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by Nakita Valerio, PhD student, Vanier Scholar, Religious Studies, University of Alberta CASIM Secretary

16-10-2024

On a particularly drizzly October morning in Edmonton, I had the pleasure of taking the time to sit with my own doctoral supervisor, the effervescent Dr. Joseph Hill, professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta, to have a heartfelt conversation about work, religion, and life. When our videos first synced up, Professor Hill appeared in his typical relaxed style, running a hand through his salt-and-pepper beard, a white kufi hat on his head. Another era might mistake him for a beatnik poet but the familiar backdrop of his home office – with its assortment of different woven textiles from around the world and various artworks of Islamic calligraphy on the wall behind him – shows him to be a wanderer of a different variety. Our conversation touches on the many journeys of a lifelong seeker through religion and academia, as well as balancing different forms of knowledge in thinking critically about what work we bring to the world and how we do so, by Allah’s Permission.

NV: Jazak Allahu khayran for agreeing to chat with me today on behalf of CASIM. I thought we could start by having you tell us a bit about your research on female religious authority and leadership in Senegal and how you got into this area of study. I’m also very interested in the long version of that story – who you were as a child and young adult, if you’ve always been interested in stories and culture, and what brought you to your field today. 

JH: I’ve often thought about how my upbringing might have affected my interest in things, and I can say there has been a lot of serendipity, a lot of unexpected events, a lot of apparent coincidences that have led me to the discipline and topics that I’m interested in. It’s all good evidence that planning doesn’t always lead you where you should end up going.

For a while after choosing the topic of women leaders in Senegal, I thought maybe I’d made the wrong choice, because people might not give me a lot of credibility due to my subject positioning as a Western white man talking about Senegalese or other African non-white women. Most people who have talked about gender in Islam, especially women in Islam, have been women, but I decided to pursue this research, devoting a lot of time and attention to it, because I saw it as something deeply interesting. The things that I was seeing and the questions they raised for me were things that few others were talking about, if at all. In the literature, I simply couldn’t find the kinds of phenomena that I was witnessing in Senegal. And despite my subject position as a man, I had a unique position and unique experience as somebody who had been interacting with this community for years by the time I decided to do this research. 

Before this time though, my interest in people of other cultures was almost “random,” you could say. When I was an undergrad, I was at Brigham Young University, and I’d always seen myself as kind of an outsider. My studies were no exception. It bothered me that even though I went there to study the history of arts and ideas, people were only presenting me with European or Western arts and ideas. I was majoring in humanities but, as I went through it, I became more and more aware that the world we live in is broader than the one that I was being taught about. And even though I was in a university in a town that was very white, Christian, Mormon, and conservative, I couldn’t help but let myself get curious about the broader world. I started reading books about the history of Asian and African arts. Eventually, I found some professors who were interested in West Africa, so I took a course on African politics, and then they brought in another professor who was a specialist in East African literature, so I took a class on Africa from an East Africanist. In this way, I gradually became exposed to more traditions, and I decided that I wanted to do something deeper in the humanities. I also found that, at that time and place, the best way to learn about non-Western cultures and to acquire the tools for understanding them in context was to take anthropology classes, so I added anthropology as a double major and eventually graduated with both. Adding anthropology helped me understand the social context, and the importance and meaning of artworks I was studying.

As a classical guitarist and as a classical music radio announcer before that, I found myself interested in Senegalese music, especially the kora, a harp that is played there and the Senegalese xalam, a local guitar. I travelled there by myself during my third year to do research for my honors thesis. I took xalam lessons from a well-known teacher who played for the national ballet and orchestra and from a kora teacher at the National Conservatory. I wanted to understand how playing these instruments was passed down through generations, the pedagogical traditions through which these things are learned and preserved, and how one becomes a virtuoso player within them, as well as the recent transformations that were making it harder for younger generations to attain that virtuosity. Eventually, my work led me to complete an undergraduate thesis on the griots, or the praise singers and musicians of Senegal, on the question of how they transmit their knowledge and why their art is becoming endangered due to many changes stemming from colonialism, modernization, and urbanization. 

