The Walking Qur’an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in

West Africa

Rudolph T. Ware III (2014)

Book Review by Jameel Asani

The Walking Qur’an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in Africa
by Rudolph T. Ware III (2014) is a deconstructive historical and anthropological
study of ‘the role of Islamic knowledge in the historiography of Africa’ framed and
impelled by several concerns and themes. Amidst the inevitable discursive flurry
attendant upon such an exercise, two salient motifs organize the élan of the text. As
the author avers, these are:
1) "Embodiment as a paradigm to understand Islamic scholarship", particularly as
epitomized in the teaching traditions (1000 – 1800 CE) of West "African Muslim
societies." (Ware, 4-5)
2) "Islamic and African studies need to take African Muslims seriously as bearers
and interpreters of forms of Islamic knowledge and embodied practice with powerful
claims to scriptural authority and prophetic precedent." (ibid. 14)

According to the author a number of racial and cultural predilections jaundiced earlier
historiographies of West African Islam and its Islamic pedagogies. In this catalogue
of Cartesian dichotomies laid atop each other, Islam is the realm of the mind
(masculine, rational and Arabic), while spirit possession is the realm of the body
(feminine, emotional and African). This dichotomy was aligned to another
problematic categorization. The author’s findings suggest that studies of Islam turn
on “binary oppositions of syncretism and orthodoxy”. The former consist of a
complex including Sufism, divination, spirit possession, and talismanic uses of the
Qur’an. Ware contends that though controversial to some observers, all these
practices “are ancient in Islam and present in every Muslim society in the world”.

The latter, orthodoxy or Islam in Africa, conversely, is often synonymous ‘with Salafi,
Wahabbi and Islamist influences’. It consists of ‘reform’, which entails “the promotion
of modernized schooling, literalist approaches to the text, Arab cultural mores and
the distrust of all forms of esoterism”. According to Ware western scholars and many
modern Muslims often uncritically accord textual legitimacy and Islamic orthodoxy to
these ‘reformists’, who, paradoxically given their reverence for scripture have often
opposed traditional Qur’an schooling. Since the 19th century, the author proclaims
that increasing numbers of Muslims and non-Muslims have come to portray the
Qur’an school and its epistemology as backward.

Using his anthropological training, the author explains that exploring the dynamics of
“Africanisation” and “Islamisation” is still a discussion of syncretism and assimilation,
framings which contain subtle spatial and normative assumptions hidden within
them. He further contends when these categories are applied to Islam they “tend to
carry the implicit (or explicit) notion that the center’s claims on normative authority
are spatially and structurally immutable. In other words, Arab Muslims are in
positions of perpetual tutelage over non-Arabs.” Hence, from within a framework of
syncretism and assimilation it is difficult for the periphery to provide meaningful
insights on the center. “Such a discourse allows little room for places beyond the so-
called Islamic heartlands to contribute much to Islam”. Furthermore, within this meta-
narrative “it is very difficult if not impossible to claim that a history of Muslim religious
culture in West Africa (a main goal of this book) could provide revealing insights
about the history of knowledge in Islam”.

While Ware’s project is guided and shaped by the two motifs of epistemology and
anthropology, he carefully cautions us that, in this study, both act in service of
reconstituting and rewriting African Islamic history in a manner more appreciative
and discerning of the intrinsic values and sensibilities of its peoples and their
sapiential (characterized by wisdom) traditions.[7]

In unfolding and defending his view of the “corporeal knowledge practices of

transmission” associated with the Quranic schools [daaras], he challenges the
impression, encouraged by NGO’s such as HRW(Human Rights Watch, 2010), that
the methods of these Quranic schools are “pedagogically backward…at best
retrograde and at worst sites of child endangerment and abuse.”[2-3]

Here, Ware’s approach, while not shying away from the ideological polemic, is
markedly epistemological. In addition to the flagrant, and now amply exposed,
Eurocentric proclivities of many scholars he also draws attention to meaning made in
contemporary Salafism, Wahhabism, and Islamism. Their views he argues “owe as
much to Enlightenment rationalism as to the scholarly tradition in Islam.” While they
vociferously proclaim “Islamic purity” the author suggests that “…their
understandings of what knowledge is are plainly hybrid constructs, born of colonial
encounter…where Western rationalisms and positivisms are inscribed at every level
of their approaches to knowledge.”

Adopting an approach of ‘epistemological embodiment’, which questions the

conceptual divide between ‘textual Islam’ and ‘corporeal spiritism’, the human body
is posited as a locus of multi-modal cognition and transformation incorporating
memorization, textuality, mimesis, service, and different sensibilities towards reading
and listening.

While cautious not to romanticize the excesses and aberrations of African history,
Ware asks the reader to pause and ponder alternative emic readings of what liberal
ideology sees as a barbaric affront to human sovereignty and dignity. Where their
etic studies suggest abuse, he maintains that “In the Quran School, people learn to
make and live in a community.” He also asserts that this kind of communal
responsibility is under assault from individualistic materialism. Continuing, he notes
that, “While the consumer culture of late capitalism has certainly amplified this
selfishness, from an Islamic perspective, this kind of proud egocentric ambition is a
sickness of the heart as old as the children of Adam.” So, while modern society
valorizes and celebrates this endless pursuit of individualistic consumption, the
Quran speaks directly to such excess, which “was likely first heard by the Quraysh
as a piercing social critique.”

Ware weaves a complex narrative which is at times polemical while on other

occasions academically rigorous. The book challenges the intellectual
complacencies and cultural biases associated with European modernity under which
so much scholarship, even some purportedly critical of the Eurocentric intellectual
hegemony, woefully flounders. The central thrust of the book (which requires a lot
more research and dialogue), it would seem, is the manner in which it unfurls the
implications of an embodied epistemology, as found in the Quran schools of
Senegambia, in respect of African cultural historiography and a holistic pedagogy
which affords contemporary scholarship a wider and richer horizon of sensibilities
from which to rescue and reconfigure a more germane present day Islamic
discourse.