Science, Sorcery, or Superstition: Debating Cosmology in the Sahara

In the early twentieth century, a Senegalese Sufi scholar named Musa Kamara composed a short work in Arabic entitled Sharḥ al-ṣadr fī kalām ʿalā’l-siḥr. Kamara addressed his work to a French colonial administrator, Albert Bonnel de Mézières, with the goal of explaining practices that fell under the category of sorcery (siḥr) in “lands near and far.” The Sharḥ al-ṣadr itself pulls from an earlier debate at the turn of the nineteenth century between two Saharan Muslim scholar, who disagreed over the permissibility of certain practices related to the realm of the unseen (ʿālam al-ghayb). Musa Kamara directly cites the work of these two figures, but recontextualizes their debates within a new constellation of discourses about race and rationality. My paper uses the Sharḥ al-ṣadr to examine the process of translation that stripped a pre-colonial debate of its cosmological foundations and brought it into a colonial-era debate about logic and rationality.