Reading List: Mauritania's History, Politics, and Society
Mauritania is an understudied country, including in comparison with its neighbors Morocco, Senegal, and Mali. Yet there is a sophisticated academic literature on the country, especially if one broadens beyond English-language works to include works in Arabic and French. The list below gives, in recommended reading order, a sequence of works that deal with political, religious, and social history. You’ll quickly see my bias towards reading works that have to do with Islam - but in a country estimated to be 100% Muslim, the history of Islam there gives considerable insight into the country’s overall makeup, history, and trajectory.
Charles Stewart with E.K. Stewart, Islam and Social Order in Mauritania (Clarendon Press, 1973). Stewart’s study of the Sufi leader Shaykh Sidiyya al-Kabir (d. 1868) is also a study of the society in which the Shaykh lived - its racial and tribal structures, the contours of Islamic identity and practice there, and the politics of the consequential nineteenth century, when French colonialism was already encroaching upon what is now Mauritania. Three other notable titles that help expand the picture of pre-colonial Mauritania are Timothy Cleaveland, Becoming Walata: A History of Saharan Social Formation and Transformation (Heinemann, 2002), which gives a look at a key southeastern town and the flexibility of tribal affiliations there; Pierre Bonte, L’émirat de l’Adrar mauritanien or The Mauritanian Emirate of Adrar (Karthala, 2008), a treatment of precolonial northern Mauritania and the emirate’s role in colonial Mauritania; and Ghislaine Lydon’s On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa (Cambridge, 2009), whose title is self-explanatory.
Al-Khalil al-Nahwi, Bilad Shinqit: Al-Manara.. wa-l-Ribat or The Land of Shinqit: The Minaret…and the Guard Post (Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization, 1987). Al-Nahwi’s hefty work explores the history and inner world of the mahdara, a distinctively Saharan type of Islamic school - and a key institution in Mauritanian society. The book can also be read as a history of Mauritania itself; al-Nahwi includes a valuable opening chapter that traces some of the same political and tribal dynamics covered in Stewart’s work, giving another perspective on those complex issues.
David Robinson, Paths of Accommodation: Muslim Societies and French Colonial Authorities in Senegal and Mauritania, 1880-1920 (Ohio University Press, 2000) and Erin Pettigrew, Invoking the Invisible in the Sahara: Islam, Spiritual Mediation, and Social Change (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Robinson’s book examines key Sufi leaders who became interlocutors and in some cases active partners of the French colonial administration. These Sufi leaders included the major Mauritanian personalities Saad Bouh (d. 1917) and Sidiyya Baba (d. 1924) - the former being the brother, ironically, of the anti-colonial resistance fighter Shaykh Ma’ al-’Aynayn (d. 1910), and the latter being the grandson of the figure covered in Stewart’s book. Pettigrew’s Invoking the Invisible is a historical anthropology that spans the colonial and post-colonial periods, using people’s perceptions of esoteric knowledge as a lens for examining questions of identity and power.
Philippe Marchesin, Tribus, ethnies et pouvoir en Mauritanie (Karthala, 2010 [1992]). Marchesin’s study, as the title suggests, deals with “tribes, ethnicities, and power.” The book’s three parts discuss, respectively, (a) pre-colonial social structures and impact of colonialism, (b) the Mauritanian state from the end of World War II through the stirrings of democratization pressures in the early 1990s, and (c) the wielders of power and how they wielded it, including actors such as bureaucrats, businessmen, and political parties.
Sid’Amar Ould Cheikhna, Muritaniya al-Mu‘asira: Shahadat wa-Watha’iq or Contemporary Mauritania: Testimonials and Documents (Dar al-Qawafil, 2009). This detailed volume (part 1 of a planned series, although I have not seen part 2 published) covers 1957-1984, in other words from the transition to independence up through the coup that overthrew military ruler Mohamed Khouna Ould Haidalla and installed Maaouya Sid’Ahmed Ould al-Taya in 1984.
Boubacar N’Diaye, Mauritania’s Colonels: Political Leadership, Civil-Military Relations and Democratization (Routledge, 2018) and Noel Foster, Mauritania: The Struggle for Democracy (Lynne Rienner, 2010). This pair of books gives insight into the long period of military rule in Mauritania, a legacy that has shaped the country’s politics from 1978 to the present. N’Diaye compares and contrasts the different military regimes from 1978 to 2009, including in terms of how they approached the “national question” - the question of what kind of nation Mauritania is and should be, ethnically, racially, and linguistically. Foster analyzes the abortive democratic transition from 2005 to 2008, arguing that top military elites pursued continuity, rather than change, even amid what initially looked like a rare democratic opening in the country.
Zekeria Ould Ahmed Salem, Prêcher dans le désert: Islam politique et changement social en Mauritanie or Preaching in the Desert: Political Islam and Social Change in Mauritania (Karthala, 2013). Ould Ahmed Salem’s incisive book examines activist formations of Islam in contemporary Mauritania, including Islamists, Salafis, jihadists, and more. For those who don’t read French, the book was discussed in a 2017 New York Review of Books article by Alexander Stille. Ould Ahmed Salem’s work can be productively read alongside the many articles of Cédric Jourde, who has compellingly analyzed the intersection of Islam, ethnicity, and identity in the country; here is one chapter of Jourde’s, part of a collection that he co-edited, that makes for a good introduction to his scholarship.
Francisco Freire’s edited collection State, Society and Islam in the Western Regions of the Sahara: Regional Interactions and Social Change (I.B. Tauris, 2022). This open access volume includes contributions from some of the most knowledgeable scholars working on Mauritania, including Freire himself (with a chapter on a hugely controversial and important blasphemy case in Mauritania from the 2010s) as well as Yahya Ould al-Bara (compiler of a massive collection of Mauritanian fatawa or Islamic legal opinions) and the historian Abdel Wedoud Ould Cheikh. The latter, in fact, has an excellent collection that complements Freire’s volume - État et société en Mauritanie: Cinquante ans après l’Indépendance or State and Society in Mauritania: Fifty Years After Independence (Karthala, 2014).
Katherine Wiley, Work, Social Status, and Gender in Post-Slavery Mauritania (Indiana University Press, 2018). Wiley’s anthropological account gives a rich portrait of everyday social dynamics in a country that has, officially, moved beyond slavery. Wiley’s book (and Robinson’s and Pettigrew’s, mentioned above) should pair well with the historian Khaled Essiessah’s forthcoming book Activating Emancipation: Race, Slavery, and Islamic Respectability Among the Ḥrāṭīn in Colonial Mauritania. A sample of Esseissah’s work on the Haratine can be found here.
Hassan Ould Moctar, After Border Externalization: Migration, Race, and Labour in Mauritania (Bloomsbury, 2024). Ould Moctar examines Mauritania’s European Union-backed project of regulating migration, and also examines the lives and itineraries of migrants. The book goes well with Wiley’s as another bottom-up angle on life in Mauritania. See my interview with Ould Moctar here.