Sufi Paintings in Kano and the Visual Representation of Sheikh Ibrahim Niasse, 1995-2016

While sitting at Darma, one of the suburbs of the ancient city of Kano in 2003, one Mallam Mudi, a follower of the Tijāniyyah Sufi order, remarked on the propensity, or the sacredness, of paintings of Sheikh Ibrahim Niasse (1902-1975). According to Mudi, the paintings provide spiritual and social protection to his family, the reason why he commissioned a Sufi artist to paint Niasse's portrait on the wall of his house. However, some orthodox Sunni Muslims who happened to be present at his remarks found the idea objectionable because of the Islamic “prohibition” of all forms of figurative imagery, including photography. The Sunnis quoted verses from the holy Al-Qur'an and Ahādīth from the Prophetic traditions to buttress their argument. Their responses to Mallam Mudi nearly resulted in an open confrontation, if not for the intervention of the elderly people sitting close by.Similarly, in 2004 a Sufi adherent in Kano claimed to have seen the portrait of Sheikh Ibrahim Niasse not only moving, but also radiating an illuminating light. Upon informing passersby, hundreds of onlookers, mostly adherents of the Sufi order, mustered to see for themselves what they regarded as part of the saint's miracles, even after his demise. This incidence generated hot debates and religious discourses, especially from the Sunni scholars in Kano. On this basis, therefore, this paper raises some important questions about sacred Sufi paintings and their relevance within the sociopolitical compositions of Kano society. For instance, why did Sufis begin to use images of saints, and when, and how did this practice come to Nigeria? Why do Sufis in Nigeria adorn their houses, walls, cars, and workplaces with images of Sufi saints? What do these images mean to their followers? What does this tell us about Sufism and Islam in Nigeria, or images in Hausa society, etc.?With his debut in the Nigerian religious space in the 1940s and 1950s, Sheikh Ibrahim Niasse became the most celebrated and glorified Sufi saint not only for his seeming position as the “owner of the Faydha” (Divine flood), but also because he introduced the “Reformed Tijāniyyah” (Solagberu 2009: 5; Rudiger 2011; Hassan 2015: 7-8; Nasidi 2021). Due to his large number of followers, his eulogy and glorification featured predominantly in the Nigerian written and oral literature. Moreover, the emergence of sacred Sufi paintings in Kano and other Nigerian states, especially in the 1950s, was marked by widespread representations of Niasse, who became a dominant theme in this tradition of religious art.While some Muslims, particularly of the Wahabi/Salafi ideological bent, negate human figurative arts, including that of the Sufis, using textual interpretations of the Islamic canons (Qur'an and Sunnah), the Sufis (Tijāniyyah and Qādiriyyah) affirm its legality by referring to purely esoteric explanations of the same canons. Therefore, this paper attempts to provide an art-historical analysis of the visual representations of Niasse within the religious and political contexts of the social and artistic narratives of his followers in Kano. Most of the paintings under review were produced by active Sufi artists in Kano from 1995-2016 (Nasidi 2023).Using primary sources, especially oral interviews with the artists, the Ulama (Islamic scholars), and those commissioning the sacred Sufi paintings in Kano, as well as written documents, this paper argues that Sheikh Ibrahim Niasse was not only visually celebrated but his paintings and images are considered sacred by his followers (Ibrahim 2022). It is equally observed that such paintings, apart from being contextual, also serve as reminiscences of some important events that took place during Niasse's lifetime, having a serious impact on the religious history of Kano.Born in 1902 in a village called Tabya, some kilometers outside of Kaolack, Senegal, Sheikh Ibrahim Niasse was the son of Al-Hajj Abdullah Niasse (1845-1922), who was a revered Islamic cleric. His father was an itinerant scholar and finally settled in Kaolack in 1910 (Yusuf 1978: 9-10). Niasse's scholarly background prepared him for a sound Islamic education. At an early age, he was initiated into the Tijāniyyah Sufi order by his father, who had been initiated by Sheikh Mamadu (Muhammad) Diallo of Futa Jallon in 1875 (Mervin 1968: 99-140; Wright 2020). Later, Niasse renewed his initiation with Sheikh Sukayraj of Fez (Kane 1997: 299).In the 1930s, Niasse became prominent, especially amongst the Sufi scholars of the West African subregion. This prominence was directly linked to his public proclamation as the Sāhib al-Faydha (master of the spiritual flood), who was expected to be the overall leader of the Sufi brotherhoods in the twentieth century. This made Niasse the centurion Ghauth al-Zaman (Gray 1988/2000: 34-60). With that proclamation, he experienced bitter opposition, even within the Sufi circle. There were various contestations