A Brief History of Islam in Precolonial and Colonial Mauritania

As in other parts of northwest Africa, the dominant interpretation of Islam in what became Mauritania came to center upon three core components: in jurisprudence, the Mālikī school of Sunni Islam; in creed, Ashʿarī theology; and in spirituality and social organization, Sufism and Sufi orders. Scholars in northwest Africa came to draw upon a widely shared canon of texts in these fields and in adjacent disciplines such as Qur’anic exegesis, Arabic grammar and literature, and Prophetic biography, as well as other sciences such as medicine and astronomy.⁵ Various forms of esoteric knowledge are also transmitted within parts of Mauritanian society.⁶

Much of the region’s rich literature exists only in manuscript form, although massive efforts to catalog and digitize that literature are underway. Several Mauritanian cities, particularly Chinguetti or Shinqīṭ, are not merely repositories of such manuscripts but also symbols of past and present identities. It is common to see Mauritanians, particularly in Islamic contexts, identified as “Shinqīṭī” (“of Shinqīṭ”) rather than “Mūrītānī” (“Mauritanian”), even if the individual in question is not from the actual city of Chinguetti. Alongside the textual canon of the region, orality and the oral transmission of knowledge are vital components of Islamic education in Mauritania.⁷

The dominant institution in Mauritania for transmitting Islamic knowledge and authority has been the maḥḍara (plural maḥāḍir), which students usually enter after having completed the memorization of the Qur’an. The maḥḍara is a school—sometimes mobile—centered on one or more shaykhs who teach in a tutorial format where students read through texts with their teachers.⁸ Students often memorize manuals such as the Maliki compendium the Mukhtaṣar (Abridgment) of Khalīl bin Isḥaq al-Jundī, a 14th-century Egyptian scholar. The influence of the Mukhtaṣar has been so pervasive in Mauritania that the country’s scholars have sometimes described themselves as “Khalīliyyūn,” or “Khalīl-ists.” This text looms large in multiple ways in postcolonial Mauritania, even as the Maliki school has been challenged by other interpretive currents; one continuing legacy of the Mukhtaṣar is as a contested symbol in debates over slavery and post-slavery, with the text invoked by some to justify slavery and castigated by others as the prop of a racist power structure. A traditionalist education in Mauritania frequently involves spending extended periods at more than one maḥḍara, especially if the student reaches the level of studying advanced texts; a maḥḍara education can thus be peripatetic and customized to the needs and interests of the student. Advanced students do not receive formal degrees, but rather complete readings, receive authorizations from individual shaykhs to teach specific books (authorizations called ijāzāt, singular ijāza), and gradually pass from the role of student to the role of teacher, perhaps eventually establishing their own maḥāḍir. Various efforts to reform and “rationalize” the maḥḍara institution are underway in Mauritania, and there are also parallel and competing institutions of higher Islamic education; as elsewhere in the Muslim world, in postcolonial Mauritania there is considerable debate about how and whether classical institutions set up their advanced students for success or failure in modern economies. For defenders of the classical institutions, the maḥāḍir are indispensable as vehicles for preserving Islam and Mauritanian culture; for critics, the maḥāḍir are outmoded both pedagogically and economically, and the system either needs to be reformed (for example, by introducing the granting of formal degrees) or discarded.

Islamic authority, as a source of legitimation, has been a powerful political force in what is now Mauritania for a millennium or more.⁹ Although the pre-colonial period is beyond the scope of this article, it is worth noting that a substantial amount of scholarship has focused on Islamic life, intellectual developments, and social change in 18th- and 19th-century Mauritania.¹⁰ Precolonial Mauritania was the site of various Muslim-led polities and social units, which were then combined under French colonial rule from the first decade of the 20th century until 1960.¹¹ Notably, contemporary Mauritanian intellectuals’ understandings of their Islamic past are not confined to the precise territory of present-day Mauritania, and constituent parts of Mauritanian society have profound connections to any or all of what is now Morocco, Mali, and Senegal. For example, many Mauritanian Muslim scholars and thinkers look to the 11th-/12th-century al-Murābiṭūn/Almoravid Dynasty, with its capital in Marrakesh in present-day Morocco, as a touchstone in the region’s political and religious history. Other pivotal figures from the precolonial era include Sīdī al-Mukhtār al-Kuntī (d. 1811) and his son Sīdī Muḥammad al-Kuntī (d. 1826), Sufi leaders who were based in what is now northern Mali but whose impact reached throughout parts of West Africa.¹² Key Sufi orders in Mauritania include the Qādiriyya, the order to which the al-Kunti family belonged, and which is named after the 12th-century Baghdadi teacher ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī (d. 1166); the Shādhiliyya, whose founder was the Moroccan spiritual master ʿAlī bin ʿAbd Allāh al-Shādhilī (d. 1258); and the Tijāniyya, named for the North African Shaykh Aḥmad al-Tijānī (d. 1815). Overall, Islamic authority in pre-colonial Mauritania often rested on one or more factors, especially in combination: charisma, scholarship, genealogy, and/or military and political power. Islamic authority has also typically been exercised by men, although female scholars and spiritual guides have also been highly influential, in private but also increasingly in public.¹³

