Kunta

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Kunta , also Kuntah; are a Moorish tribal association that immigrated from present-day Mauritania to the north of Mali in the 17th century and now largely lives in the area from Timbuktu up to Adrar-n-Ifoghas . There are other Kunta living in Algeria .

Dissemination, culture and social order

The Kunta belong to the Mauritanian Bidhan , although they cannot be properly classified in their class society. Today they are widespread in the western Sahara and its peripheral areas in the north and south. In addition to Mali and Mauritania, they live in southwestern Algeria around Tindouf and other areas in Algeria such as Ahaggar and Saoura and Twat in the northwest, and in Saguia el Hamra in Western Sahara and Niger .

The social order of the Kunta is less subdivided into classes than with other Moorish ethnic groups, so that they could be assigned less to the warriors , but rather to the ulama (Arabic: zawaya ), i.e. Koran scholars. These are known throughout West Africa as m'rabatin (sing. Marabout ). The Kunta mainly belong to the Sufi brotherhood ( tariqa ) of the Qadiriyya . Although they speak the Arabic dialect of North West Africa, the Hassania , they belong to the Zanaga or Sanhadscha branch of the Berber peoples according to their origins , although a not inconsiderable admixture of Arab immigrants from North Africa may have taken place over the centuries. The genealogies like to bring the Kunta in connection with the Almoravids .

The Kunta are divided into three branches: 1. the Aulād Sīdī Muhammad as-Saghīr, who are also called Kunta al-Qibla or Kunta Taganit , 2. the Aulād Sīdī ʿUmar asch-Sheikh, who are also called Kunta Azawad because the Majority of them settled in the region of Azawad , and 3. the Hammāl, also known as the Aulād Sīdī al-Hādj Abū Bakr.

history

Origins

The kunta are traditionally derived from the Arab general ʿUqba ibn Nāfiʿ (683), the conqueror of North Africa. Descendants of ʿUqba are said to have fled to Dahra from what is now Tunisia under the leadership of a certain Yāsīn ibn Shākir . However, the Kunta did not emerge as an independent ethnic group under the Moors until the 16th century. Sīdī Ahmad al-Bakkā'ī Bū Damʿ, the son of Sīdī Muhammad al-Kuntī, who lived in the Zemmour massif in the Western Sahara in the second half of the 15th century, and in Fask im is considered the actual progenitor of the Kunta southern Río de Oro died. The family tree of Bū Damʿs is traced back to the Quraish via Muhammad al-Kuntī . The mother of Bu Damʿ was the daughter of Allu Muhammad ibn al-Hasan al-Dschaknī and came from the Berber group of the Tajkanat. Bū Damʿ received his first training from his father and from teachers of the Tajkanat. He is said to have been called Bū Damʿ ("Father of Tears") because he once missed Friday prayers in his childhood and then burst into tears. He later acquired a grove of date palms near Tichitt and founded a Zāwiya in the trading town of Walata , which attracted numerous students from the Hodh and neighboring regions. Bū Damʿ died in 1515 and was buried near Walata. To this day, numerous miracle reports about him are in circulation in the Western Sahara.

The distraction

Bū Damʿ had three sons, Sīdī Muhammad as-Saghīr, Sīdī Abū Bakr al-Hamilī and Sīdī ʿUmar al-Sheikh, to whom the three branches of the Kunta go back. The families of these three sons initially lived relatively close together in Zemmour. However, a second generation quarrel between clients of the Aulād Sīdī Muhammad as-Saghīr and the Aulād Sīdī ʿUmar el-Sheikh led to the fact that the Kunta clans dispersed into different areas. The sons of Sīdī Muhammad as-Saghīr spread over the area of Senegal and over the Hodh in what is now Mauritania.