After that, I took a year off and taught middle school before realizing my heart was in research, and I pursued a PhD at Yale in anthropology. Possibly due to my experiences growing up in a Mormon family and due to the importance Mormons give to cultivating one’s own relationship with God and spiritual experiences, I dove into my dissertation research on Sufi groups in Senegal with an assumption that religious experience might be an important part of people’s participation in these groups. I was dissatisfied with the ways these kinds of research were being done. Most of it at that point had been done by political scientists or political anthropologists who focused on how Sufi sheikhs acted as big men in their communities who would mediate between the local community of followers and the central colonial and then post-colonial governments. The literature made it look like the primary reason for becoming a Sufi in Senegal was to translate power between the secular government and the local Muslim community, and as insurance against the potential material difficulties one might face. The scholarship made it look like these organizations were essentially political and economic, and it was very hard to discern whether or not people had any deep religious experiences, whether there was any belief involved, or if it was just a social club that took on the idiom of being what they call ‘brotherhoods’.

At the end of my first year of graduate studies, in 2001, I started an exploratory research project on the Fayḍa Tijāniyya community in the suburb of Kaolack, Senegal called Medina Baye, which is their spiritual headquarters. The reason why I chose this group was not because of their international renown—although they are a global movement with millions of followers outside Senegal—but, on the contrary, because I had found so much literature about other Sufi groups in Senegal instead, especially the Murids. I thought maybe I could make a bigger dent in the scholarship by studying a group that I knew was numerically important, had a global appeal, and yet was not represented to a significant degree in the literature. I approached someone I knew from that community who was at Yale at the time and is now a professor at Harvard, Dr. Ousmane Kane, and asked him to introduce me to people there. 

In 2001, I spent about three months in Medina Baye improving my Wolof and becoming familiar with the community. Realizing I would need to understand Arabic to study how this movement related to the broader Islamic and Sufi traditions, I studied Arabic in Morocco in 2002 and in the Mauritanian desert in 2003, and then I returned to Senegal in 2004 and 2005 for more extended fieldwork. I sought to understand how the community functions as a movement and as a religious community, how their authority works, their structures and networks, but also to understand the role that religious experience might play in people’s decision to be part of this community and how they participated in it. I understand that everything is politically and economically embedded, and yet there would be little reason to call it a Sufi movement or to claim that it’s part of a broader religious tradition if people didn’t actually refer to that tradition in cultivating some kind of religious experience of the Divine. 

I came to see that, indeed, religious experience was central to people’s participation, that they universally described coming into the movement through undergoing this movement’s specific form of spiritual training, or tarbiya. Contrary to other communities’ uses of this Arabic term, tarbiya for the Fayda signifies a specific stage of initiation that transforms people fundamentally through an enveloping experience of the dissolution of the self (fanā’ al-nafs)—an experience of both the unity of God and the unity of all things in God. People describe how all the distinctions in the world vanished for them, that their own sense of self vanished, and they became aware of nothing but God. I witnessed and have continued to witness over the years that many people, especially young people, go through a state in tarbiya in which they lose complete control of their bodily functions. Sometimes you see them leaping or convulsing, or they cry uncontrollably for quite a while. Sometimes their reaction is more subtle, although it’s apparent that they’re in a different state (ḥāl). They can manifest this knowledge in many ways. And when people question them, they answer that they are completely unaware of themselves, and the only thing that they’re conscious of is God. 

That is the beginning of participation in this community, as opposed to many Sufi communities for whom this dissolution may be understood as a goal that some may attain after of years of training. This movement puts you through that training at the very beginning, usually over the course of mere days or weeks, and then you deepen your knowledge of what it means and the particular ways in which aspects of existence, including one’s own being, manifest God’s attributes. This was something that really affected me—just seeing people going through this process and knowing that they weren’t making it up, knowing that it was impossible for so many young people to be such good actors. It was very hard for me to come up with an explanation that fits in current frameworks that might argue that somehow, they’re brainwashed into thinking that something is happening and it’s all just culture, or that this is a culturally specific response to neoliberal transformations. I saw people of many different cultural backgrounds and ages going through this process, converts to Islam, people who had not been raised with these ideas, people who had just become aware of the movement and didn’t know what tarbiya was before going through it themselves. Some were born into the movement, but others joined due to certain signs in their life that showed them that this was the path for them.

