Tijaniyya

In the previous article we followed al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀ on his long journey from Halwar through West Africa, through Sokoto under Sultan Muhammad Bello ﵀, through the Sahelian kingdoms of Bornu, Wadai and Darfur, through Egypt and finally to Mecca for the performance of the hajj in the year 1247 of the Hijri calendar, and we saw how in the holy cities he underwent the spiritual experience that prepared the turning point his life would later take at Aïn Madhi. This article follows him on his return journey through northern Egypt and through Cyrenaica and Tripolitania to Aïn Madhi in the southwestern part of present-day Algeria, where in 1832 or 1833 he joined the Tijaniyya tarīqa and where he received from the then khalifa of the order the mantle of the Tijaniyya khilafa for the whole of sub-Saharan Africa.

The character of Aïn Madhi

In 1832 Aïn Madhi was not yet the fully developed pilgrimage town it would become in later decades, but it already possessed the essential form of a tarīqa capital in full working order. The central zawiya was an extensive complex with a central prayer hall that could accommodate roughly a thousand worshippers, with adjoining rooms for the instruction of the murīds, with a courtyard for the communal dhikr gatherings, and with separate quarters for the local khalifa’s family and for high-ranking visitors. Around the zawiya, over the first decades of the nineteenth century, a dense oasis town had developed in which merchants, scholars, craftsmen and farmers lived together in a shared organization under the spiritual leadership of the Tijani khalifa. The town possessed its own palm gardens that supplied it with dates and vegetables, its own water sources that functioned well thanks to centuries of careful maintenance, and its own small market where local produce was traded.

For Umar Tall ﵀, who came from the well-watered Senegal basin of Fouta Toro and who, on his preceding journey through Mecca and Cairo, had already observed every form the Muslim city took in the modern world, Aïn Madhi was a kind of spiritual laboratory in which the shape of a community led by a tarīqa could be observed in its purest operation. During his months there he made extensive observations on how the local khalifa exercised his authority, on how the administrative and spiritual functions were combined in the same person, on how the community combined its economic self-sufficiency with an ascetic way of life, and on how spiritual discipline was maintained in the daily life of every inhabitant. These observations would recognizably return in his later work of state-building in Dinguiraye and in the jihad state of the 1850s and 1860s, and they formed, in effect, the living examples on which his own later state formation would be modelled.

The Tijaniyya in its spiritual character

The Tijaniyya, founded by Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Tijani ﵀ in the late eighteenth century, was by 1832 already one of the most widespread Sufi brotherhoods in the western part of the Muslim world, with an extensive network of zawiyas in Morocco, in Algeria, in Tunisia, in Tripolitania and, in gradually expanding form, in the Sahelian interior as well. Ahmad al-Tijani ﵀ himself had died in Fez in 1815, and the leadership of the order had passed after his death to his son Muhammad al-Habib al-Tijani ﵀, who in 1832 governed the tarīqa from Aïn Madhi and who held general spiritual authority over the Tijaniyya in its entire extent.

The spiritual teaching of the Tijaniyya, in the form in which it was transmitted to its students in 1832, distinguished itself in several respects from the older Qadiri and Shadhili traditions that had until then been the most widespread Sufi currents in West Africa. First, it taught that affiliation with the Tijaniyya conferred a definitive spiritual status in which the murīd stood in direct spiritual contact with the Prophet ﷺ through the wasilah of Ahmad al-Tijani ﵀, a doctrine that in practice gave the Tijani murīd great inner certainty but that also drew criticism from other Sufi traditions, which regarded it as too exceptional a claim. Second, it made strict demands of its students, including the prohibition against adhering to a second tarīqa alongside the Tijaniyya, a requirement that bound the Tijaniyya into a close-knit community but that also placed it in a certain isolation in its relations with the wider Sufi world. Third, its wird carried a specific set of dhikr formulas, including the Wazifa and the Hailala, which in their rhythmic and communal performance evoked a spiritual experience that its students perceived as unique.

The geographical spread in 1832

In 1832 the Tijaniyya stretched from Morocco in the west to the Egyptian Nile valley in the east, with its central zawiya in Aïn Madhi and with secondary centres in Fez, in Tunis, in Tlemcen, in Tripoli and in Cairo. In the Sahelian interior it had begun to penetrate in the 1820s and 1830s through Mauritanian scholars who had been initiated in Aïn Madhi and who spread the order through their own zawiyas in Mauritania, but in West Africa south of the Sahara it was in 1832 still largely unknown, and it did not yet stand in any direct connection with the Tooroodo scholars of Fouta Toro or with the Sokoto court circle, where the Qadiriyya in the version of Shaykh Usman dan Fodio ﵀ was the prevailing form.