The consolidation of French colonial rule depended on relationships with key Muslim leaders in the region, notably the Sufi clerics Saad Buh (d. 1917, of the Fāḍiliyya branch of the Qādiriyya), Sidiyya Baba (d. 1924, of the Sidiyya branch of the Qādiriyya), and the latter’s son Abdellahi (d. 1964).¹⁴ French colonial authorities also sought, to some extent, to control and reshape Muslim identities among the elite, notably through education, selected sponsorship for individuals to make the hajj, and other interventions.¹⁵ However, the French also faced armed resistance, along both religious and tribal lines; the most prominent armed opponent of French rule in the early colonial period was Saad Buh’s older brother Muḥammad Muṣṭafā bin Muḥammad Fāḍil, better known as Māʾ al-ʿAynayn (Water of the Eyes), who died in 1910.¹⁶ The question of which Muslim scholars and constituencies were close to the French, and which were not, has continued to reverberate in postcolonial Mauritanian history.

Intra-Muslim Debates and Interactions in Mauritania

Race and Islam in Mauritania

Analyses of Mauritanian society tend to speak in terms of three main social-racial categories: the bīḍān, indexed as white, who speak Ḥassāniyya, the local dialect of Arabic; the ḥarāṭīn, indexed as black, who also speak Ḥassāniyya and who are viewed as descendants of enslaved people; and the Afro-Mauritanians, who are indexed as black and do not speak Ḥassāniyya as a mother tongue. Each category can then be further subdivided; in particular, the bīḍān are subdivided into Ḥassān (“warrior”) and Zwāya (“clerical”) tribes, while the Afro-Mauritanians comprise ethnic groups such as Peul/Fulani, Wolof, Soninké, and Bambara.³⁴ Estimating the relative demographic weight of each category is an exercise with heavily political ramifications, because the bīḍān are and have long been politically dominant; whether they constitute a plurality within the society, or a distinct minority, is a fraught issue. Within the bīḍān, meanwhile, competition and cooperation between tribes remains one key factor in politics, with successive heads of state accused of favoring their own tribes—for example, the Smassid of Ould al-Taya, the Awlad Bu Sbaa of Ould Abdel Aziz, and the Ideiboussat of Mohamed Ould Ghazouani (in power since 2019).³⁵ As elsewhere, however, tribal affiliations are not blueprints for life pathways or political choices—the Ideiboussat is a Zwāya tribe, for example, yet Ould Ghazouani is a career military officer.

Clerics from the bīḍān have dominated the upper echelons of the scholarly hierarchy in Mauritania throughout the country’s independent history. As in the military and in politics, major posts—as imams of major mosques, as ministers of Islamic Affairs, as top judges—have almost exclusively gone to bīḍān scholars. Clerical authority can also have a strongly family-based and tribal component: for example, Muhammad al-Hasan Ould al-Dedew’s profile owes much to his own learning and charisma, but also draws heavily on the fact that he is the nephew of Muhammad Salim Ould Addoud, and the grandson of the major scholar Muhammad ‘Ālī Ould ‘Abd al-Wadud (d. 1982). Within the wider Muslim and Arab worlds, the archetype of the Mauritanian scholar is also bīḍānī; the foremost representatives of Mauritania’s scholarly class on the regional and world stages are the above-mentioned Muhammad al-Amin al-Shinqiti, Abd Allah bin Bayyah, and Ould al-Dedew, all of them bīḍān. Not just family but also tribal networks help to shape networks of knowledge transmission, with tribes such as the Tajakant (singular Jakani) and the Massuma playing central roles in both Mauritania and abroad; al-Shinqiti was Jakani, while Bin Bayyah and Ould al-Dedew are both Massumi. Clerical and tribal networks have, among other roles, played a critical part in linking Mauritania to global circuits of Islamic finance.³⁶

