Ottoman History Podcast - Singing the Prophet's Praise

Episode Date: April 27, 2020

Episode 462 with Oludamini Ogunnaike hosted by Shireen Hamza Reading and writing poems in praise of the prophet Mohammad is no simple matter in West Africa. Their composition was a vehicle for intellectual debate, just as their recitation was a means of spiritual transformation for the listener. In this episode, we speak to Dr. Oludamini Ogunnaike, the author of a recent book about praise or "madih" poetry in West Africa, and we listen to recordings of several recitations. Madih poetry is widely recited by Muslims in West Africa; we learn of several major authors from the 18th century to now, including Sheikh Ibrahim Niasse and Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba. Professor Ogunnaike explains the complex Sufi cosmologies and epistemologies intrinsic to the memorization and recitation of madih poetry, which make this such a powerful and widespread practice in Muslim communities. Finally, we discuss why these poems -- manuscripts of which can be found in every collection in West Africa -- remain so little studied. While part of this can be explained by the colonial legacy of considering Islam to be essentially Arab, and thus a foreign importation to Africa, there are other epistemological issues at stake. Professor Ogunnaike's work thus broadens our understanding of a form of embodied knowledge in Islam. « Click for More »

So I actually came to Madih poetry the way most people who have lived or traveled in West Africa come to Madih poetry, which is through the sound. You hear it and you're like, whoa, that is amazing. What is that? This is the Ottoman History Podcast, and I'm Shirin Hamza. Has a poem ever saved your life? These poems, which are in praise of the Prophet Muhammad, are known as madih. In this episode, you'll hear more about madih poetry from Oludamini Ogunayke, Assistant Professor of African religious thought at the University of Virginia.

He'll speak about the many things these poems do for listeners. And of course, you'll hear more of these poems themselves from a variety of Mediha poetry in West Africa. And I realized these poems contain some of the most evocative and interesting ideas of Sufi cosmology, of even Sufi epistemology, metaphysics, practical, spiritual, like wayfaring and advice. There's just a lot in there. just a lot in there. Sufism played a huge role in the spread and practice of Islam in this region. Madih poems are recited all over West Africa, where several countries have been home to Muslims for over a thousand years.

Thus, the dozens of languages of West Africa often share influences from Islamic language and poetics. There are many fusha, or Arabic words, in use in those Ajami or non-Arabic languages. However, many writers chose to compose Madih poetry in Arabic because it was the Prophet's own language. And those are the poems that we will be discussing today. So it's a transformative performance that aims to evoke this perfection of the human state, which is identified with the Prophet Muhammad. So, I mean, I had heard it when I was a kid a little bit. I didn't really understand what it was and everything.

I was just like, that sounds cool. And then when I came back and I was doing my research in Senegal especially, but also Nigeria, usually after the Tijani's do their kind of evening litany, people hang around and sing Madih poetry, sometimes for hours. And if you go into the houses of most of the Shi'yuh, someone might be going in to do interviews with people. There'd be someone sitting in the corner just reciting Madih poetry

in these beautiful pentatonic maqams with really strong rhythm. And I was just like, this is amazing this is beautiful what is it so i went and introduced myself to one of the um best reciters that that i i knew there i said look can i record you this is uh this is just amazing i really want to uh i love poet i've loved poetry for a long time i knew but i said what you're doing is really special. I want to learn more about it. Can you tell me more about it? Can I record you performing some poems?

And then as I started, so I recorded the poems, and I started working on translating them, and then I started reading more about them, and I realized these poems contain some of the most evocative and interesting ideas of Sufi cosmology, of even Sufi epistemology, metaphysics, practical, spiritual, like wayfaring and advice. There's just a lot, a lot in there. And so people often say, like, there's no traditional Islamic civilization, there's no like novel, I There's no, like, novel. I mean, outside, like, Hayy bin Yaqdan and stuff like that. But a lot of the things that we look for in novels, a lot of intellectuals, you'll read novels and you find a lot of intellectual content in novels. You find that in poetry.

