Texts in Practice: Theorizing Lived Intertextuality

In North Africa, the majdhūb saint is colloquially known as the “mad saint”: a figure pulled to God so quickly that it loses control of its rational faculties. Debates about the categorization of the majdhūb emerge in seventeenth-century hagiographic compendia yet also echo in everyday Sufi discussions of spiritual training and authenticity today. The circulation and interplay of similar transgressive acts, discursive arguments, and linguistic phrases attributed to past and living majdhūbs construct what I term “lived intertextuality.” In this presentation, I examine how the lived intertextuality of two majdhūb saints, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān al-Majdhūb (d. 1569) and ‘Umar al-Fayyāsh (d. 1968), illuminates the reworking of the classical genre of Sufi biographical dictionaries. By tracing the interplay of sixteenth and seventeenth narratives with Facebook hagiographies, aphorisms, and pious television shows, I demonstrate how ongoing discussions of the majdhūb’s contested subjecthood renegotiate notions of sanctity, sanity, and the state. 

During the 1930s, as the Fayḍa Tijāniyya Sufi revival spread throughout Senegal, poetry recitation became an important means of transmitting and cultivating spiritual knowledge of God. While the Arabic poetry of Fayḍa founder Shaykh Ibrāhīm Niasse has received scholarly attention, Ibou Diouf’s vernacular Wolof poetry became an equally important channel of spiritual knowledge, and it has recently undergone a resurgence through social media. Indeed, many Fayḍa adherents describe Ibou Diouf’s poetry as a kind of hidden Qur’an inspired directly by God, and classically trained scholars cite it in speeches and lessons. This paper takes a decolonial approach to examining how Ibou Diouf’s poetry contributes to cultivating knowledge of God. It untangles the distinctions between oral and written knowledge to recognize interconnected forms of knowledge typically invisible to academic observers. Although Ibou Diouf was illiterate, his poetry weaves together concepts from the Qur’an and diverse Islamic and Sufi literature.