Like other anthropologists, of course, I don’t take narratives to be literal and direct encodings of “reality,” but narratives do tell us something about people’s experience, and when you see certain features show up many times in stories of people who don’t know each other and some of whom are so new to the tradition, it raises a lot of questions. I saw some people who were not interested in Islam at all, who had dreams that drew them to Medina Baye. One of these young men was a Catholic from Cabo Verde, a predominantly Catholic island off the coast of Senegal. He had a dream soon after coming to Senegal in which he saw Shaykh Ibrahim Niass, who told him that he should be a Muslim and know God. He had no idea who Shaykh Ibrahim was, and after asking around, he was shown a picture that he recognized as the man he had seen in his dream. This dream led him to someone who put him through the tarbiya process, and he eventually became a spiritual guide or muqaddam himself. Such diverse examples point to the fact that solely political, economic, or even psychological explanations are not going to provide a complete understanding of why people are doing this. Typical explanations like neoliberal economic precarity, rapid urbanization, responses to marginalization, and the need for community and meaning as older social structures break down might explain why there are so many especially young people who are ready for such a thing, but it doesn’t explain the specifics of how they got where they are and why it has such a profound meaning to them.

NV: Or it could even include people who leave behind their family, their community, their sense of belonging to experience what might be understood as a rupture, or severing in some ways, something that feels almost counterintuitive to what a human being would sort of “naturally” want to do, which is to stay where they’re rooted, right?

JH: Exactly. For every uprooted urban young person I knew who came to the movement and found much-needed community and meaning, I knew somebody else who had been kicked out of their harmonious home, whose families had been devoted to a different Sufi tradition and who would have been much better off, by the standards of society, just sticking where they were. Marginalized urban youth, doctors, and physics Ph.D.s went through the same process. In many cases, it was impossible to explain people’s particular stories through these kinds of tropes about, you know, “unmoored young people” due to neoliberalism and postcolonialism. 

I also saw that these processes had been going on for a long time. For example, when I was interviewing elders about the history of the movement, when I was in Medina Baye before I shifted to Dakar, some of the elder women told me that they were in a happy marriage in a rural community. This would have been during the 1930s, when the movement was just forming. Then they had dreams telling them to go to a place to know God. When they asked their husband if they could go, their husband said no, but they still snuck out in the middle of the night and just walked along the country paths to the village of Kóosi, where the movement was mostly located in its early years. And they sought to know God there by going through tarbiya. When they would go back to their villages, and people would say, “You’re a bad woman. You left your husband, you went without permission,” they would tell them what they had brought back, which was the knowledge of God. And eventually these women became the people who initiated a spiritual transformation in their village by going back and saying, “I went for a good reason, and it was God who called me.” And so, what was considered to be a minor breach of a Sharia rule was overridden by the fact that it was God who was calling them, and God is greater than their husbands.

It was these kinds of stories that made me think that we really need to take people’s narratives seriously. We must recognize that we are not going to be able to iron out all the details of their stories into a neat and tidy post-colonial, neoliberal political economic framework like so many of the analyses on these topics had tried to do. Indeed, it’s more effectively decolonial to let people’s stories speak for themselves, sometimes contextualizing them in terms of world systems or colonialism but also recognizing that their ways of knowing are irreducible theories we researchers might be tempted to use to explain them.

NV:  Or even the futility of trying to make something scientifically explicable…

JH: Yes! There are people studying the cognitive aspects of mystical experience, asking what is the chemical or neurological process that happens when you have religious experiences. While potentially valuable, this kind of reduction and reductionistic thinking could never explain the multifaceted richness of people’s encounter with these spiritual realities. 