So narrative. You'll find narrative. You'll find really complicated and complex ideas and arguments. And this is, I'm saying in Madih poetry, poetry itself is very broad. In West Africa, there's a lot of didactic poetry. So you take a book of fiqh and you'll anathemize it, as one of my friends says, put it in poetic form. But I'm speaking about Madih poetry in particular. So even though it's devotional poetry, poetry in prayers of the prophet usually,

it contains a lot of very profound intellectual content in both the content but also in the function, the way it's used. And so that's how I came to Medih poetry as kind of one of the clearest manifestations or something within the tradition that illustrates in really beautiful and accessible form a lot of the ideas that drew me to work on these two traditions in the first place

or that drew me to work on Tijani Sufism in the first place. I see, I see. So going back to the kind of just some basics about Madih poetry, this is mostly written in Fusha Arabic? Madih poetry is written in Fusha. It's written in Ajami. So it's written in Hausa, Wolof, Yerba, Tamashek, almost any, I can't think of a West African language that has a lot of Muslims in which there's not Medih poetry. But in my paper, I focused on Arabic Medih poetry because I only know so many languages. And the Arabic tradition cuts across all of West Africa. That's a lot of languages.

tradition cuts across all of West Africa? That's a lot of languages. Listeners can find another interview with Professor Osman Khan on intellectual history of Islamic institutions in West Africa, especially madrasas, in which he describes a particular relationship between Arabic curriculum, which was the major curriculum in the madrasas, but also the prolific writing, not only in popularizing genres like qasidas that are meant to kind of bring people to Islam, but also like tafsir or exegetical traditions, which are very long, involved texts in Ajami. So I think if you'd like to listen more, you can find that episode.

But in this genre specifically, could we hear a little bit more about the relationship between Arabic and Ajami? about the relationship between Arabic and al-Jamee? So the Arabic, actually, prosody really influenced the prosody of these al-Jamee traditions. So if you look at pre-Islamic or non-Islamic poetry in these languages, there's usually not end rhyme. The idea of meter is different. So in Yoruba, for example, there's several different genres or types of things that we would call poetry in English, but they look very different from Yoruba Ajamim poetry, which is you've got the two bait, the two misras, make a bait, and you've got the end rhyme, and you've

got the meter. So the Arabic prosody itself heavily influenced, and Arabic itself heavily influenced these languages in all kinds of ways. It's not just Muslim speakers that use Arabic words in these languages. Anybody who speaks Yoruba or Hausa or anything like that uses. So there's a massive, the languages influenced each other, and Arabic especially influenced these West African languages. Now, the tradition of praise poetry, you asked about a hierarchy African languages. Now the tradition of praise poetry, and you asked about a hierarchy of languages. So the Arabic poetry is, everybody appreciates the sound of it,

but not everybody understands the meaning. So the Arabic poetry is written by scholars, usually, for scholars, scholarly audience, primarily, but then also a general audience who will recite it, even if they don't understand everything in it or understand it well. Sometimes there'll be these, they're called macaronic poems, in which they'll mix Arabic and local languages. So you have one line in Arabic, and then you'll have another line in Wolof or Hausa so cool and it's it's true in India too there's a lot of I was just gonna say yeah it reminds me of Kowalis which have a line in Farsi and then the line in an Indian language usually like Urdu

or Proto-Hindi exactly yeah so it's a very very similar thing going on here. The poems in Aja, you know, Wolof, Yaruba, Hausa, these kinds of languages tended to, they were written sometimes by people who are non-scholars. They're also written by scholars. But usually when the scholars are writing in Fulfude, Hausa, or these languages, they are either writing personally, just for themselves. So, for example,

some of Uthman Danfodio's most personal and I think best poetry is in Fulfude, in his mother tongue. And when they're writing in Arabic, they have a broader audience. Or Uthman Danfodio and his community, when they write in Hausa, they were writing to kind of educate the masses. That was the language of most people. When they wrote in Fulfude, they were writing just for themselves. And they were writing in Arabic. They were writing for a broader public. So there's a sort of hierarchy. The languages have different functions. And you can sometimes see differences in genre and tone

in these different languages as you move across them. But they also interestingly influence each other a lot. So some of Danfordio's Arabic poetry has a lot of Fulfude poetic features. So in Fulfude, it's good poetry if you end each line with the same word. So he has this famous Qasida Dalia, which ends every line with Muhammad.

Every line, it's Muhammad is the Qafia, is the rhyme. That's considered bad. You're cheating. It's a cheap rhyme in Arabic prosody. It's good form to begin every line, like Qasid al-Muhammadiyah, begin every line with Muhammad.

So he's using something from Fulfude poetry in his Arabic poetry. These different genres and languages influence and even interpenetrate each other in some really fascinating ways. And this continues to this day. One of my favorite and the most celebrated West African poems

and praise the prophet, Al-Yadali's 18th century Mauritanian Sufi sheikh scholar, commentator on the Quran, Maliki Faqih, very influential figure in the region and even beyond. Wrote this famous poem, Salatu Rabbi. It's a poem in praise of the Prophet. And it's in Fusha, but he wrote it not using one of the classical

meters of Arabic poetry. The story says he was walking one day and he heard some of these griots, singing this song. And he said,ots, igawan, singing this song. And he said, oh, it's such a beautiful song. I want to write a poem in praise of the role that this poetry can play. We could hear the sound of the room.