Despite wide bīḍān influence in the religious arena, there are prominent scholars among other social-racial groups, especially among the Afro-Mauritanians. The Peul/Fulani, for example, are a major, Muslim-majority ethnic group across the Sahel and West Africa. The Peul have a centuries-long tradition of Islamic scholarship, and several influential jihad leaders in pre-colonial West Africa were Peul. In Mauritania, important Peul scholars include Abdoul Aziz Sy (d. 2012). Meanwhile, Sufi orders span borders and ethnic groups; For example, the pivotal Senegalese Sufi Shaykh Ibrahim Niass (1900–1975), who was ethnically Wolof, studied under shaykhs of the Idaw Ali tribe in Mauritania as a young man.³⁷ The postcolonial period has also witnessed the emergence of a growing number of ḥarāṭīn imams and scholars, including in ways that have contributed to Islamist mobilization.³⁸

Although virtually all Mauritanians are Muslims, tensions over racial and linguistic issues have recurred through postcolonial Mauritanian history. Major contention broke out over “Arabization” policies in education and other sectors in the 1960s. The 1980s featured the most severe internal violence of the country’s history, much of it targeting the Afro-Mauritanians. After the publication of the Manifesto of the Oppressed Black Mauritanian in 1986, there were numerous arrests of Afro-Mauritanian activists, and a further wave of arrests targeted Afro-Mauritanian officers after they were accused of attempting to stage a coup in 1987. In 1989, a border dispute between Mauritania and Senegal led to pogroms in both Nouakchott and Dakar, inter-communal violence in Mauritania, and the expulsion of tens of thousands of black Mauritanians. Related violence continued through the early 1990s.

Meanwhile, there are enduring tensions surrounding slavery in Mauritanian society; within the shifting phenomenon of slavery and post-slavery, coercion, Islamic discourses, and gender intersect in complex ways for both slave owners and enslaved persons.³⁹ Mauritania formally abolished slavery in 1981, and the National Assembly passed legislation criminalizing slavery in 2007, yet forms of enslavement and coerced labor persist in parts of the country. Without minimizing the horrors of slavery within Mauritania, it is worth noting that the problem is not as unique to Mauritania as much Western journalistic coverage assumes, given slavery’s persistence in neighboring Mali as well, and legacies of post-slavery discrimination and trauma elsewhere in northwest Africa.⁴⁰ In any event, there are deeply rooted forms of discrimination within Mauritania, and the roles of slave descendants and former slaves are being renegotiated at the individual and collective levels, again including in gendered ways.⁴¹ The postcolonial period has witnessed the persistence of socio-racial and tribal hierarchies even amid rapid social change and access to new forms of capital and social status for the ḥarāṭīn.⁴²

Since the 1970s, there have been waves of abolitionist activism, primarily among the ḥarāṭīn.⁴³ Key anti-slavery organizations include the Organization for the Liberation and Emancipation of Haratines (El HOR), SOS Esclaves, and the Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement (IRA). Ḥarāṭīn leaders, including anti-slavery activists, have slowly achieved greater representation within politics, holding posts such as President of the National Assembly (Messaoud Ould Boulkheir, 2007–2014) and Prime Minister (Mohamed Ould Bilal, since 2020). In the 2019 presidential election, the runner-up was Biram Dah Abeid, founder of IRA. Yet there remains a clear ceiling for ḥarāṭīn and Afro-Mauritanian politicians and demands, and challenges to the bīḍān elite—such as the protests that followed the 2019 election—are repressed with force.

Ḥarāṭīn activists have challenged bīḍān dominance not just at the societal level but also in the religious sphere. Most dramatically, in 2012 Dah Abeid publicly burned the Mukhtaṣar of Khalil in a gesture aimed at rebuking what he saw as the dominant classes’ appeals to Islamic law in justifying continued de facto slavery in the country. For context, the Mukhtaṣar and other Maliki manuals assume, as does much of the wider pre-modern Islamic tradition, that slavery is part of Muslim society—Maliki manuals often refer dispassionately to rulings associated with slavery, giving no sense that slavery itself is intrinsically wrong. Dah Abeid’s burning of the Mukhtaṣar appeared calculated, in part, to reject and provoke the scholarly establishment itself. From the vantage point of the establishment, however, Dah Abeid’s act appeared fundamentally anti-Islamic; not as severe as burning a copy of the Qur’an, but sacrilegious nonetheless. The book-burning itself, meanwhile, became a media spectacle not just for the IRA, but also for segments of the bīḍān scholarly establishment, which sought to use the event to silence ḥarāṭīn dissent and criticism of the social order.⁴⁴ Another episode worth highlighting in the arena of socio-racial relations and Islam is the case of Mohamed Ould Mkhaitir. In a 2013 Facebook post, Ould Mkhaitir compared the position of the “blacksmith” caste in Mauritania to what he saw as the Prophet Muhammad’s unfavorable treatment of the Banū Qurayẓa Jewish tribe. The post triggered an outcry and resulted in Ould Mkhaitir’s imprisonment from 2014 to 2019 on blasphemy charges; after a death sentence was overturned, Ould Mkhaitir was eventually released, whereupon he left the country for Europe. The case became a rallying cry for many Muslim scholars in the country, some of whom denounced the state’s decision to cancel the death sentence.⁴⁵