NV: We haven’t quite gotten to how you moved into studying women’s authority after this, but this conversation brings me to another question I had. Obviously, in Wrapping Authority, your 2018 book, you talk about Islam as a numinous, performative tradition. Can you take us through what you mean by that, in relation to how you got to studying this group of people?

JH: Yes, this articulation of Islam as a numinous performative tradition was an explanation I offered for what I was witnessing in the Fayda Tijaniyyah community – an explanation that builds on some earlier approaches to studying Islam, and yet departs from them. I might find different words to articulate it now, but the idea is, once again, taking issue with theories that try to reduce phenomena that are very complex to a particular plane of terminology. 

I was especially contending with trying to read these things against the grain of the school of thought that’s very dominant in Anthropology of Islam nowadays, which stems from a genealogy that goes back to Foucault and then forward through Talal Asad, and people like Saba Mahmood and Charles Hirschkind– a trend that came to be known as the ‘piety turn’. I saw myself as building on their work by saying, yes, we need to look at subjectivity and discourse as understood by Foucault. For example, we need to understand how different kinds of subjects are fashioned through different practices and discourses, but an attempt to depict subjectivity as something resulting exclusively from discursive processes (even discursive processes that are embodied through ethical practice) can overlook important dimensions of people’s religious self-understanding. Not only is it not just a purely linguistic thing but these attempts, when presented as the major explanation for people’s religious practices and experiences, tend to do violence to how people understand themselves and reality. (Amira Mittermaier has made similar points in her discussions of how dreams can’t be adequately explained in terms of discourse and self-cultivation.)

The formulation I use of Islam as a performative and numinous tradition is a variation, of course, on Talal Asad’s description of Islam as a discursive tradition. I do find that Asad’s conceptualization of the field of Islamic studies as relating to a discursive tradition is a very effective way for scholars of Islam to delimit the scope of their field of research. It gets past the problems of defining Islam either, on the one hand, as an essence made up of a set of rules or beliefs or, on the other hand, as everything and nothing, because there are as many definitions of Islam as there are Muslims. Approaching Islam as a discursive tradition allowed academics to point to an object of study without getting into questions of takfir—the question of who counts as a real Muslim—a business that no anthropologist should involve themselves in. 

Asad’s mapping of Islam as a tradition composed of many subtraditions and interpretations that ultimately refer to the Qur’an and the example of the Prophet Muhammad—even if people can’t agree on what those things mean—is a useful starting point. But a problem arises if we take Asad’s delineation of the field of Islamic studies to be an adequate definition of what Islam is for any given Muslim. (I discovered this when I struggled to get Muslim students to understand Asad’s conception while teaching in Egypt.)

This is where what people are experiencing begins to matter a lot and a more ‘emic’ definition would make more sense to people. Even if the terms ‘performative’ and ‘numinous’ are something practitioners of Islam might not use, those terms refer to what one practices daily to get closer to certain goals/desires, and the ‘numinous’ presupposes that these practices are oriented toward something beyond this material reality and discourses. It’s an experience of the beyond. It’s thinking about the beyond. It is that which transcends the material reality of our senses, yet something that is ontologically present for people. For Muslims generally, so much is about the numinous. It’s about the ghayb—what is hidden from the simple sensory experience of the world. It’s about dreams and those physically unseen yet still experienced spiritual realities. The terms I used were to re-enchant the Islamic tradition after so many, as Weber put it, disenchanted conceptualizations of it. Islam must be re-enchanted to be understood. Of course, this doesn’t mean that I expect my reader to accept Muslims’ beliefs as literally true; rather, I insist on having the humility to accept that attempts to understand the spiritual worlds people inhabit fail if we assume that these are actually just ways of talking about something else, whether that’s discourse, neurons, neoliberalism, or whatever. This is especially true when we perceive that, not only is it overbearing and ethnocentric to explain people’s lives away, but we seem to be observing things we simply can’t explain using our discipline’s etic terms.

