Invoking the Invisible in the Sahara

In this innovative new history Erin Pettigrew utilizes invisible forces and entities - esoteric knowledge and spirits - to show how these forms of knowledge and unseen forces have shaped social structures religious norms and political power in the Saharan West. Situating this ethnographic history in what became la Mauritanie under French colonial rule and later the Islamic Republic of Mauritania Pettigrew traces the changing roles of Muslim spiritual mediators and their Islamic esoteric sciences...See More