LAUSR

In Europhone scholarship, the long eighteenth century (variously referred to as the “Age of Reason,” “The Enlightenment,” and the “Age of Revolutions”) is often regarded as the foundation of the analytical category of “modernity.” As the site of many modern “myths of origin,” this period of Western European history is thus often studied through the lens of present political and ideological concerns, and the same is true of much scholarship, both Europhone and Arabophone, about Muslim societies, scholars, and movements of this period. As the era that immediately preceded and then witnessed the earliest incursions of colonial conquest and domination by European powers and the rise of various Salafī reform movements, the study of the Islamic world in the eighteenth century has long been colored by presentist ideological agendas seeking to explain “what went wrong” in the Islamic world that allowed or even necessitated European conquest and domination. These narratives of Islamic intellectual decline and decadence have been challenged, if not overturned, by numerous scholarly works over the past decade (e.g., Khaled El-Rouayheb’s Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century: Scholarly Currents in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb [Cambridge University Press, 2015] and Ahmad Dallal’s Islam without Europe: Traditions of Reform in Eighteenth-Century Islamic Thought [University of North Carolina Press, 2018]). However, in Realizing Islam, Zachary Wright considers the long eighteenth century from the perspective of the tradition of the Tijāniyya, which has been the most popular Sufi order on the African continent for the past century. Seen through this lens, the eighteenth century appears as an era in which various Islamic scholarly, spiritual, and esoteric currents of “verification” (ta _ hqīq) culminated in the emergence of the “paradigmatic sainthood” (142) of Shaykh A _ hmad al-Tijānī (1737–1815/1150–1230 AH) and his “Mu _ hammadan Way.”