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Miracles, Science, and Sorcery: The Sufi Texts of the Kunta Scholars

Join ISITA for a talk by Ariela Marcus-Sells (religious studies, Elon University), drawing from her recent book, Sorcery or Science?: Contesting Knowledge and Practice in West African Sufi Texts (Penn State University Press, 2022).

Abstract

Sīdi al-Mukhtār al-Kuntī (d. 1811) and Sīdi Muḥammad al-Kuntī (d. 1826), were two Muslim scholars who lived in the Sahara Desert in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and who decisively influenced the development of Sufi scholarship and communities in the region. In Arabic manuscripts across various genres, these scholars describe a vast “realm of the unseen,” an invisible world that both surrounded and interpenetrated with the visible world. Moreover, the Kunta scholars often discussed a set of practices that depended on knowledge of this unseen world, and that allowed people who used them to manipulate the visible and invisible realms. They called these practices, “the sciences of the unseen” and although they acknowledged that some Muslims might consider these practices to be “sorcery,” they argued that they were not sorcery, but legitimate Islamic practices. This presentation begins by examining the internal categories that the Kunta scholars use to describe the “sciences of the unseen,” and to distinguish those practices from marvelous gifts from God (karamāt) and acts of sorcery (siḥr) and continues by historicizing these practices within the context of West African Muslim societies at the turn of the nineteenth century. Within this context, the Kunta’s discussions of the sciences of the unseen partially served to demark a line between the legitimate knowledge and practice of white, Muslim elites and the pejoratized practices of racialized others. 

About the speaker

Ariela Marcus-Sells is assistant professor and Distinguished Emerging Scholar in the department of religious studies at Elon University. She graduated with a PhD in Religious Studies/Islamic Studies from Stanford University in 2015. Her research focuses on Sufi intellectual history, the history of Muslim societies in West Africa, and the relationship between the categories of Religion, Magic, and Science.