Sīdī ʿUmar el-Sheikh moved with his three sons and their clients to the Northern Sahara in the area between Sakiya al-Hamra and Twat. An anonymous text from Tuat probably refers to this event, which speaks of the fact that in 1551 the Kunta invaded Twat with a thousand fighters. Sīdī ʿUmar el-Sheikh himself withdrew after this event in order to devote himself to the study of religious sciences. His descendants were divided into three branches according to his three sons: 1. the Aulād Sīdī al-Muchtār al-Sheikh; 2. the Aulād al Wāfī and 3. the Ragāgda , the descendants of his eldest son Ahmad ar-Raqqād. The Aulād al Wāfī migrated under the leadership of Sīdī al-Hādj Abū Bakr in the direction of the Nigerbogen and to Azawad , where they founded the settlement al-Mabrūk 275 kilometers north of Bamba . Some Aulād al Wāfī even migrated to Gobir in present-day Niger and to Katsina in present-day Nigeria . The Ragāgda built a large trade network from Twat, which was active in the Trans-Saharan trade. Sīdī ʿAlī (d. 1707), a member of the Ragāgda, founded the first Zāwiya of the Kunta in Azawad in Araouane .

The establishment of the Muchtārīya order

In the 18th century, the Kunta scholar Sīdī al-Muchtār al-Kuntī (1729–1811), who belonged to the Aulād al Wāfī and grew up in al-Mabrūk, founded a branch order of the Qadiriyya , which was called Muchtārīya or Bakkā'īya . Many nomads made a pilgrimage to Sīdī al-Muchtār to see him and thereby get a share of his baraka . Sīdī al-Muchtār and his son Sīdī Muhammad al-Chalīfa themselves claimed leadership of the kunta. One of the most important effects of Sīdī al-Muchtār in the economic field was that he legalized the payment of road tolls in the caravan trade by no longer viewing them as illegal maks ("customs"), but as allowing mudārāh ("kindness").

The Muchtārīya order was characterized by openness to other religions and a less strict interpretation of the holy scriptures. The British Islamic researcher John Hunwick writes that this brotherhood attached great importance to virtues such as mercy, the forgiveness of sins and the “ jihad of words, not of the sword”, that is, conversion through persuasion and through the example of a godly life. On the one hand, this led to the fact that the Baqqa'iyya quickly found supporters in the partially only superficially Islamized confederations of the Tuareg in the central Sahara. At the same time, this stance brought them into sharp contrast to the fundamentalist Fulbe , who had been conducting a jihad in all of Western Sudan since the beginning of the 19th century with the aim of enforcing a particularly strict form of Islam. It should not be overlooked here that the demand for a revival and purification of Islam, as represented by parts of the Muchtārīya, had contributed to the Fulbe jihad and some Fulbe leaders from the environment of the reformer Usman dan Fodio before the outbreak of the Jihad had been students of Sidi Mukhtar in al-Hilla.

19th and 20th centuries

Moorish Koran scholar from the Kunta people (around 1890)

The members of the Bakkā'ī family emigrated to Timbuktu in the 18th century. Its leaders dominated the city of Timbuktu as outstanding theologians and lawyers between 1811 and 1864 and were able to extend their religious influence over the Tuareg into the central Sahara . The most important scholar of the al-Baqqai clan in the second half of the century was Sidi Ahmad al-Baqqai (1803–1865), whose advice on theological and legal issues was sought in all of Sudan and Western Sahara. His influence was so great that he stood up to the Fulbe emir of Massina and refused to extradite Heinrich Barth , a German explorer of Africa who came to Timbuktu in 1853.