It was this geographical limitation that would become a central task for Umar Tall ﵀ upon his affiliation with the Tijaniyya, for he understood from the moment of his initiation that on his return to West Africa he would have to spread the Tijaniyya in a region where it had until then possessed no serious presence, and that this expansion would inevitably come to stand in relation to the established Qadiri presence he had already observed in Sokoto and in Fouta Toro.

The arrival in Aïn Madhi

In the late spring or early summer of 1832, Umar Tall ﵀ and his company reached Aïn Madhi, an oasis town in the southwestern part of present-day Algeria on the vast plain between the Atlas mountains to the north and the Sahara to the south. The town was in those years under the direct rule of the Tijaniyya court community that had settled around the central zawiya, and in its spiritual character it was a kind of scholarly city-state in which administrative and spiritual authority were represented in a single, undivided office in the person of Muhammad al-Habib al-Tijani ﵀.

Umar Tall ﵀ was received in the zawiya by the local representatives of the tarīqa, and during the first weeks he stayed in guest quarters where he prepared himself for initiation by taking part in the ordinary dhikr gatherings of the zawiya and through personal conversations with scholars learned in the doctrine of the tarīqa. It was not the custom of the Tijaniyya to initiate a new murīd into its deepest mysteries at once, but rather to guide him along a gradual path in which his previous spiritual formation was examined and his spiritual fitness for the specific discipline of the tarīqa was established before the definitive initiation was granted.

The meeting with Muhammad al-Habib al-Tijani ﵀

After several weeks of preparation, Umar Tall ﵀ was received in a personal audience by Muhammad al-Habib al-Tijani ﵀, and in this meeting there took place, as the accounts of his close associates relate, a spiritual recognition in which the khalifa of the tarīqa saw in the Tooroodo scholar the man who could establish the Tijaniyya in its full form in West Africa, and in which Umar Tall ﵀ recognized in the khalifa of the tarīqa the spiritual guidance under which his own later work could be carried out on a solid foundation. In this meeting Muhammad al-Habib al-Tijani ﵀ questioned him at length about his spiritual history, about his Qadiri affiliation in his younger years, about the nature of the spiritual experience he had undergone in Mecca, and about the intentions with which he had come to Aïn Madhi.

Umar Tall ﵀ answered, as the tradition relates, with the openness characteristic of him, and he spoke of his West African education, of his Qadiri initiation, and of his gradually growing awareness that the Qadiri tarīqa could not give him the spiritual discipline he would need for his own future work. He told of his experiences in Mecca, of his meetings with Sheikh Muhammad al-Ghali al-Tijani ﵀, and of the conviction that had gradually ripened in him that the Tijaniyya was the tarīqa within which his own later work could be conducted. He spoke, finally, of his intention to build the tarīqa into a sustaining spiritual force in West Africa, and he asked the khalifa for the initiation by which this task could be entrusted to him.

The initiation and the bayʿa

Muhammad al-Habib al-Tijani ﵀ accepted Umar Tall’s ﵀ request, and in a ceremony in the central zawiya of Aïn Madhi the formal initiation took place. Umar Tall ﵀ made the bayʿa by which he bound himself to the tarīqa, received from the khalifa the Wazifa and the Hailala in their full form, and was given the instructions for the daily performance of the dhikr according to Tijani practice. The initiation was sealed by the scholars of the zawiya who were present in a communal dhikr gathering, and Umar Tall ﵀ was formally received into his new status as a murīd of the Tijaniyya.

What gave his initiation its exceptional character, however, was not the ordinary bayʿa that every new Tijani murīd undergoes, but the special position that Muhammad al-Habib al-Tijani ﵀ conferred on him at that same moment. The khalifa, as the tradition relates and as Umar Tall’s ﵀ own later works confirm, granted him in an additional ceremony the ijaza for establishing the tarīqa throughout sub-Saharan Africa, and he appointed him khalifa of the Tijaniyya for the Sudanese interior in the broad sense in which “the Sudan” in Arabic geographical usage denoted the entire Sahelian belt from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. It was, in other words, no ordinary student status but a grant of direct spiritual authority over a territory that in its extent encompassed the whole of the West African Muslim world.