We could hear multiple reciters. Can you tell us a little bit about the reciter? Reciter Sidi Ali Nias is a grandson of Sheikh Ibrahim Nias. He's the son of Sheikh Naziru Nias. Sheikh Ibrahim Nias was one of the most influential Muslim scholars in West Africa of the 20th century. He died in 1975. He founded a movement called the Fayda. It's a branch of the Tijaniyya order.

It's now become the most popular branch, especially in Nigeria, but it's spread throughout the world. Before we listen to this recording, you explained that Ali Adeli, as well as Osman Danfodio, two 18th century Sufi scholars, composed this poetry, sometimes in Ajami, in West African languages, influenced by Arabic, for the purpose of spreading the knowledge that they embedded therein, or drawing people to the faith, which is a very similar discourse about South Asian Sufism and local or vernacular language poetry. There's also another motivation, you said, for them to often to compose in Fosha, both for a general audience, but also to communicate to a scholarly community.

Could you tell us about the way that you came to understand that through reading these poems or listening to these poems? So I think actually you put your finger on something very important here, the importance of listening to these poems. I don't know anyone who sits and reads poems, these poems, quietly. They're usually sung, and they're usually sung in groups. And sometimes even they're composed in the context of group recitation.

So people will be singing a refrain, and then people will compose verses in the same meter and rhyme of that poem. So the context of the poetry is very important. But I also think that the authors themselves say the primary reason for the composition of this poetry is devotional. It's out of love for the prophet. And then as a means to help other people achieve that kind of love for the prophet. It's this idea generally written in Arabic literary theory called lisan al-hal.

So there's the qawl, the statement comes out of a particular hal, a state, which then gets kind of encapsulated, captured in that poem, and then gets released when it's performed in both the performer and the listener. So that's a lot of what's going on here. The poets, by their own account, have this intense longing and love and will compose these poems as a devotional practice to express their love for the prophet, get closer to the prophet, ask for forgiveness of sins, and then that poem will serve as a means of doing all kinds of other things, doing work for the audience. Yedali's

poem, for example, in his commentary on his poem, he tells a story. So he wrote this poem, and he got in some trouble with someone, and he recited this poem, and the person loved it so much, he gave him some new clothes and wasn't trying to fight with him anymore. Or another time, he was on a boat that was going to be shipwrecked and he and the sailors recited the poem and they reached shore safely and the people were so happy with him and his poem for achieving this great feat. They carried him into the city on their shoulders and he was able to get a bunch of European paper, which was a very rare, very expensive commodity. And he says all of this is due to the Baraka of the one praised in this poem.

So the people are composing the poetry, I think primarily as a devotional act. But in that devotion, they're bringing in a lot of ideas, cosmology, and it's then being used for purposes of barakah, for purposes of dawah, for spreading these ideas, these Sufi traditions. It's really fascinating that Ali Adali is composing Arabic commentaries on his own poems. I think it tells us something about the way he wanted to circulate among the scholarly community, that there are ideas within it that are kind of what we might call the cutting edge of this intellectual tradition. It also, this anecdote that you tell us from the commentary, in addition to the structure of the poem, is evidence that this poem was meant to be recited. Yes.

The story you told us from Ali Adali's commentary, in which he describes being brought to safe harbor through the barakah of a madih poem so can you tell us about the many ways that you see the this these poems doing work yeah yeah this is a really important feature of the genre and i think one of the biggest reasons why the poems are so popular is the way in which they're used so the for example in nigeria people use use it as like a love charm. People use it for success in business and, of course, most famously to cure illness. And these dimensions, again, get classified in the scholarship as kind of superstition or this kind of mythological thing around it, which is the only way they fit within a certain cosmology,

which is why it's very important to consider the cosmology of the authors and performers of the poem themselves to understand, because it's not illogical given a certain semantic theory of the relationship between the signifier and signified. If it's not arbitrary, if there's an ontological connection, then certain poems about the Prophet actually bring the presence or carry the presence of the Prophet with them, which is how, I mean the whole Sufi tradition basically works on dhikr, the presence of the madkur in the dhikr, the one invoked in the invocation. That's how the whole thing works. Why reciting prayers on the Prophet does something.