and condemnations of Niasse's claim to his position among Sufi scholars. For instance, Mauritanians argued that instead of Niasse, the ownership of the Faydha was strictly for Muhammad al-Hafiz al-Mukhtar.Niasse's claim as the owner of the Faydha brought to the fore the question of race and identity, especially from North African Sufi scholars who did not approve of a “Black” man like Niasse claiming that position (Nasidi 2021). For instance, when Ibn Al-Nawawi of Mauritania wrote some letters to his tribe's men about the possibility of Niasse being the owner of the Faydha, Al-Hadi Bn Sayyid, a leading member of the Fal family, was the first scholar to ignore it, because to him, it would be out of line for a Kori (Black African) to be the owner of the Faydha (Rudiger 2004: 71, 2011; Wright 2020). Therefore, many Mauritanian Sufi scholars concluded that Sheikh Ibrahim Niasse could not be the owner of the Faydha on racial grounds. According to some of them, the best thing a Black African can be is a “slave” (Rudiger 2011: 73-74). These contestations over the Faydha also resurfaced when Niasse visited Nigeria, as the leading Sufi scholars of the Salgawa house in Kano refused to acknowledge his claim and stuck to their chain of initiation from Sheikh Umar al-Futi. Despite that opposition, Niasse had millions of followers in Nigeria. Due to his miracles and sainthood, many of his followers believe that even his paintings can provide spiritual protection. Thus, visual representations of Niasse proliferated within the Kano religious space.The people of Kano are predominantly Hausa and Fulani, apart from other ethnic groups that later settled, like Tuaregs, Nupe, Kanuri, and Yoruba, to mention but a few who migrated from different geographical locations and settled predominantly in Kano, in search of greener pastures (Barkindo 1983: 40-45; Adamu 1999; Mubarak 2013: 2-4). Their population comprises both skilled and unskilled workers whose knowledge was used for industrial and economic purposes, such as sword and rope making, weaving, building, etc., that some of the migrant communities adopted. Sufism inculcated into its adherents, among many other things, remembrance of God and the attendant virtues of asceticism and consciousness, abhorrence of worldly life and materialism, absolute love for God and divinity, and deep thoughts about the unseen, to mention but a few (Jah 1973: 59-90).The first Sufi order introduced into Kano was the Qādiriyyah Sufi order. It was named after a great Islamic scholar, Sheikh Abdulqādir Jilāni. This Sufi order was brought to Kano by a North African scholar popularly known as Sheikh Abdulkarim Al-Maghīli in the fifteenth century during the reign of Sarkin Kano, Muhammadu Rumfa (1463-1499), who made Islam a state religion. Maghili even wrote for the Sarki, the first constitution in the political history of Kano, titled Tāj al-Mulūk (The Crown of Kings). The Qādiriyyah is popular among the elites of Hausaland.The Tijaniyyah Sufi order was introduced into Kano in the eighteenth century by Sheikh Umar al-Futi. It first originated from Ahmad al-Tijani, born in 1737 at the oasis of ‘Ain Madi in southern Algeria. Unlike the Qādiriyyah, the Tijāniyyah quickly spread among the commoners and today is the Sufi order in Kano that has the largest number of followers (Tahir 1975; Yunusa 2015: 50-60).It was during that trans-Saharan trade that some Arab and Berber merchants introduced sacred paintings into Kano (Nasidi 2019a: 177-95). Those were mostly nonfigurative and calligraphically composed. Such calligraphies were mostly quotations of verses from the Qur'an for both spiritual security and aesthetics. With this development, the indigenous people began to make headway in the sacred arts.Judging by the Islamic injunctions, especially from the Prophetic traditions, visual representation of humans or animals in three-dimensional artworks is prohibited, although there are serious contestations and debates among Islamic scholars about the legality of human figuration (Saeed 2011: 227). This form of iconoclasm, as Jari (2007: 1) submits, is not restricted to Islam, but is found in Christianity and Judaism as well. Despite this challenge, many Muslims throughout the world began to artistically represent historical narrations in the Qur'an, but mostly in two-dimensional works. One such Qur'anic narration is the divine intervention when the Angel brought a large ram to Prophet Abraham, when he was about to slaughter his son, Prophet Ishmael, as instructed in his dream.Due to the strong nature of Muslim iconoclasm, early Arab Muslim artists focused on Arabic calligraphy of Qur'anic verses and geometric or floral symbolic representations of divinity, with centers at Makka, Madinah, Kufa, Basra, Isfahan, and much later in Persia, India, and North Africa. The idea of sacred Islamic arts was introduced through longstanding relations between Kano and North Africa.It should be noted that Sufi sacred art originated from exposure to Christian art since the