The political moment in Aïn Madhi

In 1832 Aïn Madhi was not merely a spiritual oasis but also a politically precarious location. In those years it stood under pressure from the French colonial expansion, which had entered a new phase with the capture of Algiers in 1830, and from the Algerian Muslim resistance movement under Abd al-Qadir al-Jazaʾiri ﵀, which in those years was taking its first shape in western Algeria. The spiritual leadership of the Tijaniyya in Aïn Madhi, by the deliberate choice of Muhammad al-Habib al-Tijani ﵀, kept a measured distance from the direct political conflicts, and it refused to draw its community into armed confrontation with the French troops or into a direct alliance with Abd al-Qadir’s ﵀ movement. This choice, although some of its contemporaries interpreted it as a lack of fighting spirit, was in reality a considered strategic decision in which the tarīqa wished to preserve its spiritual work for a broader and longer perspective than the immediate Algerian struggle could offer.

For Umar Tall ﵀, whose West African background had led him to favour the combination of spiritual and military leadership in a single form, this Aïn Madhi position was initially surprising, and he held several conversations with Muhammad al-Habib al-Tijani ﵀ about the grounds for this choice. The khalifa explained to him that in his West African context circumstances could lie differently than in the Algerian context, and that in West Africa he could, on his own judgement, choose armed action if circumstances required it, without this constituting a break with the Aïn Madhi tradition. These conversations, in their political consequence, formed for Umar Tall ﵀ the spiritual justification on which he would later be able to fall back in his jihad at Dinguiraye, and they gave him the certainty that any armed action on his part would not be regarded as illegitimate by the central Tijani authority.

The spiritual implications of the ijaza

The ijaza that Umar Tall ﵀ received in Aïn Madhi was, in its spiritual consequence for his later life, of a depth that would scarcely be equalled in the West African Muslim world. It conferred on him the authority to perform Tijani initiations throughout sub-Saharan Africa, to appoint khalifas himself for distinct regions, to render authoritative judgement in matters of the tarīqa, and to shape the general spiritual form of the tarīqa in the West African context. It placed him, in effect, on an equal footing with the direct khalifas of Aïn Madhi within his own region, and on his return to West Africa it made him the spiritual authority of a tarīqa that would unfold a new authority throughout the entire Sahelian Muslim world.

For his personal spiritual development this meant that on his return to West Africa he could not go on living as a Tooroodo village scholar from Halwar, for his ijaza status made such a retreat impossible. He was now, regardless of his personal preferences, a spiritual leader of an international tarīqa, and his life’s work would henceforth have to be carried out in a manner worthy of that status. He accepted this responsibility, as echoes in his later works suggest, with the same sober-mindedness with which in his younger years he had accepted the Tooroodo discipline of his father, and he immediately began turning over inwardly the strategic considerations that would concern the implementation of the ijaza in West Africa.

The relationship with Sokoto

In his letters to Sultan Muhammad Bello ﵀ in Sokoto, which he undertook during his months at Aïn Madhi and on his subsequent return journey, Umar Tall ﵀ spoke of his Tijani initiation in a manner that acknowledged the spiritual authority of Sokoto in its Qadiri form but that at the same time made his own new Tijani position clear. Muhammad Bello ﵀, who himself stood in the Qadiriyya of Shaykh Usman dan Fodio ﵀, answered in a spirit of understanding whose further deepening was unfortunately made impossible by his early death in 1837, but which is still preserved in the Sokoto archives as testimony to a balanced spiritual exchange between two West African scholars. For the further relationship between Umar Tall’s ﵀ Tooroodo Tijaniyya and the Sokoto Qadiriyya, the death of Muhammad Bello ﵀ would usher in a certain delicate phase, but the marriage bond through Maryam would maintain the personal ties of mutual respect across the spiritual differences.

The stay in Aïn Madhi

Umar Tall ﵀ stayed in Aïn Madhi for about a year, from the spring of 1832 to the late spring of 1833, in a sojourn that was of great importance to his personal formation. During this period he studied the more advanced texts of the Tijani tradition in the central zawiya, he received extensive instruction from Muhammad al-Habib al-Tijani ﵀ in the spiritual discipline of the tarīqa, and he held wide-ranging conversations with the other Tijani khalifas who were present in Aïn Madhi during those months or who stayed there for a time while passing through. In those months he also met a number of Mauritanian scholars who had been initiated in Aïn Madhi and who were active as direct representatives of the tarīqa in the trans-Saharan region, and he joined with them in a network of spiritual brotherhood that would give him, on his later return to West Africa, a direct connection to the Mauritanian Tijani presence.

In his notes from this period, insofar as they have been preserved in copies made by his close associates, a considerable expansion can be observed in his spiritual vocabulary and in his capacity to absorb the finer distinctions of Tijani doctrine into his own thinking. In those months he also wrote the first sketches of what in his later years would grow into his great work Kitab Rimah Hizb al-Rahim ʿala Nuhur Hizb al-Rajim, an Arabic work of several hundred pages in which he would systematize Tijani doctrine in its West African application and which, over the following century and a half, would be regarded as the most important theological work of the West African Tijaniyya.

