Oludamini Ogunnaike is a scholar of Islamic, African, and Religious Studies, with a focus on the intellectual and artistic dimensions of West African Sufism and Ifa, an indigenous Yoruba religious tradition. He is a graduate of Harvard College and earned his PhD from Harvard University's Department of African and African American Studies. His research examines the postcolonial, colonial, and precolonial Islamic and indigenous religious traditions of West Africa, seeking to understand the philosophical dimensions of these traditions by approaching them and their proponents not merely as sources of ethnographic or historical data, but rather as distinct intellectual traditions and thinkers, even as sources of theory and possible inspirations for methods of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.
He is currently working on a book entitled Sufism and Ifa: Ways of Knowing in Two West African Intellectual Traditions, which examines and compares the epistemologies of two of the most popular West African intellectual traditions: Tijani Sufism and Ifa. Employing theories native to the traditions themselves and contemporary oral and textual sources, the work examines how these traditions answer the questions: What is knowledge? How is it acquired? and How is it verified? Or more simply: “What do you know?,” “How did you come to know it?,” and “How do you know that you know?” After analyzing each tradition separately, and on its own terms, the work compares them to each other and to certain contemporary, Western theories.
Oludamini is also working on an
online database of West African Sufi Poetry and
one of Odu Ifa (the sacred orature of Ifa), as well as conducting research and translations for a second book (tentatively entitled Master of the Word: Amadou Hampate Ba as Scholar, Shaykh, and Griot) on the legacy and importance of seminal Africanist Amadou Hampâté Ba for contemporary African Studies, Islamic Studies, and the Study of Religion. He has also begun preliminary research and translations for a third work on the prominent North African Sufi and student of Ibn 'Arabi, 'Afif al-Din Tilimsani, and another on the works of the influential 18th-century Mauritanian Sufi Shaykh Muhammad al-Yadali, as well as a collection of essays about the insights of Ifa and contemporary babalawo (priests of Ifa) on contemporary issues such as climate change, extremism, wealth inequality, gender and race relations, and the role of the humanities.
Oludamini Ogunnaike's postdoctoral appointment at Stanford is sponsored by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, Stanford Global Studies Division, Department of History, H&S Dean's Office, and Center for African Studies.
