Authority in Islam as either textual and restricted, or as spiritual and extended

29 Dakhīl Allāh is referred to as “al-Dakhīl” which means “the intruder”. Playing with names is a way of ridiculing the opponent that is practiced in the art of refutation.

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Authority, as defined by Max Weber, is the ability to make others follow and obey one’s rules or rulings without any usage of coercive power. This factor distinguishes authority (Autorität) from power, or might (Macht).³⁰ However, it is not easy to distinguish religious authority from power, as it is not easy to clearly define; it assumes a number of forms and functions. It is the ability, power and right to define true belief and practice, and to differentiate these from the false and corrupted kind, such as deviance and heresy, in a way which will eventually shape and form the views and conduct of others. As Weber puts it, authority is connected to legitimacy and trust. Thus, religious authority rests on certain qualities and may be ascribed to individuals, groups and institutions; what makes religious authority effective is the trust and readiness of others to credit that person, group or institution with it.³¹

In the case of the proponents of the Tijāniyya, the goal of whose polemical writings is to reassure their own constituency as observed by Seesemann,³² the main source and basis of authority is Aḥmad al-Tijānī, the founding figure of the brotherhood himself. The authority conferred on him by the brotherhood is the spiritual authority of a Sufi saint, along with the doctrinal scholarly authority of a shaykh as well.³³ Defending the legitimacy of the doctrines he established is thus regarded as a religious duty, and it is for this reason that proponents of the Tijāniyya often tend to portray themselves in terms of being the “tongue” or “pen” of the supreme master of the brotherhood. They will even try to attribute their own knowledge to the supreme master, calling it a “drop from his [Aḥmad al-Tijānī’s] ocean”.³⁴ If they succeed to convince the Tijānī milieu of

30 For Max Weber’s definition of authority and more, see: Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Tübingen, 1922.

31 Gudrun Krämer and Sabine Schmidtke, “Introduction: Religious Authority and Religious Authorities in Muslim Societies: A Critical Overview”, in Speaking for Islam: Religious Authorities in Muslim Societies, Gudrun Krämer and Sabine Schmidkte (eds.), Leiden: Brill, 2006, pp. 1-14, (pp. 1-2).

32 Rüdiger Seesemann, “Three Ibrāhīms: Literary Production and the Remaking of the Tijāniyya Sufi Order in Twentieth-Century Sudanic Africa”, Die Welt des Islams 49, 2009, p. 309.

33 In his work on Moroccan Sufism, Vincent J. Cornell highlights eight forms of religious authority, as embodied by eight ideal types of saints. These are the ethical authority of the ṣāliḥ, the exemplary authority of the qudwa, the juridical authority of the watad, the social authority of the murābiṭ, the doctrinal authority of the shaykh, the

generative authority of the ghawth, the religio-political authority of the imām and the inclusive authority of the quṭb.

For details, see: Vincent J. Cornell, Realm of the Saint: Power and Authority in Moroccan Sufism, Austin:

University of Texas Press, 1998, pp. 272-285. The supreme master of the Tijāniyya conforms to at least half of these patterns of authority.

34 Muḥammad al-Ḥāfiẓ depicts his endeavour of responding to opponents as a form of service to the supreme master of the Tijāniyya. He himself (al-Ḥāfiẓ) is nothing more than a “tongue among his several tongues, a pen among his several pens and a drop from his ocean” (mā ana fī dhālika illā lisān min alsinatihi qalam min aqlāmihi.. wa-qaṭra min baḥrihi). See: Muḥammad al-Ḥāfiẓ, Radd akādhīb al-muftarīn ʿalā ahl al-yaqīn, ed. Aḥmad b.

Muḥammad al-Ḥāfiẓ, n.p. [Cairo] 1369/1950, p. 4.