And that's the same reason why reciting these poems is understood to vehicle the presence of the Prophet in certain ways. Which, again, only makes sense given a certain theory of language, of literature, of cosmology. When they were forming an imamate, there was a kind of revolution by al-Mamikan. they swore allegiance to him on the Quran on the Dalal Khairat collection of Salawat and on Fazazi's Ishriniyat

this collection of 20 verse poems people keep the poems in their house for protection people carry them with them when they drive for protection and I say they function kind of like Hilyas you know

this is the Ottoman history podcast so you guys should know all about Hilyas the descriptions of the prophet's appearance in in which there's a hadith, which is popular even if it's not authenticated, that whoever looks on my description with longing will be saved, will not face the fire. So these poems often, in describing the Prophet, serve as a kind of oral hilya, a description of the Prophet that induces a state of longing that has this kind of oral hilya, a description of the Prophet that induces a state of longing

that has this kind of salvific effect. A lot of the poems are just very eloquent forms of dua, of prayers for intercession. A lot of them function as dhikr, and I'd like to play you this recording of Zakiru leading dhikr in Medina Baye. So there you could hear the poem interspersed with an invocation of the Shahada, La ilaha illallah. And this serves as a kind of extension of the ordinary practices of dhikr that you have,

where people say the wir weird or the wazifa or these kinds of things. And it functions the same way zikr does. The invoked is supposed to be present in the invocation. That presence is what allows someone to progress along the spiritual path towards God and or the prophet. And the poems also serve as a kind of a description, but a way of making the reality of the Prophet present or evoking that reality within the soul of the reciter and the listeners. So within Sufi cosmology in general, but especially the Akbari and Tijani cosmology, the hakikatul muhammadiyya, muhammad in reality, or nur muhammadi, muhammad in light, is the fundamental reality in everything.

So it's a bit like the idea of Buddha nature. Everything has its own Buddha nature. So the reality of this table ultimately is the muhammad in reality. And what this poetry serves to do is to evoke that. And that's true of each person as well, too. In essence, each person deep down is the Muhammadan light. The Muhammadan reality is latent within each person and is their fundamental reality. So by describing this reality in evocative terms, it aims to evoke that reality in the listeners and in the reciters of this poetry. So it's a transformative performance that aims to evoke this

perfection of the human state, which is identified with the Prophet Muhammad. And this perfection is described in lots and lots of different ways, but it's ultimately described as being so transcendent, it transcends its transcendence, in that it's capable of taking, and this is where the Sufi kind of metaphysics and theory is so important, and that it can take on any form.

So if you want to transcend visibility, you have to be like a mirror, which means you're capable of taking on any color, like a glass of water. Glass of water can take on anything. You put fuchsia on it, you get fuchsia. And so this is in Sufi literature called the maqam la maqam.

So we're following the ibn Arabi, the station of no station. It's precisely a station of no station because it's a station that's perfectly receptive, becomes capable of taking on any station. So it's just completely non-delimited. You can't even say it's non-delimited because that's to limit it somehow. So they often say that everything has a particular maqam ma'alum, known station, except for the human being.

And the human being has this potential for infinite receptivity, mirroring the divine infinity and transcendence. And so these poems describe this state in a lot of different and interesting ways and try to put people into this state and eventually make that state their station. And that station, that kind of ends, the end goal of this poem, of this genre of poetry

is usually annihilation and the prophet, fanafir as-sul, what they call, this kind of mystical experience of union with the reality of the prophet. And so this, when you have this kind of Sufi metaphysical background, literary theory background, I think you can understand a lot more what's going on in these poems, because that was

the background in which the authors were operating in and writing. These are the texts they were reading. And you pick up a lot of allusions in the poetry that if you weren't coming with this background, you would completely miss. And this is brought out often in the commentaries on the poem especially the oral commentaries because some of these crazier sufi ideas i mean some people say i shouldn't be even saying these things i was actually gonna ask you i shouldn't i shouldn't be saying these things in a podcast that's going to be openly distributed uh to to people but often in these uh commentaries um the oral commentaries are where you get the really juicy stuff, the really interesting stuff that people wouldn't normally put in writing because they're afraid people will misunderstand it. People aren't ready to hear it because you hear, OK, your essence is at your very essence.

You're the Mohammedan light. So I don't have to pray anymore. I have to fast. Everything's all good. At your very essence, you're the Mohammedan light. So I don't have to pray anymore. I don't have to fast. Everything's all good. I can just run around killing people. There's no consequences or things like that. So these ideas are difficult to understand.