The spiritual form of the Tijani discipline

The daily discipline of the Tijani murīd, as Umar Tall ﵀ received it in Aïn Madhi and as he would later transmit it in his teaching to his own West African students, comprised a fixed series of spiritual exercises performed at set moments throughout the day. Before the morning prayer the so-called lazimu was performed, a dhikr recitation of one hundred repetitions of the istighfar (the plea for forgiveness), one hundred repetitions of the salat ʿala al-nabi (blessings upon the Prophet ﷺ), and one hundred repetitions of the Hailala (the utterance of the tawhid formula). Between the midday prayer and the afternoon prayer the so-called Wazifa was performed, a more elaborate dhikr formula that in its full form took about half an hour. And in the communal gatherings on Friday, the so-called hadra, a collective dhikr was performed under the leadership of the local muqaddam, in which the whole community affirmed its spiritual identity in rhythmic communion.

For Umar Tall ﵀ personally, these exercises were, according to his own later statements, the spiritual framework by which, in his West African jihad years, he would be able to maintain the discipline of prayer in his daily life despite the conditions of war in which he would often operate. He performed the Tijani discipline under all circumstances, in peacetime as in wartime, in village mosques as in military camps, and he made the Tijani practice a fixed pillar of his personal spiritual life that would know no interruption over the following three decades.

The return journey begins

In the spring of 1833, Umar Tall ﵀ took leave of Muhammad al-Habib al-Tijani ﵀ and of the spiritual community of Aïn Madhi, and he began the long return journey to West Africa a changed man from the one who had set out from Halwar in 1828. He was now al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀, bearer of the Tijani khilafa for sub-Saharan Africa, and he faced a task that in its spiritual and political scope was the greatest to which a West African scholar of his generation could devote himself. His return journey led through Morocco, where in Fez he visited the Tijani zawiya of Sidi Hammad-Tijani and where he stayed in the city for some time in scholarly conversations with the Moroccan Tijani khalifas, and then southward through the Sahara to Mauritania and finally to West Africa.

Along the way, in every town or village where he stayed, he gradually put his new responsibility into practice by granting Tijani initiations to scholars and to murīds who approached him out of interest in the tarīqa. In his passage through trans-Saharan towns and villages he left behind small circles of Tijani adherents, and on his return he gradually built up a network that in the following decades would form the bed in which the Tijaniyya in West Africa would grow to its greatest expansion. It was, in other words, no passive return journey but an active execution of the mandate he had received in Aïn Madhi, and it gave each stage of his return a spiritual effect of its own that did not pass unnoticed in the local communities.

The growing circle in Morocco

In the Tijani zawiya of Fez, where Ahmad al-Tijani ﵀ himself had lived in his final years and where his grave was maintained in simple form, Umar Tall ﵀ stayed for several weeks, paying extended visits to the Moroccan Tijani khalifas who carried on the ordinary spiritual work of the tarīqa in that city. In Fez he also met scholars from the Qarawiyyin mosque, the ancient university founded by Fatima al-Fihri ﵀ in 859 and still recognized in the ninth century after the Hijra as one of the most important centres of learning for Maliki fiqh in the western Muslim world. In the Qarawiyyin library he consulted a number of manuscripts that he had heard mentioned during his West African education but that he could now hold in his own hands for the first time, and he made notes that would return in his later works.

In Fez he also completed his definitive plan for the spread of the Tijaniyya in West Africa, and in a number of letters that he sent ahead to his earlier contacts in West Africa he set out the essential content of what, on his return, he would put before his former fellow students and the Tooroodo scholars of Fouta Toro. The letters, insofar as they have been preserved in copies, show a man who, without disowning his earlier Qadiri affiliation, presents himself in a new form, but who also makes no concessions on what he regards as the higher spiritual station of the Tijaniyya, and who prepares his former companions for a choice they will have to make in their own conscience before Allah ﷻ.

The passage through Mauritania

In the Mauritanian region, which he crossed in the summer of 1834 or the late autumn of 1833, Umar Tall ﵀ met in a number of Mauritanian zawiyas the local Tijani scholars who in the preceding years had carried the Qadiri tradition under the leadership of Sidi al-Mukhtar al-Kunti ﵀ and his successors, but who were increasingly confronted with Tijaniyya elements as well. He stayed for some time in Trarza in southwestern Mauritania, and in Brakna further east, where he held scholarly conversations about the proper relationship between Qadiri and Tijani in the Mauritanian context. These conversations foreshadowed in their character the tensions that in the following decades would flare up in pronounced form between Qadiri and Tijani in West Africa, and Umar Tall ﵀ presented his own position with the combination of spiritual resolve and personal kindness that characterized his handling of spiritual disagreements.