NV: I was thinking exactly that – that your definition makes room for the mystery again, for something beyond explication but which is known, even intuitively, to the people experiencing it. Obviously, this is part of that journey of taking what people experience and narrate seriously, both men and women. I know you expressed some earlier apprehensions about your positionality in the field but it seems to me to be a natural progression from your research that as you spent more and more time with the community you’d started to notice women playing certain roles that if viewed from a liberal, secular feminist perspective, either wouldn’t appear to be that authoritative or wouldn’t even be visible at all. It sounds like, as you got deeper into it, you started to be able to recognize these matters because you were taking their understanding of reality so seriously. Can you speak a little bit more about your transition into looking at female religious authority and leadership then?

JH: I went into this community as a graduate student thinking I was going to do a general, traditional ethnography of the community, describing their social organization and everyday life. I didn’t necessarily have one aspect of that community I wanted to look at aside from knowing I should take the religious aspects seriously. It was only after having done research in this community for several years that I started to notice some patterns having to do with gender, but I had never had a particular interest in gender.  I knew that some female scholars had told me that when they went to Senegal or other places, they had gone with similar ideas that I had—that they were going to do an ethnography of the community—but they ended up getting shunted into women’s spaces. You know, people would come and say, “I want to talk to the Shaykh” and people would say, “Okay, but how about you go say hi to the Shaykh, and then go into the kitchen and hang out with the women.” 

Obviously, that wasn’t the case for me as people naturally put me in men’s spaces, and it was actually an uphill battle trying to find information about female religious leaders once I started learning about their existence. I wasn’t forbidden from doing so, it’s just that this is a somewhat hidden phenomenon. Many people were reluctant to talk about it a lot, not out of shame of the existence of women leaders, but because there are attitudes that discourage people from bringing a pious woman into the public sphere to become a spectacle – something that is sometimes perceived as denigrating. I had to be very proactive to learn more about pious women. 

I became aware of the existence of women’s leadership during my first week in Medina Baye in 2001 when I asked my research assistant to introduce me to some of the local spiritual guides, and he wrote down names of people he personally knew. One of the names that he wrote down was a woman he happened to know because she was a neighbor of his family. When I saw her name, Dieynaba Guèye, I said, “Oh, that looks like a woman’s name. Are there female spiritual guides?” In the literature, everything I had read had either only talked about men or had said that it was against the rules to have a female spiritual guide or for a woman even to be a formal disciple in the Sufi orders. My research assistant replied “yeah” in a very nonchalant way, as if there were nothing unusual about it, and this led to a whole cascade of questions for me. He only knew of one, but he alluded to the fact that there were certainly others, and he acted as if it wasn’t a big deal that there were female spiritual guides. It seemed never to have occurred to him that a woman couldn’t do that. This piqued my curiosity, and I went to interview her. 

I should also mention that the person who introduced me to this community, as I mentioned, Dr. Ousmane Kane had told me that his mother had been his Qur’an teacher. I asked him if it was common for women to teach the Qur’an—since I had only heard of male Qur’an teachers at that time—and he noted that not many did, but he said unceremoniously that his mother taught many students and was excellent at it. Only later did I realize that Dr. Kane was the maternal grandson of Shaykh Ibrahim Niass, the founder of the Fayḍa Tijāniyya. I eventually learned that his “Qur’an teacher” mother was Shaykh Ibrāhīm’s famous daughter, Shaykha Mariam Niass, perhaps the most famous Qur’anic educator of her time in all of Africa. In Dakar, before going to Medina Baye in 2001, I went to her house and introduced myself as her son’s friend, so she was the first person from the Fayḍa Tijāiniyya that I spoke to in Senegal. I only gradually figured out that she was a major international figure who, in addition to being a world-renowned Qur’an teacher, had advised heads of multiple African and Middle Eastern States. She had become famous throughout Africa and the Middle East during tours where she would have students recite the Qur’an on national television channels. She had been the subject of Al Jazeera documentaries and news reports all over the Muslim world.

