Knowers of the Unseen: disputes over sufi knowledge and practice

This book presents the results of a study on sufi knowledge and practice in a sufi lineage located in central Africa in the early nineteenth century. The book is from the series Magic in History that explores the role of magic and the occult in European culture, religion, science, and politics. The topic caught my attention for the multiple ways in which people perceive, know, and understand the world and what is in it, whether we call it science, religion, or magic from a Western perspective. The author, specialized in Religious Studies, analyzes how Sidi Al-Mukhtar, from the Kunta family, and Sidi Muhammad, his son and heir, through precise and methodic description of techniques, prayers, and definition of terms, differentiated their knowledge and practice from outside groups that adopted sufi practices, and legitimated their knowledge and practice as science, as opposed to sorcery and magic.

A methodological introduction is followed by four chapters: (1) “The Visible World,” a description of geographical, social, and economic characteristics of the region; (2) “The Realm of the Unseen,” a description of what exists and is Unseen in sufi cosmology, and the different roles sufis play in relation to this Unseen knowledge; (3) “The Sciences of the Unseen,” a presentation of the structure of Kunta knowledge and practice, and how it articulates the distinction between Kunta sciences of the Unseen and sorcery or magic; and finally (4) “Bridging the Worlds in Prayer,” where she describes how Sidi Muhammad defends the efficiency of prayer in a specific traditional text, at the same time explaining how prayer heals and transforms the self into a servant of the divine.

The reading, far from easy, rapidly grows in complexity as references to different authors, perspectives, and names of unknown origin proliferate. The book contains a dense comparison and discussion of different historizations of Africa and of sufi knowledge and practice. There's a meticulous analysis and comparison with case studies of other sufi groups, and other regions and periods.

According to the author, the transformations in the way Kunta lineage organized sufi knowledge as science distancing it from sorcery or magic took place in a context of economic, political, and social transformations in the Sahara and Central Africa, where the traditions of the Kunta sufi lineage also had effects. Although through her scene descriptions – i.e. of how talismans were being commercialized – and background, the reader can imagine local markets in relation with the wider intensification in commerce and geopolitical economic change due to the late years of the first industrial revolution led by Europe, she does not describe or analyze this socioeconomic context in relation to the Kunta practices of knowledge specifically.

The author mentions multiple methodological challenges posed by the study. First, traditional texts as the ones used for this study are, according to the author, difficult for academics for two reasons. First, they refer to a sphere of human activity that is impossible to grasp only through written sources. In this sense, the author approached the world of the Kunta sufi lineage by being sensible to the native point of view of the terms and meaning being used, ethnographically speaking, and also by respecting native distinctions between practice and knowledge. Her focus is on the way the Kunta defended their sufi practice and knowledge as science.

However, considering that there's a dispute over the status of knowledge and that the Kunta sufi lineage is defined on the basis of that status, it's inevitable to ask about other local social groups in the dispute. This leads to the second difficulty in using traditional texts: these texts imply categories of knowledge and practice whose meanings have been contested in almost every historical period. The Kunta defense of their practice and knowledge as sciences, confronting sorcery and magic, resonates with contemporary efforts to distinguish science and religion from magic in Occidental Europe, as the author mentions. In Europe, some of these discussions have been shaped by a colonialist analysis that denigrated African practices as superstition, and thus separated these texts from the field of Religious Studies. According to the author, this problem exists because of a miscomprehension of native terms, which is why methodologically she focused on respecting native terms and points of view, i.e. calling Kunta sufi knowledge and practice as sciences on the Unseen. However, I consider it insufficient to address the issue as a miscomprehension of native terms. More than a miscomprehension, it's an intentional definition of the ideological weapon of colonialism: a misleading construction of an Other whose human and moral status is inferior to the West and whose knowledge won't be recognized equally. This Otherness justifies its domination, control, exploitation or persecution (Said 1978). In this scheme of things, what Others do is not-science and not-religion, thus in Europe Afrodescendent knowledge and practice are seen as sorcery, and European knowledge and practice are seen as science or religion, with a higher status. In this case, it is the sufi who claim a higher status of knowledge and practice, in detriment, as well, of those of Afrodescendent peoples. Even though the author mentions the European context for comparison and mentions the misleading understanding of native terms, she doesn't point out the similarity in the ethnic or racial determination of the dispute over practice and knowledge status. This is certainly a crucial discussion that she leaves pending, given that she claims “the Kunta's classification of the sciences and sorcery are related to a trend of increasing racialization in that region” (Marcus-Sells 2022, 117) among other mentions of this tension in the book, and that she names the discourse of alterity and the magic discourse of exclusion as some of the conceptualizations used in similar cases.

I consider this dimension fundamental to understand the process she studies because knowledge is always disputed in transepistemic arenas conformed by multiple social groups (Knorr Cetina 1996). If the dispute were between Europeans and sufis, probably sufi practice and knowledge wouldn't be seen as science, but as religion or even magic with a lower status, and in that scenario ethnic determination would be highlighted. As the author herself produces scientific knowledge – in Western terms – on science or sorcery, the term science is to the author a native term as well as her own, and she doesn't account for this. Although she clarifies uses of the terms sorcery and magic, she doesn't do the same with the term science. In anthropological terms, a process of estrangement (Da Matta 1999) would reflect her position as a European social scientist.

The question that prevails is why Ariela chose this subject, what motivated her, what moved her, what was her experience and her approach to sufi practice and knowledge, and the realizations she experimented. While these may be considered personal matters, their assesment can illuminate elements of the subjective involvement a social scientist – regardless of the discipline – has with her object of study. Although she mentions her field trips to the region across several periods of time, she didn't include present day testimonies because she focuses on a specific historical period. However, the question about the actualization of sufi tradition may be useful to understand the process she studies, because Sidi Al Mukhtar and Sidi Muhammad transformed the way of conceiving and organizing their knowledge and practice in the Sciences of the Unseen projecting the lineage tradition into posterity.