Sufi Mystics of the Niger Desert: Sidi Mahmud and the Hermits of Air

This book is a study of the evidence that exists to this day in the Niger Republic, and in the adjacent regions of Saharan and non-Saharan Africa, about the life of Sidi Mahmud al-Baghdadi, who, it is believed, introduced new doctrines of Oriental Sufism into the Air Massif during the 16th century. He was slain by the then Sultan of the city of Agades, though the Sufi order that he had founded survived amongst his Tuareg and non-Tuareg followers of whom a number were scholars of note and who emanated from a tradition of Saharan scholarship that dates back to the post-Almoravid age, from the 12th and 13th centuries. Some of the sources that tell of the life and death of this saint and religious teacher are oral traditions. However, by far the most comprehensive account of his teachings is to be found in the 17th-century text of Qudwat al-Muctaqid which was allegedly written by Shaykh Ahmad B.Uwayis, the Lamtuna Tuareg. The teachings of Sidi Mahmud were to reappear recently in the Khalwatiyya Sufi order ( Tariqa ) in Niger. They are still important for contemporary Islam in that republic which is a bridge between the Arab world and the Muslim states of the African Sahel. There is also evidence to suggest that initiated members of the Mahmudiyya Sufi order were once to be found throughout the entire Southern Sahara, from Timbuctoo in the West to Borno and Lake Chad in the East. This Sufi order was one of the earliest to be founded in the area of Air which was a crossroads of African trade and of rival empires and of conflicting tribes and peoples.