NV: What humility! It’s such a common trait with Qur’an teachers that they mention they teach Qur’an, but they leave out that they might have hundreds or even thousands of students!

JH: Yes, many thousands of students memorized the Qur’an at her hands since the 1960s. She was also the one who almost single-handedly introduced the broader public in Senegal to the notion of reciting with tajweed, rather than using Senegalese rules of pronunciation. She had studied with a Mauritanian Arab shaykh who insisted on tajweed, and she taught this to her students, who became famous as people who could recite among the best and emulate Egyptian reciters’ melodic mujawwad style. This did not exist in Senegal prior to her. Not only was she a famous teacher, but she was also this revolutionary figure in the Qur’an scene.  As Shaykh Ibrahim’s daughter too, people came to see her as a bearer of his barakah because she was close to him, but she was also appointed as a spiritual guide and initiated and guided many people on the Sufi path in her own right, even though a few people I spoke to tried to deny that or said I was making it up, incredulous that Shaykh Ibrahim would appoint a woman to act as a spiritual guide. Shaykha Mariam herself, who came to treat me as a son later, described giving many people tarbiyah.

NV: So, obviously you were coming up against these ideals, norms and structures of what people claim they are supposed to be adhering to but then you have all these everyday practices happening underneath.

JH: Yes, and obviously, it would intrigue anyone to wonder about what’s going on below the surface. But all of this happened while I wasn’t explicitly interested in women’s authority. It would just come up in some conversations and it was these encounters that led to my puzzlement and wanting to ask more questions.  I had completed my dissertation research in 2004-2005 and I was talking to other researchers back in the United States about these questions I had, and some of them told me, “Well, why don’t you write a book about these female leaders?” When I then began revisiting my interviews and field notes, I realized how much there was about this. I’d find a note that somebody had mentioned a spiritual guide in this or that village, or that I’d heard women chanting at this dhikr ceremony, even though, officially, it’s supposed to be against the rules. I started putting these things together, and I did publish an article in 2010 that was a sort of seed for what would later become Wrapping Authority. After the article, I went back to Senegal and also had my assistants conduct interviews on the topic in my absence to gather more information from 2009 to the time of publication.

One of the questions I had in this research was, why has nobody ever talked about this? And why is it, when people do infrequently mention it, that they don’t talk about it with a sense of controversy or transgression? Or that people don’t say these women are revolutionaries or feminists? They talk about it in this very nonchalant way. I wondered too if this was a new phenomenon. Did previous scholars not talk about it because it didn’t exist? Or did they not talk about it because they were not interested in talking about it or just overlooked it? Finally, I was also interested in the question of, well, if this is an activity that is strongly coded as masculine in this environment, and people tend to perceive women’s and men’s roles as highly disparate in this community, not necessarily better or worse, but divergent with a strong gendered division of labour, how is it that someone with a female persona can perform the role of a spiritual guide and still be considered the pious, demure, humble woman that she’s supposed to be? 

I also wondered the degree to which liberal ideas figured into people’s self-explanations and goals, and the degree to which the changes that I was witnessing in the religious sphere could be attributed to broader changes in gender roles around the world and ideologies of women’s liberation and equality. These are all questions that motivated me, and the book was an answer to these questions. I wasn’t trying to get into the “hot topic” of gender. I was just really confused about what was going on and wanted to know more.

NV: There’s a lesson in that too for young scholars or grad students to just be open, not to go into their studies too narrowly but really take the time and let things season a bit so they can even begin to touch such conundrums and put ideas together. You can’t get that from just parachuting in and doing one-off interviews alone. You have to be with the community for a longer period of time to start to see certain things, especially if people are speaking about them in a veiled way, for whatever reason.