He refused, in his dealings with the Qadiri scholars, to combat them in a polemical manner, and he repeatedly stressed that he acknowledged and respected the Qadiriyya in its own place, but at the same time he held fast to his conviction that the Tijaniyya, in its own spiritual character, offered a closer and more direct contact with the Prophet ﷺ than the Qadiri tradition could offer, and that a murīd who had been granted this higher station could not return to an earlier stage without spiritual loss. It was an attitude that met with understanding and respect in Mauritanian scholarly circles, and it enabled Umar Tall ﵀, on his return, to build up an extensive network of Mauritanian contacts that would serve him well in his later years.

Saint-Louis and the French trading posts

The return journey also brought Umar Tall ﵀ in a number of instances past the French trading posts of Saint-Louis at the mouth of the Senegal River, whether in direct transit or through visits from Mauritanian traders who were in contact with him. The French presence at these posts was in 1835 still limited to a commercial function and had not yet grown into the outright exercise of colonial power that would take its definitive shape in the 1850s under Louis Faidherbe, but in his observations of Saint-Louis Umar Tall ﵀ could already discern the contours of what in the following decades would grow into a grave challenge for the West African Muslim world. In a number of instances he met French trading agents who addressed a few words to him in French or in broken Arabic in the halls of the local trading house, and he understood from these contacts that the world to which he would return in his West Africa was undergoing a far-reaching geopolitical transformation.

He spoke of these experiences in his letters to his former fellow students in West Africa, and he warned them of what he regarded as an impending European colonial expansion in West Africa whose spiritual and political consequences for the Muslim communities of the region would be of a gravity never known before. It was, in his reading, no longer sufficient to go on living in the ordinary Tooroodo manner, for the challenges of his generation would require a political answer that had to combine the spiritual strength of the Tijaniyya with the political and military strength of a jihad state governed by the Shariʿa.

To Fouta Toro and beyond

Toward the end of 1834 or in the early spring of 1835, after an absence of nearly seven years, Umar Tall ﵀ approached his native Fouta Toro, and his return had by then been prepared in the wider West African Muslim world with a considerable spiritual stature attached to it. His father Saidu Tall, if he was still alive at that time, had received reports of his son’s progress through travelling merchants, and the Tooroodo scholars of Fouta Toro stood ready to receive the returning hajj veteran into their midst. But the man who returned was no longer a Tooroodo village scholar from Halwar, and the effect his return would have on Fouta Toro and on the wider West African Muslim world was of a magnitude that his father and his fellow villagers had not suspected at his departure in 1828.

To this return and to the years that followed from it, and in particular to his stay in the Sokoto region and to the gradual development of his political blueprint for a West African jihad state, the next article devotes its attention. In this article we have seen how at Aïn Madhi the spiritual turning point of his life was sealed by his affiliation with the Tijaniyya and by the extraordinary grant of the ijaza for the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, and how this turning point, in its consequences, would absorb his earlier existence as a Tooroodo village scholar into an entirely new form.

Sources

• Jamil M. Abun-Nasr, The Tijaniyya: A Sufi Order in the Modern World, Oxford University Press (1965), pp. 62–98.
• David Robinson, The Holy War of Umar Tal, Clarendon Press (1985), pp. 128–168.
• John Ralph Willis, In the Path of Allah: The Passion of Al-Hajj 'Umar, Frank Cass (1989), pp. 124–168.
• Knut S. Vikør, Sufi and Scholar on the Desert Edge: Muhammad b. Ali al-Sanusi and his Brotherhood, Hurst (1995), pp. 56–88 [for the broader context of the Sufi brotherhoods in the Maghreb in these years].
• B.G. Martin, Muslim Brotherhoods in Nineteenth-Century Africa, Cambridge University Press (1976), pp. 98–136.
• Madina Ly-Tall, Un Islam militant en Afrique de l’Ouest au XIXe siècle, L’Harmattan (1991), pp. 168–212.
• John Hunwick, Arabic Literature of Africa, Vol. 4, Brill (2003), pp. 246–286.
• al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀, Kitab Rimah Hizb al-Rahim ʿala Nuhur Hizb al-Rajim, Arabic original circa 1845; French translation Gallica BnF (1856); critical edition by Madina Ly-Tall, Dakar (1985), pp. 1–48 [for the initiation theology and the Tijani apologia].