Not everybody can understand them. They can be dangerous. And moreover, they can be very controversial. And so oftentimes you'll find some of these ideas in oral commentaries that people have. Or if you know enough of them yourself, when you read the poems, you'll see it. You'll recognize allusions to those things in there. In order to demonstrate some of these very complex but very necessary cosmologies with which people would be reading reciting and learning this poetry we're gonna listen to a recording of Cherno the friend of Oludamini's could you explain a little

bit about this poem this is a poem by Sheikh Ramiaz known like most poems by its first few words Safali Awakti And it's a poem particularly loved by the kind of more esoteric Sufi scholars and disciples in Sheikh Ibrahim's lineage because it illustrates a lot of these themes that we were talking about. So let's take a listen. Here's my translation. I'm sorry it's not very poetic. He purified my time for me and he made sweet my intimacy

by the mention, dhikr, of the followed one, the salve of heart and soul. A messenger ascended above heaven and he drew nigh and descended or drew near and then drew nearer while he was in the holy presence. At a time when there was no servant and no thing other than him

and nothing remains of meaning and nothing remains of sense and that is the truth and he or it is our God. He is the truth, none but he remains to the dust of the grave. Save ignorance and false fantasy. So purify a heart from jealousies and fantasy and conjecture. And where is apart from the holy? And where is his equal?

Leave the where. Rather, ask where is the knowledge from that foundation. The holy is not seen with the naked eye, but rather with the eye of blindness and obliteration and annihilation and effacement. So get drunk. For whatever you may have intended, you have only tasted of wine and voice,

but sound and a whisper. If the drunk dances or gets carried away singing, that is from ecstasy. He is being sanctified from confusion. Whatever we say about drunkenness is for us knowledge too lofty to be bound in pages. For every station, if only you knew, there is a saying. So not equal are the rational thinker and the mad brother. Going astray in the essence of God is the essence of guidance. طلال بذات الله عين الهداية

That's a really amazing verse. قل وأخو مسي طلال بذات الله عين هداية فإياك والنقد المؤدي إلى البأس So beware of the dangerous criticism that leads to sorrow. So the knowledgeable give everything its due, while he who is ignorant denies a thing, though it be more evident than the sun.

Upon him be the blessings of God and in his peace, and upon his family and companions. In reality, they are my joy. There's a lot there, and I think if you go back and listen to or read this poem with this kind of Sufi cosmology or metaphysics in mind, as I tried to do in this article, The Presence of Poetry, you will see how this poem and many other poems illustrate and allude to in striking and very evocative forms

these ideas about the Muhammadan reality. So, for example, there's a time when there was only him and nothing else. Annihilation in God, annihilation in the prophets. The idea of a knowledge that can't be contained in writing, also the idea of this transcendence of transcendence. So the Prophet drew, it's a direct quote from Surah Najm, he drew near and then drew nearer or drew nearer and then descended both and he ascended above heaven and then drew nearer and then drew nearer. So you have this transcendence and then a both, and he ascended above heaven, and then drew nearer, and then drew nearer. So you have this transcendence and then a kind of descent,

but that descent is in itself also drawing nearer. So you're not descending from the divine presence. You're actually drawing nearer. You're not going further away from God. You're drawing nearer to God. And then as he says, where is apart from the holy? And it said, leave aside asking the where. Where doesn't enter into the discussion of divine realities, but rather what's important is the knowledge that comes from this journey. If you read this poem through a kind of Akbari, Sufi

framework, a lot of the allusions become more clear and the argument of the poem becomes more clear in which you're kind of following in the footsteps of the messenger up to heaven, back down, you know, on the mirage, up to heaven, back down, and then in the world. But all without ever having left the Hadratul Qudsi, the holy, the divine presence.

So these poems, they take the classic structure of the qasida and they transform it in very interesting ways. And like all of the best poetry, they bounce back and forth and there's a wonderful ambiguity and elusiveness between the levels being talked about. So sometimes we think they're talking about a physical historical reality, they're talking about a metaphysical one, and sometimes we think they're talking about a metaphysical one, because they're really talking about both at the same time. And they're often talking about the physical places as manifestations of metaphysical realities, just as they're talking about the historical prophet as the manifestation par excellence

of the Muhammadan reality. And so when you have this cosmology and this kind of knowledge of the literary theories of the tradition, you can follow them as they do all of these fascinating and understand, get a better idea of all of the fascinating things they're doing, the ways in which they're transforming

the structure of the qasida, and why they're doing it that way, and how it relates to their particular context of spiritual practice. Okay, so this is a great transition question about some of the contemporary reciters whose work you've been listening to throughout the podcast.