JH: Yeah, and there’s another lesson here too. We’re often taught to talk to people about the things they like to talk about or just to listen to people because they’ll naturally talk about what is important to them, but it’s not always that simple. People might not know if you’re sympathetic about something, or they might feel that crossing certain lines is inappropriate. People in urban areas were generally happy to talk about women’s authority if I initiated the topic. In rural areas, I often found that women hesitated to speak much and said I should speak to the men, not because they had nothing to say but because of norms of pious humility, and I sometimes had to make efforts to help them understand that I actually was interested in hearing what they had to say about their own experiences. Colleagues have sometimes asked if it was difficult for me to talk to female authorities given that I am a man, and while it’s true I was not integrated into their daily activities like a female scholar might have been, I was still able to be with them and observe a lot about how they interacted with their community. These women were almost never alone, so you’re not in seclusion with them, and besides that, one of the reasons I focused on performance so much was because they treated the interviews as an opportunity to get out certain messages about their community, and they often did this while surrounded by intently listening disciples. Their narratives were framed in a way to contribute to their own moral authority and that of the movement. For this reason, as much as I took their narratives seriously as accounts of events that had happened, I also had to pay attention to the roles these narratives played in constructing women’s authority, something they had practiced many times when speaking to their followers and telling some of the same narratives they told me. In this way, the ethnographic interview was not a completely alien genre to them but something resembling an ordinary communicative event, as Charles Briggs might put it, in which they performed their authoritative selves. These women are used to talking, asking questions, dialoguing, and explaining themselves to their followers, who in many cases included more men than women.

NV: There is never enough time when we talk but this brings me to another question I had about you being a scholar in anthropology but also considering yourself a now-initiated member of this community and being a student of traditional knowledge. Can you talk more about this benefiting you and about the experience of being in both worlds?

JH: This is a vast topic that I think about a lot. One thing I didn’t get into when I talked about researching and writing the book is that, during the long process of writing the book, I became a Muslim, and a few years later I became a Tijani, very shortly before publishing the book. I’d been doing this research for years before shifting my subject position to an insider position. As an anthropologist, you’re never fully an insider, but you can write as a member of the group that you’re talking about, and certain aspects of writing this book benefited from the experience of being an initiated Tijani. It allowed me to describe things differently, especially the tarbiya process, which became something familiar to me, and this changed my relationship to people’s narratives. Especially as somebody who has experienced the kinds of dreams and other religious experiences that people told me about, this took my interest beyond the theoretical.

In the beginning, I wanted to take people’s narratives seriously, whether or not I took them literally for myself as ontological realities. Afterwards, as an initiated member of the community, it did change my whole orientation toward them even if those parts did not necessarily develop much during the writing of the book. It hasn’t been until more recently that I’ve taken significant time and energy to acquire knowledge in the traditional sense, and it’s become a major preoccupation of mine, getting up early in the morning to study Qur’an and various texts, which I discuss with my teachers. On the one hand, as I progress in my own traditional studies, I’ve gained a lot of perspective that I wouldn’t have had otherwise on this tradition and related social relations. There is a sense of being far more deeply embedded in the community that you’re studying, and you have in-depth conversations that you wouldn’t have as an outside observer. On the other hand, seeking traditional knowledge takes a significant amount of your time and mental energy that, while enriching your work and life, might delay the finishing of some of your other projects.

NV: I consider myself a student of traditional knowledge as well and there is a sense of deep trust and openness to life that comes out of following that path which makes your scholarly work appear in a different light. Like, yes, you’re trained professionally in your field and it does matter a lot, especially to your life trajectory obviously – and I can say the same for myself as well as a fellow convert to Islam – but given the precarity of everything these days, traditional knowledge also offers a certain comfort and especially an understanding that no matter where you end up, you’ll be exactly where it was written for you to be, insha Allah. This is something that might not come as naturally to someone in academia which seems to be going at a faster pace with the ‘publish or perish’ and norms of neoliberal productivity very often behind it now. Studying traditional knowledge is at a different pace; it requires more space and more depth, and it has a different trajectory.

