The Islamic Wisdom of Healing and Protecting in Mauritania

My dissertation, To Invoke the Invisible: Muslim Healing, Magic, and Amulets in the Twentieth-Century History of the Southern Sahara, examines how economic and social changes during the colonial and postcolonial periods in Mauritania affected the social history of l-hjab, or a potent secret Islamic wisdom of healing and protecting, and its experts in the twentieth-century.  My project follows how these experts have provided safe sites for individuals in the region to articulate their anxieties and vent their frustrations, enter into agreements with local political powers, and protect positions of authority and power.  Attending to the intellectual history of local religious knowledge in focusing on the various ways Muslim scholars coped with tensions related to l-hjab, this research identifies the long history of the trans-Saharan slave trade, as well as notions of racial genealogy and Islamic doctrine, as producing nodes of ritually powerful activity.  On the other hand, French administrators tended to gloss over or remain ignorant of events related to harmful magic or spirit mediation.  Relying on the sparse and, more accurately, absent colonial documentation on events and figures related to this protective esoteric knowledge, this research also traces French colonial approaches to secretive esoteric knowledge and its experts. This work considers the ways that ideas about Islam, health, harm, and political authority are related over time.

I spent the summer of 2013 between the West African countries of Senegal and Mauritania conducting follow-up archival and oral history research. I spent a week in Dakar, Senegal working in the Senegalese National Archives to trace some of the major political changes during the colonial period in one region of Mauritania, the Trarza.  Because my dissertation focuses on the history of a secretive family from this region with shifting genealogical, racial, and denominational affiliations, I wanted to get a better sense of the kinds of political changes that could affect their role as healers and protectors for regional emirs and warriors. Another case study in my dissertation shows how accusations of bloodsucking in desert oases reflect tensions around slave status, gender, and periods of famine in desert communities. In a desert region where racial dynamics often portrayed black populations as only marginally Muslim as a way to legitimatize enslavement, bloodsucking accusations reveal how such populations were also thought to be ritually powerful through harmful magic. I travelled to two Mauritanian oasis towns with diverging histories of bloodsucking, Awjeft and Ma’aden el-Ervane, where I interviewed various elderly men and women about their memories of specific cases of bloodsucking accusation and opposition to such accusations. 

As a third part of my research, I focused on more contemporary history, looking at how increased contact and concern with religious reform movements of the Islamic heartland of the Middle East led to efforts to make these esoteric healing and protective practices conform to more rigid interpretations of doctrinally-permitted techniques of managing misfortune.  Religious reform movements, along with postcolonial politics aimed at constructing a modern nation-state, drove experts of l-hjab to go underground, using new terminology to refer to older techniques, to alter the materiality of their prescriptions, and increase the invisibility of these already hidden sciences. 

With the generous support of the Abbasi Program Student Grant, this research contributes to methodological debates about subjectivity, secrecy, and truth in oral and archival research and historiographical research on the disaggregated nature of Islamic knowledge in West Africa, religious syncretism, and reformism. This project examines the idioms of magic and harm as a complex historical phenomenon, using the changing contours of l-hjab to reflect upon important themes in African History - local and colonial knowledge production, the effects of colonial policies on local populations and socioeconomic structures, the interaction between local and global religious practice and politics, and how African populations dealt with worldly insecurities of spaces without an overarching political state formation.