It remains rare for prominent bīḍān scholars to condemn slavery root and branch, perhaps reflecting entrenched systemic racism in Mauritania but perhaps also reflecting the deep-seated moral-intellectual dilemma for contemporary Muslim thinkers generally when it comes to slavery, a phenomenon now often considered morally repulsive but also a phenomenon practiced by no less than the Prophet Muhammad himself. One bīḍānī scholar who has issued a fatwa declaring all types of slavery invalid is Ahmad Jiddu/Jiddu Wuld Ahmad Bahi; the media coverage that this fatwa attracted is, in and of itself, an indication that many Mauritanian scholars remain reluctant to issue blanket condemnations of slavery.⁴⁶

State-Islam Relations in Postcolonial Mauritania

At independence, the Mauritanian state was skeletal. For most of the colonial period, Saint-Louis (in Senegal) was Mauritania’s capital; at independence, Nouakchott had only a few thousand residents, and there were relatively few holders of university degrees in the new independent administration.⁴⁷ Iron and fish resources enabled “a degree of relative prosperity,” but the state presence in sectors such as education remained thin through the 1970s.⁴⁸ Enforcement of particular Islamic doctrines would have been a challenging undertaking for the new state.

Despite Mauritania’s long history of Islamic politics and scholarship, the country entered independence with some ambivalence about the place of Islam within the state. On the one hand, Mauritania was an “Islamic Republic,” a moniker that some leaders understood as a unifying platform in a country divided along racial, tribal, and linguistic lines. On the other hand, there were limits to the actual place of Islam within the state, especially amid the lingering influence of French political and legal models. The 1961 Constitution proclaimed that “the religion of the Mauritanian people is the Muslim religion” (Article 2) and that the president “is of the Muslim religion” (Article 10), but was silent on the question of sharīʿa. Meanwhile, what some Mauritanian Muslim actors regarded as symbols of Islam, others regarded as power grabs by one segment of society against another. For example, in the 1960s, the “Arabization” of education and other sectors became hugely contentious, including in religious terms. Ould Daddah, who enforced Arabization, later wrote in his memoir that colonial legacies of recruiting administrators primarily from the south, in other words from non-Arab communities, contributed to tensions about education and the civil service after independence. Voices in postcolonial Mauritania called for “resuscitating” the country’s “Islamo-Arabic cultural heritage, considerably stifled by colonization,” but also for “resuscitating” the country’s “specifically African cultural heritage.”⁴⁹ In formal politics, meanwhile, the battle-lines in the 1960s and 1970s were more ideological (leftists, Nasserists, Baathists, etc.) and tribal than they were religio-political.

Starting in the mid-1970s, the waning single-party regime of Mokhtar Ould Daddah, as well as his military successors from 1978 on, began to show more interest in developing institutions of “official Islam” in the country. More research is needed to understand the precise driving forces behind these moves, but they likely reflected multiple factors: the search for new or strengthened sources of regime legitimacy, especially amid rapid urbanization and social change; the desire to counterbalance leftist opposition movements, such as the Kadihines, an underground political party founded in 1973; the impact of regional and global trends in Islamic activism; and the availability of new sources of funding, notably from Saudi Arabia. Three noteworthy institutional changes occurred during the 1970s and 1980s. First, in 1975, Ould Daddah’s government created a standalone Ministry of Islamic Affairs (headed by Hamdan Ould al-Tah). Second, in 1978, authorities established the state-backed Higher Institute of Islamic Studies and Research (Institut Supérieur d’Etudes et de Recherches Islamiques, ISERI) with support from Saudi Arabia. Third, under military ruler Colonel Mohamed Khouna Ould Haidalla (in power 1980–1984), the sharīʿa became—theoretically at least—enshrined in Mauritanian law with the promulgation of the July 1983 penal code, which outlined penalties relating to classical categories in the sharīʿa such as the hudud (crimes against God), qisas (crimes where the victim or the victim’s family have the option of retaliation), and the payment of diya (compensation for the victim or the victim’s family).⁵⁰ None of Ould Haidalla’s successors have been as interested as he was in formal Islamization of the state; indeed, Ould al-Taya’s 1991 constitution was drafted with the help of French advisors and was closely modeled on the French political system.⁵¹ Yet institutions such as ISERI have remained influential, including sometimes as loci of Islamist dissent.