JH: That’s a beautiful thing. For quite a while now, I’ve been investing time and energy into reading texts in the Tijani tradition and the broader Sufi tradition, studying Qur’an and other traditional Islamic texts, and I feel that it’s an investment in my knowledge, that even at an academic level, will eventually pay off, because I’ll be in a completely different place to talk about these things than I have been in the past. That approach though, and part of what is so beautiful about our tradition, is that it is like filling a reservoir slowly. It’s going to take a long time and that might spread out your other projects and interests over longer periods, but everything will be better because of it. When you devote your time to mastering traditional knowledge, things get quieter too – you find yourself less interested in some of the debates going on in the scholarship or in some of the wider cultural practices you come from, each of which feels less urgent as a result of your traditional studies. 

My dissertation research and all that deeply immersive time I spent in Mauritania and Senegal was something I found I could hardly articulate to people upon my return to the West. It was such a culture shock coming back, even though I wasn’t yet Muslim, not only because I was less interested in the social aspects of life here in the West (like drinking) but also because the checkbox approach to knowledge of doing a literature review, reading a bunch of theories, writing an outline, and so on, just feels less and less like it has anything to do with what you lived and experienced in those other traditional spaces. Ferrying back from a place devoted to spiritual learning and experience to the academic world was very hard, and it continues to be. I’ve really devoted myself to immersion in certain forms of knowledge and practice and I ask myself, will I write about these matters academically? It seems a little superficial to think I could translate things into that language right away, even though I might eventually.

Another tension beyond that is that being part of the Islamic tradition changes you to the core. Even just studying it, not even being a Muslim, but being deeply immersed in the broader Muslim community and Islamic tradition, can result in centering a large part of oneself outside the geographical centre of Western imperial power, such that you can see it as an entity more clearly. In a much more profound way than I did before, I find myself looking at the dominant institutions in our society and the world with a very different lens from what I might have a few years ago, and I think one of the major tensions that many of us are facing right now is that institutionally, we are part of systems and institutions that, often unbeknownst to them, are the heirs of a long tradition of Western imperial power – one that is completely ignorant of and dependent on the dehumanization of a very large part of humanity. It mobilizes horrific discourses about certain humans as the objects of humanitarian pity or noble/bad savages, and my recent experiences in academia and political activism—above all with our Western institutions’ full support of the genocide in Gaza— have brought that tension out very sharply to me.

For many academics – Muslim and non-Muslim – who have become more aware of the imperial nature of modern Western states and pretty much all the institutions in them, including the universities we work for, it’s become a profoundly difficult time for us to try to figure out how to situate ourselves and even exist in this context. As a scholar of Islam, this has thrown a lot of things in the air for me. How can I continue to be part of a system that supports genocidal colonialism, and can I actually change anything—or at least not be complicit—while working within that system? How do I even continue to think about my research when—even if in many ways it’s extremely important—I wonder: how can we talk about anything other than empire, genocide, and colonialism? Back to the question of traditional knowledge, I was speaking to some colleagues a few days ago about the many problems faced in universities these days, and I commented that, if the situation becomes truly unbearable, what I really want to do is go and spend a few years in a Mauritanian maḥḍara, the kind of traditional desert school where I studied Arabic in 2003. While it may not be a realistic option now—and my colleagues probably thought I was joking—the desire is real. It stems from this sense of crisis from being part of a system that is causing unimaginable suffering in the world and a desire to return to where I can cultivate a deeper knowledge of these spiritual traditions and reflect on what they might bring to living in the current moment. I don’t know of any clear answer, but I believe that if we’re not experiencing a major crisis with how things are right now, there’s something wrong with us.

NV: This is such an important point and a good one for us to end on, to reflect on. I think our traditional studies, because they are so focused on the long-term and on a whole other plane of being, can serve as a sukoon in the turbulence of the times we are living through as academics. But they’re also a reminder that no action in the service of goodness is ever wasted. Your work is critically important precisely because it challenges dehumanizing discourses and gets at the heart of what matters to people within their narratives and their spiritual realities. It helps us to “know one another” and beyond. One hope from those efforts is to confront that which is mobilized in the service of violence and power for a more equitable world. When we do this collectively, even in discomfort, other realities are possible. Thank you so much for your time today and many blessings ahead, insha Allah.