On Religious Connections between Mauritania and the UAE

In the brief biography of one scholar, a glimpse of ties that go beyond just a few ultra-famous shaykhs.

If you said “Mauritania and the United Arab Emirates,” I would think of Shaykh ‘Abd Allah bin Bayyah (b. 1935), the intellectually dynamic but politically controversial scholar who works closely with the UAE government (see here for a critical analysis of the Shaykh’s politics). And if you said “Mauritania and Saudi Arabia,” I would think of Shaykh Muhammad al-Amin al-Shinqiti (d. 1973), one of the rare foreigners to serve on the Kingdom’s Council of Senior Scholars, and the author of an influential tafsir (exegesis of the Qur’an) called Adwa’ al-Bayan (Lights of Explanation). Or if you said “Mauritania and Qatar,” I would think of Shaykh Muhammad al-Hasan Wuld al-Dedew (b. 1963), the walking library whose political sympathies are Islamist.

But these individuals are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of religious connections between Mauritania and the Gulf countries. The networks connecting Mauritania to the Gulf have been the subject of a few scholarly analyses - they come up in the work of Chanfi Ahmed, Zekeria Ould Ahmed Salem, and Mohamed Fall Ould Bah and Abdel Wedoud Ould Cheikh, for example. I and Michael Farquhar also explored some of these dynamics in a blog post some years back. But scholarly focus has mostly been on a few individuals and, sometimes, tribes.

Picking up Volume 4 of the book al-Fiqh al-Maliki fi Thawbihi al-Jadid (Maliki Law in Its New Garb), however, I was reminded of the depth and breadth of these connections. The book, whose volumes I’ve slowly been reading out of both personal and scholarly interest, was written by the Syrian scholar Muhammad Bashir al-Shaqfa* (b. 1936), who taught and served as an Islamic legal official (mufti) in Abu Dhabi for many years. One brief biography of him is available here.

Volume 4 opens with a long reminiscence and eulogy by al-Shafqa for one of his mentors, the Mauritanian Shaykh al-Talib Ahmad bin al-Did, who served as Mufti for the Islamic Legal Court of Al Ain, the second-largest city in Abu Dhabi and the fourth-largest city in the UAE overall.

Al-Shafqa includes a brief biography of al-Did, giving us a fascinating look at one case of recruitment of a Mauritanian shaykh to work in the UAE’s religious system. Al-Shafqa recounts that al-Did was born near Néma in Mauritania’s eastern Hodh El Chargui Region, and studied in traditional Islamic schools (mahadir, singular mahdara) before embarking on a career that began with teaching in government schools, then serving a member of the national political bureau, then a member of the Mauritanian parliament, and then head of the Red Crescent in his home region. He was then sent to the UAE and appointed Mufti in Al Ain in 1985, living there until his death in 2002 (Al-Fiqh al-Maliki fi Thawbihi al-Jadid, Vol. 4, p. 13, footnote 1.)

Interestingly, al-Shaqfa also comments on al-Did’s penchant for “fiqh al-waqi’,” which is a difficult phrase to translate, but which in the context of al-Shaqfa’s book means something like “Islamic legal rulings/opinions that take people’s realities and situations into account.” Al-Shafqa gives a few examples of how al-Did applied the concept, including (a) treating the threat of dismissal from a salaried job as a form of compulsion (ikrah), whereas some earlier jurists applied more narrow definitions of compulsion; (b) considering prayer on airplanes permissible - an issue which was heavily debated in the twentieth century; and (c) allowing men to shave their beards if the encountered difficulties wearing a beard in some countries (p. 17). The concept of fiqh al-waqi’ is a major element of Bin Bayyah’s thinking as well.

To conclude, I think these Mauritanian-Gulf connections merit more systematic study than they have so far received. There is much to think about here both in terms of why and how Mauritania could “export” religious specialists and also about which countries had need of “importing” these specialists, and why. In the case of the UAE, perhaps part of it had to do with the needs of staffing legal and religious institutions in a relatively young country that wanted to modernize and institutionalize at a rapid pace. Obviously the story is not a uniquely Mauritanian-Gulf one; Gulf countries have had deep religious ties with other countries as well (Egypt, for example), but Mauritania is, after all, a country with a very low population, making it all the more striking the significant representation (in terms of numbers and prominence) of Mauritanian shaykhs in the Gulf.

*It’s possible that it’s pronounced Shaqafa - I have not heard the name said out loud.