So would you like to tell us about your own encounters, your decision to record, how that was received, you know, the context within which these are recited, and maybe like a few figures who you've really enjoyed listening to? Zakiru, I'm not sure if I heard him the first time I was in Senegal, but one of the first times I was in Senegal, I heard someone reciting the Qasidas of Sheikh Ram Yass, and it just really moved me tremendously. I didn't really understand what he was saying, but it was just the sound, musically, it moved me. Then I came back for my dissertation research, and I heard something similar that reminded me of what I heard in Dakar a couple years ago. And I went in tour as a zawiya of Baba Lamin, who's one of Sheikh Remnyas' sons.

And there was a young man there who was reciting poetry. It was after the wazifa and it was exquisite. And I wanted to catch up with him, but I had an appointment so I couldn't and then I was in Qawlaq later on and I heard him again reciting in the maqam at the grave of Sheikh Ramya so I went up to him immediately afterward and I said hey I love your recitations would it be possible for me to record you and he said yeah no problem when do you have time yeah so I just went through and I was like can can we record some of your favorite poems of Sheikh Ibrahim and so we we did that and in the meanwhile I

talked to him and said so you know how did you come to do this and so I love love the poetry of Sheikh Ibrahim and I have a good voice I have a gift gift for this and he said he's the official reciter for this Baba Lamin, who's a very big sheikh. And so he said, Baba Lamin was coming to my town in Nigeria, and I really wanted to be his reciter. I wanted to be recognized. So I prayed this many prayers on the Prophet the night before and did this. And then it was my chance to perform in front of him. And I made sure I did my best. And he said, people were going to Ahwal all over the place when I was reciting and Baba Lamin says yes I want this guy to go and he brought him with

him and now he travels with Baba Lamin back and forth between Kowlak and Dakar and when he travels internationally sometimes he goes along too. So he is a professional reciter of Sheikh Ram Niasse's poetry, most of which is Madih. He can do other things too, but those are the hits. The other person you'll see if you go to the West African Sufi Poetry Project website is a friend of mine, Cherno. Cherno is also a Tijani. He studied in Egypt for a long time, and he himself is a friend of mine, Cherno. Cherno's also a Tijani. He studied in Egypt for a long time, and he himself is a poet. He also loves Sheikh Benyass's poetry.

He can recite in several different styles. I think he spent some time studying in Mauritania, so he knows some Mauritanian styles of recitation. There are loads of Nigerians everywhere in West Africa, but also in Senegal, so he knows some Nigerian styles of recitation, as well as Senegalese styles. And because he's a poet and loves poetry, we would often have discussions about Sheikh Ram Niasse's poetry. He taught me a lot. And so I asked him if we could record some of these, which we did in Professor Khan's apartment

in Dak car. And this actually brings me to something I meant to discuss before, the way in which the West African, or the Madih tradition in general, but the West African Madih tradition in particular, takes on and transforms the formal features of the Qasida. So as some listeners may know, the Qasida usually has a kind of, the classical Qasida has a tripartite structure, in which you have a nasib, an amatory prelude in which the poet laments at the ruins of the beloved's campsite at the ruins of the beloved's campsite and describes the beauty of the beloved and the passing of time

and how the love is wasting him away and the tears are running down his cheeks and all this, the beginning of the border, you know, is like many of these other poems are like this. And this is true for the pre-Islamic mu'alakats as well too. And then this next section, which is the rahil, which the poet sets out on a journey, usually in pursuit of the beloved.

And then finally, the third section is one of madih, in which the poet praises the beloved and himself, and it's usually a moment of union or reunion, a kind of sweetness. And so these three sections, qasidas differ a lot from place to place, but they generally tend to have these kind of three sections. And the West African madih tradition being one of

the more conservative forms of qasida because most of the people who are trained, the scholars, read the mu'alakat. They read these classical poems. So there's a kind of archaism in a lot of their their style they keep this but they transform it so the beloved is now the prophet and the ruins

the atlal the campsite is uh off in medina and the area around medina and the different physical features around medina and then the rahilil is the spiritual journey of following the prophet through the different levels of reality, through different maqams. But these poems often go back and forth between this kind of the metaphysical and the physical. So in describing the prophet, they go back and forth between describing this Muhammad in reality, it was the first thing God created, this light, and then, and he also patched his sandals. And there's this kind of movement, interesting movement back and forth

between the historical Muhammad and the Muhammad in reality, or Muhammad in light. And then in the praise section, which is the section of union, they'll usually describe their union or their state of union with the prophet and doing so praise themselves as they're praising, praising the prophet. One of my favorite examples of this transformation of the genre, Sheikh Bermias has a poem which he wrote in Paris. The beginning opening section describes the lights

of a discotheque in Paris. The story goes that they put him up in a hotel that was looking over a discotheque. And then when some of the disciples or people organizing his trip realized this, they said, oh my God, we put the Sheikh above a disco. This is terrible. We need to move him. And Sheikh Ibrahim said, no, no, no, the lights in this remind me of the beauty of the light of the Prophet. So he takes the lights and the city of Paris with its old castles and ruins and things like that. That's the campsite.