Under the regime of Ould al-Taya there were, as noted above, waves of serious repression against Islamists. The most severe repression came amid the US-led “Global War on Terror.” Ould al-Taya had spent much of the 1990s as something of an international pariah, out of favor with the United States due to his support for Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War, as well as his role in mass human rights violations against the Afro-Mauritanian and ḥarāṭīn populations. Ould al-Taya began working his way back into Washington’s favor through 1991’s (partly cosmetic) liberalization of political space, by recognizing Israel in 1999, by embracing counterterrorism cooperation with the United States after 9/11, and by tacitly supporting the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Islamists criticized the latter three policies, and after the occupation of Iraq began in March 2003 authorities arrested and tortured a number of Islamists, Islamist-leaning clerics, and other dissidents.⁵² In June of that year, tensions escalated further when former Major Saleh Ould Hanenna led a coup attempt. Following the coup, Islamists were accused of colluding with Ould Hanenna and further crackdowns occurred. Ould al-Taya won approximately 67% of the vote in the November 2003 elections, defeating former head of state Ould Haidalla and several other candidates. It was not until Ould al-Taya’s overthrow in 2005, and the subsequent partial opening of political and media space under the transitional military government of 2005–2007, that Islamists were able to operate more freely.

Ould Abdel Aziz had an ambivalent relationship with Islamists during his 2008–2019 tenure in power. On the one hand, Ould Abdel Aziz did not conflate mainstream Islamists and jihadists, as Ould al-Taya had done—although Ould Abdel Aziz justified the 2008 coup partly on the basis of the claim that his civilian predecessor, Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi, had been weak on terrorism. Even as Mauritanian authorities vigorously pursued jihadists in Nouakchott, in the country at large, and even into neighboring Mali, the Islamists’ party, Tawassoul, retained its legal status and could compete in elections. Starting in 2010, Ould Abdel Aziz’s administration began to turn from a counterterrorism-focused strategy to a more multi-pronged counter-jihadism effort. Here Ould Abdel Aziz even enlisted mainstream Islamists’ help, particularly that of Ould al-Dedew, who participated (alongside loyalist clerics) in a prison dialogue with convicted terrorists and suspected jihadists. On the other hand, Ould Abdel Aziz had tensions with Islamists, especially towards the end of his second elected term: In 2018, authorities closed Ould al-Dedew’s Markaz Takwīn al-ʿUlamāʾ, accusing the school of inculcating extremism in students.⁵³ After Ould Abdel Aziz left office, tensions with Islamists seemed to subside a bit again—but the school was not reopened.

Although torture and imprisonment of Islamists and hardliners appears to have lessened in recent years, the Mauritanian state also appears to practice fairly broad surveillance measures against clerics who have been associated with jihadists. For example, Abu Hafs al-Muritani (Mahfouz Ould al-Walid), a former advisor to Osama bin Laden, returned to Mauritania in 2012 after spending much of the post-9/11 period under Iranian state supervision. Al-Muritani enjoys considerable freedom to appear in the national and international media, but also lives in a centrally located Nouakchott neighborhood where he may face surveillance. Another cleric, Muhammad Salim al-Majlisi, was accused of ties to al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb in the late 2000s and was imprisoned until 2010, when he was freed as part of an amnesty following the prison dialogues. Al-Majlisi has been detained briefly several times since then, but also enjoys some freedom to speak in the media, as well as to preach and teach in mosques. One author has described the state’s approach to such clerics as “control and contain.”

Beyond the authorities’ relationships with dissidents and potential dissidents, one of the most important recent reforms to official Islamic institutions was the 2017–2018 reorganization of the High Council for Islamic Legal Rulings and Recourse (al-Majlis al-Aʿlā li-l-Fatwā wa-l-Maẓālim, where “maẓālim” literally means “injustices” but here refers to the structures charged with addressing injustices). The new High Council replaced and merged two earlier structures, the High Islamic Council and the Mediator of the Republic (charged with improving government-citizen relations). This change was one element of a 2017 constitutional referendum that passed with over 85 percent of the vote as opposition parties denounced what they saw as presidential overreach. In terms of socio-racial composition, the membership of the new High Council was overwhelmingly bīḍānī.⁵⁴ The High Council remains one site of negotiation over Mauritanian identity, both in intra-Islamic terms and in socio-racial terms.