MATTHEW STEELE

Few works of medieval Islamic law have endured as successfully as the fourteenth century legal manual, the Mukhtasar Khalil.  Through a close reading of hundreds of glosses and ethnography of its transmission today, my dissertation traces how the Khalil assumed a position of authority in Islamic Africa.  I draw on textual anthropology and book history to sketch a social life of the book as it evolved across time and place.  Beginning in the sixteenth century, I explore the book’s transmission across two ends of the Sahel, considering how the Khalil’s reception in Mauritania and Sudan brought to bear very different ways of understanding Islamic law, textuality, scholasticism, and even piety.  By doing so, I am interested in what made the Khalil an attractive work for recension by scholars, and how, relative to glosses of other law texts, its commentators found in its margins a space to reimagine later Maliki thought.  My project questions how the Khalil and its glosses produced a particular experience with the text, one that was generative of not simply changes to legal precedent and literary genre, but of communities for whom their connection to the Khalil served as a type of notional identity.  Through fieldwork in seminaries across Mauritania and Sudan, my dissertation considers how the Khalil was inhabited by scholars and laity alike in ways fundamentally different from fiqh texts of its kind.  I aim to answer why the Khalil represented, and in counterintuitive ways still does, a uniquely discursive space for legal and literary creativity, one not normally associated with positive law or Islamic Africa. 

My research is broadly concerned with knowledge practices and Islamic law in Africa.  To the extent that the western academy has taken Africa’s experience with Islam seriously, classical Islamic sciences, and positive law (furu` al-fiqh) in particular, remain underrepresented.  The literature has typically depicted Islamic Africa in the racialized image of the Sufi marabout, a caricature of orality, mysticism, and custom.  Yet local historical sources reveal that African Muslims did indeed write, and did so prodigiously about Islamic law.  Through ethnography of Muslim teaching institutions and study of teaching ledgers, family archives, and legal manuscripts, my work aims to reorient discussion of Islam and Africa around positive law, a branch of legal studies overlooked in work on Sufism and legal theory (usul al-fiqh) predominant in African and Islamic Studies.  I focus on an approximately three hundred year period beginning in the late seventeenth century in which the production of legal manuals, commentaries, and poems by African scholars surged.  Rather than the waning vitality accused of medieval Islamic scholarship, I find a far more vibrant landscape of later Maliki thought and of furu` al-fiqh than is usually supposed.  My research considers the production of these texts as part of larger transformations occurring across the late medieval Islamic World, as well as their legacies in Africa today.  It questions how engaging with medieval legal literature evoke particular ways of being in the world.  I ask how ethics of knowledge, sociality, and authority are produced through re-constituting works of medieval Islamic law, and how their construction shapes ideas of law and scholasticism in contemporary Africa.

I have a related interest in the textual practices of African language scholarship written in Arabic script, or `ajami.  Though `ajami has received increasing attention in the western academy, a vast body of African language scholarship in Arabic remains unstudied.  My research explores one of the largest of these sources, Pulaar language `ajami manuscripts produced under the Futa Jallon Empire of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and later in colonial Guinea.  By relying on family archives, marginalia, and `ajami commentaries of classical Arabic works, I consider how jurists deployed `ajami scholarship to recast legal canons, debate, and institutions, in fundamentally new ways.  My interest in doing so is both literary and historical.  I am concerned with the textual content of such manuscripts, but also the values and practices at play in their composition, the audiences they sought to shape in their transmission, and their location in a broader tradition of Arabic scholarship.  My work explores how this production was authorized apart from, but also deeply enmeshed within, existing Islamic discourses in Arabic.  Because a large part of this scholarship was oriented around glossing works of Arabic, I question how textual interpolation was understood by Pulaar authors of `ajami works.  My research asks what it meant to explain a medieval Islamic text in Pulaar rather than Arabic in the Futa Jallon of the eighteenth century?  What constituted a work of `ajami translation rather than commentary to the author producing it, and how closely did those divisions parallel their Arabic equivalents?