And they remind him of the days gone by and the Prophet. And he's burning and longing for the prophet. And then he sets off on this airplane trip to Medina. And as he's ascending in the plane, he goes back and forth between his ascent in the plane and his travel to Medina. And his ascent through the spiritual stations and his travel to the station of no station, which is the prophet's station. Prophet station. And then he comes to Medina itself and there's this beautiful praise of the Prophet in his physical and spiritual union with the Prophet. I wanted to remark briefly on how this structure of poem, commentary, super commentary, abridgment is so prevalent in so many different genres. Why are scholars composing commentaries on their own poems?

So you have to situate this in the broader context of the West African Islamic intellectual formation, the way in which these scholars were trained. And a big part of the way in which they were trained was studying poems and commentaries upon the poems. So this is true in things like fiqh, but then this is also true in terms of devotional poetry. So poem, the Ishariniyat, which is by a 13th century Andalusian scholar who was a friend of Ibn Arabi's Al-Fazazi.

And it's called the Ishariniyat because it's a collection of 29 20-verse poems. Each poem ends with a different letter of the Arabic alphabet. This is so popular in Nigeria that, in Nigerian Islamic education, that people, it's kind of one of the culminations of Islamic education in the region. They say you're not really a scholar until you've studied Ishriniyat with its commentaries. That's when you, because it brings in so many, Sira, Quran, Hadith, even some Fiqh,

and a lot of cosmology and metaphysics as well too. So the commentaries are what they point out and explain the allusions to all of these things in the poem, but then also use them as a jumping off point for deeper discussions of, let's say, the haqiqah of Muhammadiyah, or sometimes even fine points in law, Islamic history, all kinds of different things. This studying poems and commentaries upon the poem was an integral part of Islamic West African, not just West African, but especially Islamic West African education. So people would study Kab ibn Zuhair's Banat Suad.

People would study the Borda. People would study Busiri's Hamziya. People would study another set of, this time 21 verse poems, 29 of them called the Witriyat. And so these poems were widely not just performed and recited, but then also studied and commented upon. There were commentaries upon commentaries of these poems. Were people mostly studying locally composed commentaries in the Madaris?

It's a mix. We find a mix of both. So we find the ones that are most extant in the manuscript collections. We find mostly local ones, but then there are some famous commentaries that we find from, let's say, North Africa that are popular. And then we find a lot of abridgments of commentaries, especially in the 20th century. So you have a commentary written elsewhere that's abridged, summarized. Another one that's really popular, it's not Poetry in Praise of the Prophet, but Al-Yusi, who you may have mentioned in Professor Roehib's podcast. who you may have mentioned in Professor Roehib's podcast. Yeah, sorry, Al-Yussi, 17th century Moroccan polymath,

Sufi, logician, brilliant thinker, wrote a famous poem in praise of his sheikh, Al-Dalia, rhymes in the letter Dal, and wrote a commentary on that, Nela al-Amani. And it's a very extensive commentary. And it was studied. It's pretty popular in the West African manuscript collections, and it was studied as a treatise on Sufism. So it's a praise poem,

but the poem and its commentary are studied as a work of tasawwuf, both practical and theoretical. And so this was a tradition not just in West Africa. Al-Yusuf is Moroccan, North African, but it continues into West Africa and continues to the present day. There are YouTube videos, for example, we mentioned Sheikh Ibrahim Niasse.

There are dozens of YouTube videos of people giving commentaries in Wolof or Hausa on Sheikh Ibrahim Niasse's Arabic poetry. What I find so engaging about this is that you could not have pieced together this both historical and contemporary curriculum without both manuscript research and engagement in the contemporary environment of Islamic studies. Absolutely.

