Tijani Research Council

This research collective aims to assist, share, and coordinate research related to the Tijaniyya Sufi order. We hope to make such research more accessible to a non-academic audience through multiple mediums including print literature, website development, social media presence, and conference and teaching activities. We are a loose network of researchers with similar (and dissimilar) interests, and we do not represent or censure each others’ diverse perspectives.

The Tijaniyya Research Council recognizes the challenges to traditionally constituted religious authority presented by the cacophony of voices in the new digital world. We hope to draw on this dynamism while highlighting a core textual tradition, maintained by chains of personalized knowledge transmission still relevant in the contemporary world. We thus hope to create and sustain dialogues between traditionally constituted religious authorities, academic researchers, and new generations of intellectuals whatever their training.

In particular, the Tijaniyya Research Council hopes to support the ongoing work of gathering a database of literature produced by intellectuals within the Tijaniyya. We recognize that the lens of a particular Sufi order cannot hope to circumscribe the various hybrid identities of intellectuals identifying themselves with such an order. But such circumscription, however negotiated and porous it may be for individuals, nonetheless opens significant vistas into the layered dynamism of Islamic intellectual history. The Tijaniyya, like any other school of thought within orthodox Islam, thus serves as a window through which to observe Islam’s vibrant scholarly production.