves to strengthen transatlantic ties with West African compatriots and visit sacred burial sites in the small city of Thiès. I examine how two sites of pilgrimage for the Mustafawi—Moncks Corner, South Carolina and Thiès, Senegal—play a part in the infrastructure of Black Atlantic Sufi network. Moncks Corner is the central site in which access to the Tariqa’s most charismatic living shaykh, Shaykh Arona Faye, has worked for the past two decades teaching and mentoring those on the Path. On the other hand, Thiès is the location where the Tariqa’s founder is buried and travelers visit the town in order to pay homage to his memory. I show how these sites catalyze mobility and operate as spaces of spiritual refuge for visitors in both local and regional contexts by looking at how a local zawiyah produces movement in relation to a broader tariqa. By looking at pilgrimage and knowledge transmission, I argue that the manner in which esoteric approaches to spiritual care and the embodiment of higher Islamic ethics via the West African Sufi methodology of the Mustafawi informs the manner in which Muslims of varying African descent inhabit a broader diasporic identification of “Black Muslimness.”

The Paradox of the Female Slave Body in the Islamic Legal System: The Cases of Morocco and Sudan

Hawwa ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 9 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 215-233
Author(s):  
Ahmad A. Sikainga
Keyword(s):  
American South ◽  
The Body ◽  
Cultural Codes ◽  
Power And Control ◽  
Slave Women ◽  
The American South ◽  
Female Slave ◽  
Female Slaves ◽  
Relations Of Power ◽  
And Control

AbstractThis chapter is concerned with the way in which Muslim jurisprudence dealt with the body of female slaves in two Muslim societies: Morocco and the Sudan. While the depiction and the representation of the slave body have generated a great deal of debate among scholars working on slavery in the New World, this subject has received little attention amongst both Islamicists and Africanists. The literature on slavery in the American South and in the Caribbean has shown that the depiction of the slave body reveals a great deal about the reality of slavery, the relations of power and control, and the cultural codes that existed within the slave societies. The slave physical appearance and gestures were used to distinguish between the slaves and free and to justify slavery. Throughout the Americas slaves were routinely branded as a form of identification right up to the eighteenth century. Although the body of the slaves from both sexes was subjected to the same depiction, the treatment of female slaves deserves further exploration. As many scholars have argued, slave women suffer the double jeopardy of being both a slave and a woman. Moreover, the body of the female slave in Muslim societies is of particular significance as many of them were used for sexual purposes, as mistresses and concubines. The chapter shows that the reproductive role of female slaves became a major justice issue, particularly in their struggle for freedom.

Dance

2020 ◽  
pp. 274-304
Author(s):  
Susan Jones
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American South ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Dance ◽  
Late Work ◽  
Pueblo Indian ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
European Culture ◽  
Ritual Dance ◽  
The American South

This chapter examines the ways in which Lawrence contributed extensive and innovative literary engagements with dance in the modernist period. Lawrence’s citations of dance are most widely associated with the liberation of the body and identity through early twentieth-century dance practices such as social dance, Greek dance, and the work of Isadora Duncan. Yet, as this chapter explores, Lawrence’s narratives also reflect the aesthetics initiated by the innovations of the Ballets Russes, European Expressionism, and, latterly, the ritual dance of the American South - of Native and Pueblo Indian forms. In his late work Lawrence especially invokes dance experimentally to formulate a new literary critique of a failing European culture.

scholarly journals Black Muslimness Mobilized

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Youssef J. Carter
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
West African ◽  
The Body ◽  
Spiritual Training ◽  
Physical Mobility ◽  
Spiritual Journeys ◽  
Key Sites ◽  
Black Muslim ◽  
The One ◽  
Sister Cities

West African and American-born Muslims in the Mustafawi Tariqahave been impacted by a Senegalese Islamic pedagogical tradition,which places emphasis on the role of the body as a medium for religiousand spiritual training. My research examines the tremendouslabor required to produce Muslimness as an embodied reality andcritical resource initially in two key sites of pilgrimage—MoncksCorner, South Carolina and Thiès, Senegal—by demonstrating theimportant role these sister cities play in a transatlantic Sufi network.I suggest that there exists a continuity seen in the interactionsof West African Muslims and African-American Muslims—asolidarity emboldened through the sufi practices out of which abroader politics of “Black Muslimness” endure. African-Americanand Senegalese members of the Mustafawi Tariqa identify withina broader category of ‘Black Muslim’ in the mobilization of bodiesoriented toward these two sites of pilgrimage. As my extensiveresearch reveals, Moncks Corner is the central site in which accessto the Sufi order’s most charismatic living shaykh, Shaykh AronaFaye, has worked for the past two decades teaching and mentoringhis students on their spiritual journeys. On the other hand, Thiès isthe location where the order’s founder is buried and travelers visitthe town in order to pay homage to his memory. The processes of diasporic identification seen in both sites, I argue, are groundedin both physical mobility and the particular spiritual pedagogy ofthe Mustafawi. In order to further elaborate how local and internationalsolidarities are framed from within the concept of diaspora,I unpack the manner in which religious genealogies, discourses ofancestry, and the transmission of esoteric knowledge reinforce suchaffinities.O Allah, send blessings upon our master Muhammad, the one who precedesall others, the one whose brilliant lights radiate and fill the heavens.May Allah bless him and his family and companions in the amount ofevery grain of sand and every star in the sky. (al-ṣalāt al-samawiyya).

Black Yellow Fever Immunities, Innate and Acquired, as Revealed in the American South

1977 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 419-436 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth F. Kiple ◽  
Virginia H. Kiple
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
American South ◽  
West African ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
Tropical Africa ◽  
Cheap Labor ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The American South ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Differential Experience

West Africa’s disease environment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was decidedly hazardous to the health of Europeans who ventured there. Comtemporary observers reported die-offs of white troops reaching the 80 percent mark annually, while the loss of one half of a ship’s company on the coast was not all that unusual. Philip Curtin has calculated that on the average England’s loss of white troops ranged between 300-700 per 1,000 mean strength per annum with his most recent word on the subject placing the overall white death toll at about half of the white soldiers, government officials, and civilian personnel who reached West African shores. K. G. Davies, on the other hand, would have the “risks of the African station” even higher with an individual facing “three chances in five of being dead within a year.”West African natives by contrast positively thrived amidst European death. Again referring to Curtin’s data, the biggest killer of whites by far was “fever.” The fevers of Sierra Leone, for example, dispatched white troops at the rate of 410.2 per thousand per annum during the years 1819-1836, yet caused the death of only 2.5 African troops per thousand per annum. A similar differential experience with fevers occurred throughout West Africa—an experience which Professor Curtin has suggested constituted a crucial reason for the Atlantic slave traded Europeans would have preferred to locate plantations in tropical Africa close to a seemingly inexhaustible source of cheap labor, but they were persuaded by the lethal nature of West African fevers to locate those plantations instead in the more salubrious New World. Put plainly, they found the expense of transporting African workers across the Atlantic eminently preferable to challenging the odds against their own survival in Africa.

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