The manuscripts work that you're talking about, I believe that, like myself, many listeners may be less familiar with manuscript research in Islamic studies in West Africa. I guess why, if this poetry is so prevalent among the manuscripts, like why has it been so ignored? It's been a great work. There's the Arabic Literature of Africa series, which is a multi-volume series inaugurated by John Hunwick. A lot of people have contributed to it, which is a first foray into an attempt to catalog the extensive Arabic manuscripts of the region.

And it's an incredible, if you're a researcher who does anything to do with West Africa, it's an incredible, if you're a researcher who does anything to do with West Africa, it's an invaluable resource. And even if you don't work on West Africa, because there are connections between the West African intellectual scene, Islamic intellectual scene, and everywhere from North Africa to the Hejaz, the Ottoman, Turkish world, even into India in a later period. So it's an invaluable resource if you want to see who's studying what where and what manuscripts are going where. So that there's also Bruce Hall has been working on a West African manuscript archive that's searchable online. If you look

at any of these collections, medieval poetry is very prominent in them. It's amongst the most prominent genres, most well-represented genres everywhere. So the reason I think medieval poetry has been understudied has to do with the particular ways in which the modern West has developed the categories of the intellectual, the literary, and the devotional as kind of separate. There's a lot more overlap between the literary and the intellectual, and the devotional as kind of separate. There's a lot more overlap between the literary and the intellectual, and the devotional is kind of seen as something separate. Something maybe to do more with practice than with theory or with knowledge. And it's religious as opposed to academic.

We know a lot of these categories don't exist, and the same boundaries don't apply. They're different boundaries, different categories within different intellectual traditions. So the idea that devotional poetry is not literary, it's rather something that has to do with religious practice is, well I think it's absurd anyway even in the Western context. John Donne, I mean John Donne is one of the greatest English poets of all time. The metaphysical poets are amazing. They write devotional poetry.

William Blake. But there is this kind of idea of a separation of the devotional from the literary, which a lot of the scholars, especially the early scholars who were working on West African literature, had. And so they would tend to view Medeha poetry as something devotional, not literary. It's not expressing personal feelings, which is bizarre if you read it. It very clearly is expressing feelings, but it's kind of repetition of stock tropes and ideas that just serve a simple devotional function. Also, then the separation of the devotional from the intellectual. Nothing could be further from the truth within the Sufi tradition. A lot of the early scholars who were coming at this literature had these ideas that the devotional

is something different from the intellectual. And they tended to look for prose treatises, and sometimes these kind of didactic poems. That's where the intellectual work is going on, or the commentaries. And some scholars, the early scholars even classified most of the West African medieval poetry as lacking any real literary achievement, which I think has much more to do with the training of those authors themselves than with the actual qualities of the poetry. Personally, myself, preparing for this interview and listening to some of the examples that you have on the West African Sufi poetry database that you've built, which listeners can find on our website. This is really gorgeous

poetry. Yeah, I think so too. And I think part of the problem may have been also that they were looking at the poems in manuscript form and not hearing them. So there's some things that you can't hear. So acrostic poetry is a big thing in West African Madih. They love doing acrostics. It's harder to hear. It's easier to see. The first letter of each verse will spell out something. So they'll have an ayah of the Quran,

one poem, 20th century Senegalese poem, takes the Salat al-Fati, famous prayer on the prophet, and the first letter of each verse spells out the Salat al-Fati. One son of Muqtad al-Kunti, very, very prominent 19th century Qadri sheikh, but his son wrote, I call it a 3D poem. So if you take the first word of each verse, it makes another poem in meter and rhyme. So the first word of each verse, I think it's like, I forget how, it's 107 line poem, I think. And then that makes a poem of 20 or 21 lines itself. And the same is true with the first word of the second misra, the second hemi-stitch. It forms another separate poem also in meter and

rhyme. So it's this kind of amazing 3D poem. And that's not something you can hear. You can only see that. But a lot of the beauty of the poetry and even some of the features that are regarded as being defective in Arabic prosody, they work really well when performed and you can hear it. So I think that's perhaps another reason why that's led to the lack of appreciation of this genre. But I do think the main reason has to do with these categories, that the devotional is somehow not literary and not intellectual. Once you kind of get rid of that hang up and you can look at devotional poetry perhaps a bit more objectively, you'll see there's loads of intellectual content.

That's why it and that's why so many commentaries were written upon it and continue to be written and spoken upon it and why it's part of why it's such a popular genre in the region and elsewhere. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you very much. I had a great time. This has been a really exciting interview in which we covered many different topics. Listeners who are interested in finding out more can look at the bibliography on our website, www.OttomanHistoryPodcast.com, in which Ola Domini has very graciously provided us with several titles which readers can follow up with if they're interested. Thank you.