Papers by Andrea Brigaglia
Islamic Africa, 2018
This study analyses five Bamana-language texts composed in the earlier twentieth century by Amado... more This study analyses five Bamana-language texts composed in the earlier twentieth century by Amadou Jomworo Bary, a Fulbe scholar from the Masina (Mali), that were hand copied in 1972 by the Fulbe scholar and researcher Almamy Maliki Yattara. The writing system, which uses modified Arabic characters to note phonemes specific to Bamana, is compared to other West African adaptations of Arabic script. The article also examines the doctrinal positions developed and world view implicit in the texts, which concern water rites in San (Mali), Islamic belief and practice, and healing. Attention is drawn as to how knowledge of local cultural contexts can contribute to a better understanding of these manuscripts.
Religious Studies Review, Jun 1, 2020
Die Welt des Islams, Aug 28, 2018
This paper contains a transliteration in Latin script, an English translation and an analysis of ... more This paper contains a transliteration in Latin script, an English translation and an analysis of Al-Ṣābūn al-Muṭahhir (“The Cleansing Soap”), a poem on tarbiya (spiritual training) and ma‘rifa (gnosis) originally written in the Hausa language using Arabic script by Muḥammad Balarabe (d. 1967) of Shellen, in Adamawa, Nigeria. Balarabe was a Sufi of the Tijāniyya order affiliated to the Jamā‘at al-fayḍa of the Senegalese Ibrāhīm Niasse (d. 1975). In style and content, Balarabe’s poem serves as a corrective to some of the observations on Hausa Sufi poetry made by Mervyn Hiskett in his classic 1975 monograph. Drawing attention to the philosophical background of the poem (a dense web of doctrines that integrates Akbarī Sufism and Aš‘arī theology), the paper also suggests that some of the generalizations made by Hiskett in a 1980 article on the Hausa literature produced by the Jamā‘at al-fayḍa are in need of revision.1
Studi magrebini, Nov 5, 2020
This paper reconstructs, in a parallel way, the continuous oscillations occurred in the interpret... more This paper reconstructs, in a parallel way, the continuous oscillations occurred in the interpretation of the notion of takfīr (excommunication), respectively in Abū Bakr al-Baġdādī’s Islamic State and in its West African province (the latter being in turn an offshoot of the Nigerian group known as “Boko Haram”). The paper combines an analysis of theological discourses as emerging from primary sources, with a sociological reading of the processes of jihadist mobilization. It argues that the continuous oscillations between more and less stringent interpretations of the same theological doctrine, similarly observable in the center and the periphery of the Caliphate, are the result of multiple discursive and strategic imperatives pulling the Ǧihādī-Salafī leadership towards contrasting directions. The “lapsed abode of unbelief” – a notion originally devised by a section of the Caliphate’s scholarly leadership in order to halt the oscillation of the takfīr pendulum – was unable to create an ideological consensus in the global Ǧihādī-Salafī community, showing the degree to which the latter has come to be enmeshed in a complex entanglement between its discursive and strategic needs.
Journal of Sufi studies, Jan 30, 2017
This article presents the translation and analysis of two poems (the first in Arabic, the second ... more This article presents the translation and analysis of two poems (the first in Arabic, the second in Hausa) authored by one of the most famous twentieth-century Islamic scholars and Tijānī Sufis of Kano (Nigeria), Abū Bakr al-ʿAtīq b. Khiḍr (1909-74). As examples of two genres of Sufi poetry that are rather unusual in West Africa (the khamriyya or wine ode and the ghazal or love ode), these poems are important literary and religious documents. From the literary point of view, they are vivid testimonies of the vibrancy of the Sufi qaṣīda tradition in West Africa, and of the capacity of local authors to move across its various genres. From the religious point of view, they show the degree to which the West African Sufis mastered the Sufi tradition, both as a set of spiritual practices and techniques and as a set of linguistic tools to speak of the inner.
Journal of Qur'anic Studies, Oct 1, 2013
An appraisal of two written works of tafsir by twentieth-century West African scholars, the Salaf... more An appraisal of two written works of tafsir by twentieth-century West African scholars, the Salafi-oriented Gumi and the Sufi Niasse. Highlights the importance of the Jalalayn as the shared core of both works, as well as on the opposing agendas of the two in explaining the differences between the two.
Journal of Islamic Studies, 2020
No Abstract
Studi magrebini, Nov 5, 2020
Process models define allowed process execution scenarios. The models are usually depicted as dir... more Process models define allowed process execution scenarios. The models are usually depicted as directed graphs, with gateway nodes regulating the control flow routing logic and with edges specifying the execution order constraints between tasks. While arbitrarily structured control flow patterns in process models complicate model analysis, they also permit creativity and full expressiveness when capturing non-trivial process scenarios. This paper gives a classification of arbitrarily structured process models based on the hierarchical process model decomposition technique. We identify a structural class of models consisting of block structured patterns which, when combined, define complex execution scenarios spanning across the individual patterns. We show that complex behavior can be localized by examining structural relations of loops in hidden unstructured regions of control flow. The correctness of the behavior of process models within these regions can be validated in linear time. These observations allow us to suggest techniques for transforming hidden unstructured regions into block-structured ones.