During the colonial period (1893–1960), the French succeeded in skillfully exploiting the latent disputes between Kunta and Tuareg, which Sidi Ahmad al-Baqqai had only temporarily resolved. In view of the advancing drought in Azawad and Adrar-n-Ifoghas (border area between Mali and Algeria ) and the scarcity of pastures and water supplies, armed clashes between the two ethnic groups broke out several times in the 1950s, about which the German ethnologist and writer Herbert Kaufmann has reported in several of his books.

literature

  • Jamil M. Abun-Nasr: Tidjaniyya : A Sufi Order in the Modern World. Oxford 1965 (also contains a lot of material on the Kunta theologians of Timbuktu)
  • Heinrich Barth : Travels and discoveries in North and West Africa in the years 1849 to 1855. Gotha 1857–58, Bd. 4 u. 5.
  • Albert Adu Boahen : Britain, the Sahara and the Western Sudan, 1788-1861. Oxford 1964 (among other things about the relationship between the Kunta marabouts and the Europeans).
  • Aziz A. Batran: The Qadiryya Brotherhood in West Africa and the Western Sahara: The Life and Times of Shaykh Al-Mukhtar Al-Kunti (1729-1811). Institut des Etudes Africaines, Rabat, 2001.
  • John Hunwick, "Kunta" et al. "Timbuktu", in, Encyclopédie de l'Islam. Nouvelle Édition . Vol. 5 u. 10. Leiden 1986 u. 2002.
  • Paul-Nicolas Marty: Études sur l'Islam et les tribus du Soudan. Vol. 1: Les Kounta de l'Est. Les Berabich. Les Iguellad. Paris 1920.
  • Ann McDougall: The Economics of Islam in the Southern Sahara: The Rise of the Kunta Clan. In: Nehemiah Levtzion, Humphrey Fisher (ed.): Urban and Rural Islam in West Africa. Westview 1987.
  • HT Norris: The Arab Conquest of the Western Sahara. Harlow 1986.
  • Rainer Oßwald : The trading cities of Western Sahara: The development of the Arab-Moorish culture of Šinqīt, Wādān, Tišīt and Walāta. Marburg studies on Africa and Asia. Vol. 39. Dietrich Reimer, Berlin 1986
  • Elias N. Saad: Social History of Timbuktu: The Role of Muslim Scholars and Notables, 1400-1900. Cambridge 1983.
  • John Spencer Trimingham: Islam in West Africa. Oxford 1959.
  • John Spencer Trimingham: A History of Islam in Western Africa. London - Oxford - New York 1962.
  • Thomas Whitcomb: "New Evidence on the Origins of the Kunta", in, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 38 (1975), 103-123, 407-417.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ HT Norris: The Arab Conquest of the Western Sahara. Studies of the historical events, religious beliefs and social customs which made the remotest Sahara a part of the Arab World. Longman, Harlow 1986, p. 127
  2. ↑ See Batran: The Qadiryya Brotherhood . 2001, p. 9f.
  3. ↑ See Batran: The Qadiryya Brotherhood . 2001, pp. 14, 34.
  4. ↑ See Batran: The Qadiryya Brotherhood . 2001, p. 22.
  5. ↑ See Batran: The Qadiryya Brotherhood . 2001, p. 20.
  6. ↑ See Batran: The Qadiryya Brotherhood . 2001, p. 24.
  7. ↑ See Batran: The Qadiryya Brotherhood . 2001, pp. 8, 12.
  8. ↑ See Batran: The Qadiryya Brotherhood . 2001, p. 25.
  9. ↑ See Batran: The Qadiryya Brotherhood . 2001, pp. 25-27.
  10. ↑ See Batran: The Qadiryya Brotherhood . 2001, p. 27.
  11. ↑ See Batran: The Qadiryya Brotherhood . 2001, pp. 28, 36.
  12. ↑ See Batran: The Qadiryya Brotherhood . 2001, p. 38.
  13. ↑ See Batran: The Qadiryya Brotherhood . 2001, p. 28.
  14. ↑ See Batran: The Qadiryya Brotherhood . 2001, p. 43.
  15. ↑ See Batran: The Qadiryya Brotherhood . 2001, p. 42.
  16. ↑ See Batran: The Qadiryya Brotherhood . 2001, p. 30.
  17. ↑ See Batran: The Qadiryya Brotherhood . 2001, p. 196.