Middle Ages; it gradually made headway into the Islamic world, particularly that of the Sufis and the Shi'ah (Lewis 2010: 155-57). Christian sacred art includes visual representations of Jesus and his disciples, the Virgin Mary, Paradise, and Hell, to mention but a few. In conformity, Sufi paintings deal with representations of Sufi saints, hermits, and some religious Qur'anic scenes.The origin of sacred Sufi painting in European/Christian art indicates the level of Muslim iconoclasm as a sign of their obedience to their religious injunctions (Zarcone 2013: 43-57). The first travelogues published by Westerners who visited the Ottoman Empire (the largest Muslim empire, established by the Turks in 1299 ad) paid attention to Sufis who performed amazing and mysterious rituals and ascetic practices (Nasidi and Muhammad 2019: 71-81). Thoughout the fourteenth century, although such European travelogues did not include visual representations of Sufis, they described in detail features and activities of Sufis (who were referred to as “Qalanders”), including the dance of the whirling dervishes, rituals, and litanies. According to Zarcone, visual representations emerged in the sixteenth century, such as in Nicholas de Nicolay's work Quatre Premeirs Lives des Navigations et Peregrinations Orientale (1568). Nicholas's work documented the magical way of the Qalanders, wearing unusual, spectacular clothes and bearing symbolic artifacts.Despite the emergence of debates on the inherent between African and European artistic especially in the that art and the European painting on the sacred Sufi paintings in Kano. This was from sacred by Nigerian to the of Sheikh Ibrahim Niasse, who was considered within the Tijāniyyah Sufi as the and the most Sufi saint in the twentieth century. he is also the most glorified in Nigerian Sufi and not only by the but throughout the Muslim world (Nasidi the emergence of sacred Sufi paintings in Nigeria, in the from These were with the visual narration of important historical events in Islamic such as to slaughter Ishmael, the of and the to mention a of sacred paintings that those of Kano is the visual representations of Sheikh a and a Sufi who the and is mostly in with or the holy in his In such paintings, his miracles are in the order, the followers of his Sufi order, apart from in the of 2022). Therefore, sacred Sufi paintings are mostly such as Ahmad Abdulqādir and Sheikh Ibrahim Niasse, among artists, especially began their in Kano as sacred Sufi in the the houses, and of followers of both the Tijāniyyah and Qādiriyyah use especially and in their are mostly debut in the Kano religious space in the 1940s as an important not only for the of but also for the emergence and of sacred Sufi According to the emergence of figurative sacred Sufi paintings with the of Sheikh Ibrahim of he should be noted that the visual representation of Sheikh Ibrahim was by the paintings of Sheikh of Senegal, artists observed during their to Niasse in especially in the 1940s and (Nasidi 2021). of Kano emerged a of artists who began to paint the of Niasse and other Sufi saints, both indigenous Sheikh Muhammad Sheikh Sheikh and as Sheikh Ahmad Sheikh Abdulqādir Sheikh Ibrahim the 1950s, Niasse's paintings have been seen on many and This is because most of the of such believe that Niasse's paintings and images spiritual and that the to represent the of a as both and Thus, it is that the and to Sufi paintings and their and to This to of being in the world throughout also argues that the sacred to be and from the or Therefore, he that both and have the to from a use into a sacred a the and have various of with the and images that are symbolic of the that humans have to or the the and other religious through religious and In this visual representations are of religious as they can make the or Thus, the Sufi paintings of Niasse in Kano from the to the This of visual representation is to the owner of the from especially apart from Niasse, many Sufi are visually in Kano. the of Niasse to his prominence and large number of followers in Kano and other Nigerian The are visual representations of Niasse by is a portrait of Sheikh Ibrahim Niasse produced by who was born in in Kano. 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The paper a of Niasse and a background history of the of Sufi paintings in Kano, about the visual representations of Niasse not only as the owner of the Faydha, but also as the of Tijāniyyah in Kano. The paper argued that the of paintings of other Sufi like Sheikh Ahmad and Sheikh the of the paintings of Niasse in Kano that he is the of Sufi in Kano and those commissioning among the followers of paper also argued that the Sufi paintings have the to from a use into a sacred in the visual representations of This is to the religious and spiritual to the paintings of Niasse in Kano, are on the of the Sufi from the that followers believe that his paintings some spiritual of the paintings also important in both the of the Sheikh in Kano and by to his