Kitāb al-Rimāḥ
In 1845, al-Ḥājj ʿUmār Fūtī Tāl, an important nineteenth century West African Muslim
intellectual, completed his magnum opus, the Kitāb al-rimāḥ (The Book of Lance). The fifty-five
chapters of this work cover a broad range of topics in Islamic spirituality, ethics, and jurisprudence.
The work is also a foundational text on the doctrine and practice of the Tijānī Sufi brotherhood.
But despite its continued importance and wide circulation, it has drawn virtually no scholarly
analysis. Indeed, two decades ago, John Hunwick considered the Kitāb al-rimah as a “hard lump
in the stomach – massive and undigested.” In this paper, I argue that the Kitāb al-rimāḥ is a crucial
source for uncovering the intellectual relationships between West Africa and other parts of the
Muslim world. It also raises important questions on Islamic epistemology, textuality and
knowledge transmission.
In writing the Kitāb al-rimāḥ, Tāl drew from over a hundred separate sources, indicating
the wide circulation of texts, ideas, and practices in the region. Yet most of the Kitāb al-rimāḥ is
made entirely of quotations. The work fits within the broader context of classical Islamic
scholarship, where Muslim scholars often quoted previous works at length. They used these
quotations to rhetorically couch their arguments and claims as extensions of those earlier works.
This genre of writing has sometimes been disparaged as unoriginal or plagiarism. In this paper, I
argue that such characterizations misunderstand the Islamic intellectual tradition. For centuries
within works of the Islamic religious sciences there was a dialogical relationship between
individual authors and their contributions, and the larger corporate body of scholars and
knowledge. I investigate this intertextual relationship through an examination of the Kitāb alrimāḥ.
By using Tāl and the Kitāb al-rimāḥ as an example, this paper interrogates the concept of
“the author” in the classical Islamic scholarly tradition. It also examines how scholars introduced
new ideas, concepts and practices, through a deep engagement with the past.