On Friday April 7th, Noah Salomon gave a Baraza presentation titled, “For Love of the Prophet: The Art of Islamic State-Making in Sudan.” Dr. Salomon is Associate Professor of Religion, and Director of Middle East Studies, at Carleton College. The talk supplemented material that can be found in Dr. Salomon’s new book, For Love of the Prophet: An Ethnography of Sudan’s Islamic State (2016, Princeton University Press).
Dr. Salomon began his talk using the painting depicted on the front cover of his book to visually and narratively situate the project of the Islamic State in Sudan within a broader timeline than is typically understood. In 2015, Dr. Salomon was finishing his book and traveled to Sudan with the hope of acquiring a painting by Dr. Ahmed Abdel Aal, a painter, scholar and Sufi Sheikh who had served as the Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts of Khartoum. Dr. Salomon traveled to Dr. Ahmed’s daughter’s house as she housed her father’s paintings after his death. Many of the paintings were in bad condition, partially because there was no protecting them from the ubiquitous dust storms. After selecting a painting with no title, Dr. Salomon hoped, but did not know, if the work of art would relate to his book project on Islamic State-Making in Sudan.
Dr. Salomon returned to the US and in the process of having the painting restored, a faded title appeared on the back of the work- “From the Diary of Shaykh Taj al-Din al-Bahari”. In painting the work,Dr. Ahmed had imagined a diary for Sheikh Taj al-Din al-Bahari, “the Sufi leader and follower of the Qadiriyya order who met Dawud b. ‘Abd al-Jalil, a Sudanese merchant from Arbaji, during the pilgrimage in Mecca about 1577 and was invited to visit the Funj kingdom. There he stayed for seven years, during which he initiated a number of prominent Sudanese into the Qadiriyya order” (Mamdani 2009, Saviors and Survivors, pg. 325). Essentially, Dr. Salomon argues, the Sudanese state is realizing that al-Bahari’s Sufi Islam had been more effective in this prior time than their current law-based approach to the Islamic State-Making Process. After the partition of Sudan into two countries in 2011, Sudan has begun to explicitly use art and poetry to instill love of the prophet within the heart of the Sudanese. Similarly, the particular moment in Sudanese history in which al-Bahari occupies is being mobilized, rewritten, and repurposed for the nation-making initiative. Dr. Salomon believes this is what Dr. Ahmed was referring to in his painting depicting the diary of a man who lived several hundred years ago.
CAS News Bulletin- Week of April 10th, 2017