This paper translates and discusses the texts of three Sunni anti-Shia songs in Hausa, all produc... more This paper translates and discusses the texts of three Sunni anti-Shia songs in Hausa, all produced by religious singers of Kano, Nigeria, from the mid-1990s onwards. Politically, these literary items have to be located in the competitive environment of Kano Islam, and culturally, in a long-standing poetic tradition where invective and satire (Hausa zambo; Ar. hijā’) naturally emerged as the counterpart to the genres of praise and eulogy (Hausa yabo; Ar. madīḥ). Read in chronological order, these three texts display a crescendo that reflects different stages in the development of popular Nigerian Sunni attitudes towards the local Shiite leader El Zakzaky and his movement: disillusionment; theological stereotyping; social stigma
Through a chronological analysis of the videos released in the name of supposed Boko Haram leader... more Through a chronological analysis of the videos released in the name of supposed Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau, the paper argues that the man who has been appearing on all the late 2013 and 2014 videos (and whose picture has been portrayed on the cover pages of most international newspapers and magazines) is an actor posing as Shekau.
This article discusses the genesis of Boko Haram as an offshoot of the Nigerian Salafi movement. ... more This article discusses the genesis of Boko Haram as an offshoot of the Nigerian Salafi movement. In particular, it looks at the ambivalent relationship between Boko Haram’s first leader Muhammad Yusuf and the leaders of the mainstream Salafi group Ahlus Sunna. Using as a starting point Quintan Wiktorowicz’s threefold model of purist (or quietist), politico and jihadi Salafis, the article challenges the conclusion of two recent publications, which tend to see Boko Haram and Ahlus Sunna in terms of, respectively, jihadi and quietist Salafis. While agreeing that the rift between the two Nigerian groups reflects global Salafi debates, the article advances two critical arguments and one hypothesis. The first argument is that in terms of their political theology, the positions of quietist and jihadi Salafis are virtually identical, the differences between the two being contextual and volatile. Of the three categories identified by Wiktorowicz, only the politicos contain the germs of an al...
Die Welt des Islams, 2018
This paper contains a transliteration in Latin script, an English translation and an analysis of ... more This paper contains a transliteration in Latin script, an English translation and an analysis of Al-Ṣābūn al-Muṭahhir (“The Cleansing Soap”), a poem on tarbiya (spiritual training) and ma‘rifa (gnosis) originally written in the Hausa language using Arabic script by Muḥammad Balarabe (d. 1967) of Shellen, in Adamawa, Nigeria. Balarabe was a Sufi of the Tijāniyya order affiliated to the Jamā‘at al-fayḍa of the Senegalese Ibrāhīm Niasse (d. 1975). In style and content, Balarabe’s poem serves as a corrective to some of the observations on Hausa Sufi poetry made by Mervyn Hiskett in his classic 1975 monograph. Drawing attention to the philosophical background of the poem (a dense web of doctrines that integrates Akbarī Sufism and Aš‘arī theology), the paper also suggests that some of the generalizations made by Hiskett in a 1980 article on the Hausa literature produced by the Jamā‘at al-fayḍa are in need of revision.1
Manuscript and Print in the Islamic Tradition
This chapter provides a chronology of the printed editions of the Qur'an published in Nigeria, in... more This chapter provides a chronology of the printed editions of the Qur'an published in Nigeria, in the form of offset lithography, from the 1950s onwards. Reconstructing the history of these publications alongside an anthropological description of Qur'anic reading practices in Nigeria, the chapter raises questions related both to the aesthetics and to the economy of Qur'anic calligraphy. In answering these questions, the chapter stresses how a set of cultural and historical factors shaped the Nigerian Islamic book market to enable an old calligraphic art to thrive in the age of print. The flamboyant aesthetics of the Qur'anic 'printed manuscripts' of twentieth-century Nigeria is, rather than a simple residual legacy of an 'ancient art', the fruit of the encounter of the latter with a modern economy.
This article looks at the lawḥ (wooden tablet) in traditional Quranic education in Africa, throug... more This article looks at the lawḥ (wooden tablet) in traditional Quranic education in Africa, through the lens of the phenomenology of religion. It argues that, the set of pedagogical practices that are sustained with the support of the lawḥ can be understood as a complex ritual of initiation into Islamic notions and beliefs. As in Eliade’s classical phenomenology, this ritual takes the form of a symbolic re-enactment of a primordial myth and acts as the support of a symbolic identification between the initiate and a sacred ancestor. A symbol, at the same time, of the archetypal Quran (al-lawḥ al-maḥfūẓ), of the metaphysical reality of the Prophet (alḥaqīqa al-muḥammadiyya), and of the pupil’s human form, the lawḥ allows for the symbolic identification of the protagonist of the initiation (the pupil) with the protagonist (the Prophet) of Islam’s most primordial myth (the revelation of the Quran).
This article, prompted as a response to a recent contribution penned by Audu Bulama Bukarti, retu... more This article, prompted as a response to a recent contribution penned by Audu Bulama Bukarti, returns to the history of an incident occurred in 2003 between the Nigerian security and a group of militants popularly known as the “Nigerian Taliban” and considered as a precursor to Boko Haram. While the historiography around this incident has been almost saturated by debates around the size of the links between the “Nigerian Taliban” and al-Qaeda, that period of Nigerian history continues to be read in isolation from the broader counter-terrorism strategies conceived at the time by the Nigerian State in the context of what, for us, is a fundamental structural factor, i.e. the then mounting Global War on Terror. Drawing on a different set of data than Bukarti, our contribution will argue that, far from having been a “local” incident, the “Nigerian Taliban crisis” shows clear signs of how, at the time, the Nigerian space was being penetrated by the War on Terror’s strategic logic, discursi...
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Papers by Andrea Brigaglia