About The Book

This is the first exhaustive work of one of Islam's most influential figures. He is the leader and founder of the most populace Sufi Tariqas in the Islamic world Shaykh Ahmad Tijani (1737-1815).

He was one of the central figures of eighteenth-century Islamic reform and Sufism (Islamic mysticism). The Sufi order that bears his name, the Tijaniyya, today claims millions of adherents all over the Muslim world, especially in West Africa.

Known by his followers as the Qutb al-Maktum (the Hidden Pole), Shaykh Ahmad Tijani has remained for many an enigmatic and sometimes controversial figure. Here for the first time in the English language is an exposition of his life and doctrine based on primary sources and interviews with prominent Tijani leaders in Senegal, Morocco and Egypt.

About The Author

Zachary Wright, PhD, is assistant professor in residence at Northwestern University in Qatar, with joint appointments in history and religion from Northwestern's Evanston campus. Wright received his PhD (history) from Northwestern University, with a dissertation focusing on Sufism and the history of Islamic knowledge transmission in West Africa. He also has an MA in Arabic studies, Middle East history, from the American University in Cairo, and a BA in history from Stanford University.

He teaches classes on Islam in Africa, modern Middle East history, African history, Islamic intellectual history and Islam in America. He has authored and translated several books, among which are: On the Path of the Prophet: Shaykh Ahmad Tijani and the Tariqa Muhammadiyya (2005), The Removal of Confusion (2010), the latter a translation of a West African Arabic text, Kashif al-ilbas, by the Senegalese Muslim leader Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse, another is What the knowers of Allah have said about the Knowledge of Allah (2015), which he translated for Imam Cheikh Tidiane Cisse,who is the Imam and spiritual heir of Shaykh Ibrahim Niass.