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their claims, the consequences translate into a visible enhancement of their status and acceptance in Tijānī circles. By contrast, any shortcomings in their mission to do so could bear drastic consequences, leading to the diminution of their authority, or even their total rejection by fellow Tijānīs. (A case in point is the challenge issued by the Sudanese Ibrāhīm Sīdī, in the face of the transnational authority of Ibrāhīm Niyas of Senegal and Muḥammad al-Ḥāfiẓ of Egypt; he accused both of taking too soft of a stance vis-à-vis the opponents when they should have striven to defend the brotherhood and its teachings with every means available).³⁵ Proponents of the Tijāniyya who take it upon themselves to defend it against the onslaught of outsiders are well aware of all of these facts. They thus work to consolidate the authority of the supreme master in their literary productions, which in turn leads to the establishment of their own authority. Indeed, for Tijānis, along with the scriptural ability to quote from the foundational texts of the religion, references to the founding figure of the Tijāniyya serve as the cornerstone for the formation of their own authority. And, as Jamil Abun-Nasr has aptly observed, “Aḥmad al-Tijānī was to his followers what he claimed to be”.³⁶

Where the conflict between Tijānīs and their opponents involves Salafīs, it is basically a struggle between two different sorts of authority. Both parties are battling to “speak for Islam”, drawing on their own religious knowledge, on the basis of different sources of authority. Salafīs underline the importance of discursive and textual knowledge extracted from the foundational scriptures of Islam, the holy divine speech of the Qurʾān and the Sunna of the Prophet.³⁷ Indeed, for them, the only source of religious authority is that which God has revealed in his book, and which his messenger has illustrated by his perfect example. Other, human sources of authority are fallible, and therefore devoid of probative value.³⁸

35 For details of the accusations directed at Ibrahim Niyas and Muḥammad al-Ḥāfiẓ, see: Ibrāhīm Sīdī, al-Irshādāt al-aḥmadiyya fī shamm rā’iḥat al-khatmiyya wa-l-katmiyya (completed in late October 1995 and printed together with al-Anfās al-rahmāniyya fī rashḥ fuyūḍ al-ṭarīqa al-Tijāniyya), n.p. [Khartoum], 1995. A detailed account of the issue is given in the following chapters.

36 Jamil Abun-Nasr, The Tijaniyya: a Sufi Order in the Modern World, p. 182.

37 Gudrun Krämer and Sabine Schmidkte, “Introduction: Religious Authority and Religious Authorities in Muslim Societies. A Critical Overview”, in: Speaking for Islam: Religious Authorities in Muslim Societies, Gudrun Krämer and Sabine Schmidkte (eds.), Leiden: Brill, 2006, pp. 2-14 (p. 9).

38 This argument was developed at least as early as third and fourth centuries after the Prophet. For the appearance of this method of argumentation in the discourse of Dawūd b. ʿAlī al-Isfahānī (d. 270/884) and Ibn Ḥazm (d.

456/1064), see: Camilla Adang, “‘This Day I Have Perfected Your Religion for You’: A Ẓāhirī Conception of Religious Authority”, in: Krämer, Gudrun and Schmidkte, Sabine (eds.), Speaking for Islam: Regligious Authories in Muslim Societies, Leiden: Brill, 2006, pp. 15-48.

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The protagonists of Tijānī Sufism, however, also draw on God-given knowledge that they perceive to be embedded in the spiritual experiences of the supreme master of the brotherhood, and derived from his daylight communications with the Prophet. The perception, in later Sufism, of the Sufi master as a legitimate source of religious authority is a well-known phenomenon,³⁹ which finds its acme in the discourse of the eighteenth century Moroccan Sufi author al-Lamaṭī (d. 1156/1743), who claimed that if the schools of jurisprudence were to disappear, the illuminated mystic (al-maftūḥ ʿalayhi) with direct access to the Prophet would be able to restore the whole of the sharīʿa.⁴⁰ This is sufficient evidence of the fact that the “Sufi saint becomes a new source of authority in his own right”, as one researcher has put it.⁴¹ The master’s role in his local community and immediate environment is held to resemble the role of the Prophet among his global community, known as the umma. It should again be emphasized that Sufis, including Tijānīs, do perceive the Qurʾān and the Sunna as the two supreme sources of religious authority—but not necessarily the only ones.⁴² This is exactly the point that distinguishes them from Salafīs, for whom religious authority is confined to these two foundational scriptures of the religion alone, access to which is obtained through “discursive engagement”, to use Qasim Zaman’s formulation.⁴³ Thus, the altercation between the two sides may be seen to be a battle between “textual and spiritual authority”, to borrow from Gudrun Krämer and Sabine Schmidkte.⁴⁴ Here it should also be noted that proponents of the Tijāniyya display different levels of reverence towards the spiritual authority of their

39 For an account of the issue, see: Simon Digby, “The Sufi Shaikh as a Source of the Authority in Medieval India”, in Islam et société en Asie du Sud, Marc Gaborieau (ed.), Paris, 1986, pp. 57-77.

