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The ‘Emergence’ of the Verse Tradition in Mauritania: Intellectual History and the Culture of Islamic Scholarship in the “Land of Million Poets.”
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- Author / Creator
- Abdulkadir, Abubakar Sadiq
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This study focuses on the vibrant literary-intellectual tradition of the classical Arabic poetry of Mauritania and the role it has played in Saharan knowledge production and transmission. It attempts to illuminate an important and understudied facet of Afro-Islamic intellectual and artistic history: the Arabic poetic tradition that embodied and popularized the intellectual thought and doctrines of Saharan (and West African) Muslim scholars and continues to shape the culture of Islamic scholarship in the region. Despite its outsize influence throughout the region, this intellectual tradition has received scant Europhone academic attention. Studies on the Sahara generally and Mauritania specifically have largely focused on the political and socio-economic dimensions of the region’s history, thereby neglecting its important and widely influential intellectual traditions and their history. While a few excellent scholarly works have been published on the history, Islamic texts, and prominent Muslim intellectuals of Mauritania, other works have examined the poetic and Islamic scholarly writings as literary productions and important sources for social history. However, despite these contributions, there is still no comprehensive study on the history of Mauritania’s and the Sahara’s rich Arabo-Islamic intellectual/literary traditions as such.
This study addresses this lacuna through a historical investigation into the so-called ‘emergence’ of Mauritania’s celebrated Arabic poetic tradition that reportedly emerged in the seventeenth to eighteenth century. Specifically, the project seeks to understand why and how this tradition reportedly emerged, when and where it did, and how it has shaped the region’s culture of Islamic scholarship and Mauritanian culture ever since. Firstly, it explores the socio-political, economic, religious, and intellectual milieu of seventeenth to eighteenth-century Mauritania, expanding its focus to the broader West African context. Furthermore, examining the lives and contributions of key figures such as Sīdī ʿAbd Allāh ibn Muḥammad al-ʿAlawī (d. 1731/2) and Muḥammad ibn Saʿīd al-Yadālī (d. 1753), recognized as founders of this poetic/intellectual tradition, alongside later eighteenth to nineteenth century scholars, the research illuminates the intellectual landscape and social factors that led to the reported emergence and eventual dominance of this poetic tradition. In other words, by way of a literary archaeology of texts among other dynamics, this study is a critical examination of how specific political, economic, and intellectual trends of the region came together to create the conditions for the rise and perpetuation of this intellectual and social tradition. -
- Subjects / Keywords
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- Graduation date
- Fall 2024
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- Type of Item
- Thesis
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- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
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- License
- This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Library with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.