This dissertation has been written in order to analyse the impact of the fayḍa Tijaniyya on the Arabic literature of Africa, and to extract trends in the scholarly Tijaniyya community of the twentieth century. The research has further led to the discovery of works that have not been recorded in John Hunwick's Arabic Literature of Africa, Volume II (ALA II), which is regarded as a standard reference work. The Tijaniyya Sufi order was born in 18th century Algeria and had reached West Africa by the nineteenth century. Some of the beliefs held by the Tijaniyya included an expected spiritual revival, known in Sufi terms as fayḍa. It was in 1929 that Ibrahīm Niasse proclaimed the fayḍa Tijaniyya, and within a few years, this revolution had spread widely. As with previous Sufi revivals in the area, a literary boom occurred with the fayḍa. This boom was not significantly documented, resulting in the Tijaniyya Project (TijProj), which this research is based on. TijProj is an offshoot of a larger project of Northwestern University's Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa (ISITA), which covers countries beyond Nigeria. Like much of the traditional Arabic literature in Africa, the TijProj collection required cataloguing as it was incomplete. The collection was held by Andrea Brigaglia, then of the Religious Studies Department of the University of Cape Town, as he had personally collected a significant amount of literature and field notes through interactions with scholars and other individuals in the literature trade in Nigeria. The literature was categorised into genres and subjects after being catalogued. The cataloguing and organisation of the materials led to the creation of an enormous database of literature produced by the jamā‘at al fayḍa Tijaniyya (“the community of the fayḍa Tijaniyya”), which was then stored in Microsoft Access. As a result of creating the database, quantitative information could be drawn, as to what impact the fayḍa had on literature production, as well as further qualitative information about the jamā‘at al fayḍa tijaniyya . Finally, the collection was compared to ALA II, which led to the discovery that almost two-thirds of TijProj has not been recorded in ALA II. This project has served to highlight the scholarly importance of the jamā‘at al fayḍa Tijaniyya , which constitutes a majority Sufi movement in Africa with African origins and international influence. It has shown the enormous contribution of the jamā‘at al fayḍa Tijaniyya to the corpus of Arabic literature in Africa. The intellectual trends that existed within the community have been derived, and are based on traditional Arabic literature, yet particular to the 20th century jamā‘at al fayḍa Tijaniyya . Finally, this research has catalogued new source material for researchers in the field.

My thesis explores the spatialities and gendered pedagogies of Muslim childhoods within the context of selected South African madrasahs (places for religious instruction). The main question that guides my research study is how is the madrasah space gendered? Beginning with the assumption that madrasah spaces are gendered, my research seeks to understand Muslim childhoods and gender as a relational and materially contingent social phenomenon. I engage my research question with theoretical lenses developed by critical posthumanist and feminist educational thinkers focusing on the concepts of diffraction, entanglement and intra-action. These theoretical and analytical tools provide a lens for thinking about childhoods, gender and childhood pedagogies as ontologically relational. Diffraction attends to the multiplicity of interdependencies and ecological networks that constitute and shape interactions between subjects and objects. In this ontological-epistemological framework, the material, discursive and affective factors of social phenomena are seen as entangled and co-emergent encounters. My diffractive analysis is a place-attuned, relational reading of childhood ontologies, it focuses on the intra-actions between humans and more-than humans, nature-culture, organic-inorganic, and maps patterns of material-discursive affective entanglements. Using data co-generated from fieldwork observational studies conducted at four madrasah sites in the Western Cape, I diffractively analyse the spatialities and gendered pedagogies of Muslim childhoods. I map how historical geographical-political-social-pedagogical factors intra-act and participate in the gendering of space. My diffractive reading on Muslim childhood spatialities, in the final analysis, offers a lens for thinking about gendered ontologies in ways that are nonlinear, co-emergent and relational. This place-based perspective on madrasah pedagogies contributes to a broader conversation on religious geographies within a post-anthropocene context of environmental precarity, socio-economic inequalities and spatial disparities in South Africa.

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