40 “Wa-law taʿaṭṭalat madhāhib bi-asrihā la-qara ʿalā iḥyā sharīʿa” he argues. See: Aḥmad b. Mubārak al-Lamaṭī, al-Ibrīz min kalām sayyidī ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Dabbāgh, Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1423/2002, p.

356.This statement is quoted by the influential nineteenth-century Tijānī spiritual master and military commander in West Africa Al-Ḥājj ‘Umar (d. 1864). See: ʿUmar Fūtī b. Saʿid Fūtī, Rimāḥ ḥizb Raḥīm ʿalā nuḥūr ḥizb al-rajīm, vol. I, Beirut: Dār al-Fikr, 1383/1963, p. 88. See also: Bernd Radtke, “Ijtihād and Neo-Sufism”, 48, 3, 1994, pp. 909-921, (p. 920); Bernd Radtke, John O’Kane, Knut S. Vikor and R.S.O’Fahey, The Exoteric Aḥmad Ibn Idrīs:

A Sufi’s Critique of the Madhāhib & the Wahhābīs, Leiden: Brill, 2000, p. 18.

41 Devin DeWeese, “Authority”, in: Jamal J. Elias (ed.), Key Themes for the Study of Islam, Oxford: Oneworld, 2010, pp. 26-52, (p. 49).

42 Along with the authoritative scriptures of the religion, Sufism recognizes other sources of authority: “In addition to the claim to contact with and access to the living reality of the Prophet, Sufism also claims contact with a rich spiritual world that is imagined in neatly classified and hierarchical terms...as a source of immediate and undeniable religious authority”. See: Devin DeWeese, “Authority”, p. 48.

43 He makes this pronouncement in relation to the distinctiveness of the ʿulamāʾs’ mode of argumentation, “a style whose distinctiveness and authority rests on its discursive engagement with the history of earlier scholarly debates”.

See: Muhammad Qasim Zaman, “Consensus and Religious Authority in Modern Islam: The Discourses of the ʿUlamāʾ”, in: Gudrun Krämer and Sabine Schmidkte (eds.), Speaking for Islam: Religious Authorities in Muslim Societies, Leiden: Brill, 2006, pp. 153-180, (see p. 155).

44 Gudrun Krämer and Sabine Schmidkte, “Introduction: Religious Authority and Religious Authorities in Muslim Societies. A Critical Overview”, p. 10.

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supreme master in their polemical literature. While, for example, the Mauritanian Aḥmad b. al-Hādī highlights the unique nature of his master’s authority as a legitimate source of evidence for his teachings, the Egyptian Muḥammad al-Hāfiẓ often soft-pedals in this regard and prefers to base his arguments on discursive authority, with only implicit references to the probative value of the spiritual authority of the founder of the brotherhood.⁴⁵

Another equally crucial point to consider relates to the patterns by which authority may be acquired. In both cases, this depends not only on one’s ability to deal with acquired discursive knowledge, but also, and probably most importantly, on one’s personal reputation and perceived degree of faithfulness to the tradition to which one belongs. Thus, here authority is something that is exercised with reference to discursive learning, and acknowledged by its subjects with reference to the level of the exerciser’s connectedness to a given tradition of the one exercising it.⁴⁶ Both Tijānī shaykhs and their Salafī counterparts are aware of this fact. As before, each of their polemical literatures is a display of their acquired discursive knowledge and, as such, coloured by their own respective traditions in each case. For Tijānīs, it is unimaginable that they would undermine either the statements of the brotherhood’s founder and supreme master or any of its authoritative sources on the basis of their own acquired religious learning; far from it, they are required, on the contrary, to defend the doctrines of their order at any cost. Thus, even if the teachings promoted by the Tijānī master were found to be at odds with divine instructions or the practice of the Prophet, it would be their ineluctable religious duty to find a means of reconciliation that would distract criticism on the one hand and enhance their personal reputation among their fellow Tijānīs on the other. The underestimation of the spiritual authority of the supreme master or one of his deputies would cause a serious decline or even the total extinction of their authority within the brotherhood.