758 Schermerhorn Ext.
In this talk, I propose that some of the ways that contemporary scholars have tried to go beyond race fail to appreciate the work that different ideas of race did in negotiations between colonial administrators and Muslim notables. The theory of a racialized Islam was used in the production of durable structures during the colonial period that have shaped the way Islam has been understood, lived, and governed. Instead of either discarding race or enshrining it as a transhistorical human category, I examine the Franco-Senegalese racial project and its development of Islamic structures during the colonial moment by reading a genealogy of the saintly figure al-Hajj Umar Tal by Shaykh Musa Kamara. Taken from The Most Deicious of Sciences and the Best of the News in the Life of Hajj Umar, this excerpt of a 1935 text offers a critical view of what was emerging as the joint racial project of the colony-state and indigenous elites as well as the powerful structures of the Sufi brotherhoods in a process of mutual accommodation.
Speaker: Wendell Hassan Marsh, PhD Candidate, Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies-Columbia Universit
