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Article

Johnson, Samuel  

Jeremy Rich

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

historian and religious leader, was born on 24 June 1846. His father, Henry, was a member of the Saro community, a large group of people who had been liberated from slave ships by the British Navy and then resettled in the British coastal colony of Sierra Leone. Like many other Saro individuals, Johnson’s father originally came from a Yoruba-speaking community in southwest Nigeria. Henry Johnson came from a royal pedigree, as he was the grandson of Alaafin Abiodun, king of the Oyo Empire in the late eighteenth century. Johnson married a Saro woman named Sarah, and their son Samuel was born in the Hastings village near Freetown. Samuel was the third of four children.

By the 1850s, many Saro chose to return to their home regions, and the Johnson family followed this trend by moving to back to Yorubaland in December 1857 There Henry Johnson became an assistant ...

Article

Sanusi, Sayyid Muhammad bin ʿAli al-  

Wilfrid Rollman

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

North African scholar of Islamic law, theology, and mysticism, and leader and founder of the Sanusiyya brotherhood (tariqa), was born on 22 December 1787 in Wasita, near Mostaghanem in western Algeria. He was a sharif, or descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. Orphaned at an early age, he was raised and educated in his early years by his paternal aunt Fatima, and then by the leading scholars of nearby Mazuna and Mascara.

Sometime between 1805 and 1809 al-Sanusi moved to Fez, Morocco, to pursue more advanced studies at the Qarawiyyin Mosque, the celebrated university. There he studied the traditional curriculum with many of Morocco’s most prominent scholars of the time and quickly achieved academic distinction in their courses. He became an avid practitioner of Sufism and an active member in a number of several turuq (Ar. sing. tariqa mystical way or organization including the Shadhiliyya the Nasiriyya ...

Article

Sidi Harazem  

Stephen Cory

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Moroccan Maliki legal scholar, was born and lived in Fez, where he became a noted expert in the study of hadith and qurʾanic exegesis until he was exiled to Marrakesh toward the end of his life. He is also known as Abu al-Hasan ʿAli ibn Hirzihim. He is best remembered as a vocal critic of the Almoravid regime in Morocco and a proponent of the teachings of the noted scholar, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, whose works the Almoravids had banned. Ibn Hirzihim was also influential in the early scholarly career of Abu Madyan, who would become one of the most famous Sufi saints in North Africa during the late medieval period. Better known as Sidi Harazem, Ibn Hirzihim is the patron saint of a spring located near Fez and, as such, his name is used to market drinking water in Morocco to this day.

ʿAli Ibn Hirzihim was born into a ...

Article

Wansharisi, Ahmad al-  

David S. Powers

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Maliki scholar, jurist, and mufti, was born in Jabal Wansharis (Ouarsenis), a mountain massif in the Central Algerian Tell, 31 miles (50 kilometers) southwest of Algiers. When Ahmad was five years old, his father moved the family to Tlemcen, where he studied the Qurʾan, Arabic language, and Maliki law and jurisprudence with distinguished scholars.

In 1469 at the age of forty al Wansharisi incurred the wrath of the Zayyanid sultan Muhammad IV who ordered that his house be ransacked and plundered Leaving everything behind al Wansharisi fled to Fez where he was welcomed by the scholarly community receiving food and shelter from the jurist Muhammad al Sughayyir He moved into a house near the Muʿallaq mosque in the Sharratin quarter of Fez al Qarawiyyin and was appointed professor of Maliki law at the Madrasa Misbahiyya His knowledge of the law was proverbial He who has not studied with al ...

Article

Washington, James Melvin  

Deborah Bingham Van Broekhoven

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

scholar, preacher, and teacher, was born at the Colored General Hospital in Knoxville, Tennessee, to Annie Beatrice Moore Washington and James W. Washington. Raised with six siblings (Louise Hill, Helen Brown, Howard Moore, Willie Moore, Charles Washington, and Ray Washington) in the Austin Homes Project and at Mount Olive Baptist Church, Washington felt the call of God to preach in 1961 while attending a meeting of the National Baptist Young People's Union (Conversations, xxvii). In 1971 Washington married Patricia Anne Alexander, with whom he had a daughter, Ayanna Nicole Washington.

As a youngster from a working class family in a segregated city Washington s only source of books was a small library for colored After reading in the newspaper that Knoxville libraries were no longer segregated he visited the magisterial Lawson McGhee Library with its ...