And that was a challenge. Because I entered college in 2003, at the beginning of the war in Iraq, when everyone and their grandmother was convinced that learning Arabic was the ticket to getting a job in government. At the school I went to, all students were preregistered for classes with the exception of first-year students and graduate students, who had to attend classes before they could register. All classes were required to leave three seats open for first years and graduate students. So, I showed up to the first day of Beginning I Arabic along with 70 other students, all hoping to get one of those three seats. The instructor announced that he would not allow anyone to register for those three seats until there were only three students left in the class who wanted them. And so I proceeded to wait the rest of them out. I came to every class and did all the work in the class, without any guarantee that I would get in officially or get credit for it until enough people gave up that I was offered the slot. So the first thing I learned in my college career was that I would have to fight for the Humanities and they were worth fighting for. I am still doing that work today.

But aside from Arabic, I really didn’t know what else I wanted to study. So I started off by studying everything. I took classes in history, and political science, and anthropology, and comparative literature. And calculus, and biology, and Religious Studies. And they were all great classes, but I found that I had a particular love of that place where religion, history, literature, and philosophy met and connected. Those classes lit a fire in me. Because they showed me that in places and periods and languages that were wholly different from my own people had grappled with the questions that provoked and haunted me, questions of deep existential meaning and ongoing political urgency – and that they had expressed their answers in language that was profoundly beautiful. When I studied those answers, I found myself connected to peoples, movements, and cultures larger myself.  And as I went deeper and deeper into my studies, I found that they were changing me. Once I learned how to read deeply, I found that I could read anything, including the social and political institutions in which I was embedded. I learned to question everything, and to produce my own critical answers. I put myself to work imagining other, better worlds.

The period that I grew up in was really not perfect. I went to college – and then lived in the Middle East – during the Iraq War. A war of choice, when the President decided to invade a country that posed no threat to the United States, largely to secure access to vast oil resources. I then graduated from college into a massive financial disaster caused by the loosening of banking regulations so that very rich people could become even richer. So I can’t say that it was an easy time to be a young person – if there is ever an easy time to be a young person.

But I do think that it is much harder to be a young person today. I went through college at a time when few students had personal laptops, before the invention of the smart phone or the ipad or the rise of social media. The students I went to school with didn’t all like me – but they were all really present along with me in the spaces we shared. The political culture at the time seemed divisive, but it was nothing in comparison to the chaos and fury of the current age. It’s hard right now y’all.

But one of the things that is making it even harder is that the institutions and entities who are invested in dividing us from each other, in fracturing our attention and undermining our interpersonal relationships – are also selling us a particular approach to knowledge. This approach is, “the extractive attitude.� It is based on the idea that the purpose of knowledge is to extract resources from the environment and money from the economy – which ultimately means from consumers. This attitude is not new. I know from my own field of African history that the European governments who colonized various territories sent scholars out in the wake of the armies, geographers and engineers to survey and map the land, and linguists and anthropologists to learn languages, and catalogue customs. The purpose of these colonial scholar-soldiers was to facilitate the pacification of the population and the extraction of natural resources. Knowledge has always been a form of power. And then, just as now, deep engagement in storytelling, religious worldviews, and philosophy was disregarded and rejected as impractical. Education, according to the extractive attitude, is a product whose value measured as a return on investment. This attitude invites us to use learning to maintain a position in cultural and class warfare.

The opposite of the extractive attitude is a humanistic attitude. A humanistic attitude values knowledge for its ability to bring meaning and joy into our lives and our communities. A humanistic attitude evaluates our present relative to both our past and our vision of the future. A humanistic attitude is an approach that finds richness and complexity in things that seem simple. And it does those things through a deep engagement with the ideas and the art that have been produced by humans through the ages.

When I went to college I had to fight for a seat in a language class against the forces of opportunism. And I want you to fight for humanism, too. And it is a fight sometimes. A fight to maintain vision and resolve in the face of a thousand messages that tell us that the humanistic attitude is “useless.â€� The makers and marketers of new technological products are trying to convince us to give up our capacity for deep engagement. To give up our ability to generate ideas, to read literature, to think about the past, to make and appreciate art and culture, and to communicate with each other. To convince us to give up on humanism they threaten us with catastrophe and apocalypse. They warn that their products will change society so deeply that it will be unrecognizable, or that they might destroy humanity entirely. But I have my own message. For anyone who is worried about understanding these forces, or who is struggling to make sense of the world right now – the Humanities can help.

Those of us in Religious Studies have studied apocalyptic predictions, we know the distance between what they promise and what they deliver. Those of us in History have studied revolutions and know how politics and new forms of media align. Those of us in World Languages and Cultures know that our understanding of the world is shaped by language and how to connect with people across cultural differences. Those of us in Philosophy know that the potential for meaningful change is rooted in examination and reflection.  And those of us in English know (to paraphrase James Baldwin), that it is literature that teaches us that the things that torment us the most are the very things that connect us with all the people who are alive, or who have ever lived. The Humanities are a repository of our shared humanity and the heart of our capacity to be, not just human, but better humans. More than ever, humanity needs the Humanities. And right now, the Humanities needs you.

Applications can be submitted online.

Her article examines a set of practices described by a Sufi Muslim scholar named SÄ«di Muḥammad al-KuntÄ« in an Arabic manuscript text entitled the FawÄ�ʾid NÅ«rÄ�niyya. SÄ«di Muḥammad was the leader of a family network called "the Kunta," which controlled extensive trade routes, and asserted social and religious authority within the Sahara Desert in the late 18th and early 19th century.  

The FawÄ�ʾid NÅ«rÄ�niyya provides instructions on how to use the letters of the Arabic alphabet, the names of God, and in particular the greatest name of God, to perform a variety of practices intended to produce material results in the world—from healing the sick, to protecting a house, to exerting total control over the universe. Marcus-Sells then turns to another text by the same author to show that SÄ«di Muḥammad acknowledged that other Muslim scholars might consider these practices to be acts of sorcery (siḥr); however, he argues against this classification, and instead positions the sciences of secrets as a form of legitimate Muslim devotional practice and refers to them as "the sciences of the unseen." 

Ultimately, Marcus-Sells argues that SiÌ„di MuhÌ£ammad atttempts to limit access to the sciences of the unseen even as he presents explicit instructions for their use. His arguments for the legitimacy of the sciences establishe them as not only Muslim, but specifically Sufi, devotional practices, and thus place them under the control of Sufi leaders, including the leaders of his own family. In this fashion, by limiting and directing access to “the sciences of the unseen,” SÄ«di Muḥammad attempted to shape the Saharan society in which he lived by establishing his authority over the devotional lives of other Muslims.

This study thus adds to scholarship on sorcery and other contested practices in Islamic history while also highlighting the role of African Muslims in contributing to these debates. 

Ariela Marcus-Sells, assistant professor of religious studies and Distinguished Emerging Scholar at Â鶹ÊÓƵ, has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency created in 1965 to provide funding to support projects across the Humanities. Proposals are evaluated by panels of independent, external reviewers and funds go to a wide range of individuals, groups, and institutions through the United States. 

The NEH has announced the receipients for 253 new awards for 2019, representing 8 percent of the total applications received. Of the NEH Fellowships offered this year, only six went to recipients in North Carolina, one of which was to Marcus-Sells.  

The Fellowship will provide seven months of funding for June through December 2019 to support full-time work by Marcus-Sells on a book manuscript titled, “What is Magic? Debating Science, Sorcery, and Secrets in West African Sufi Texts.”

Marcus-Sells’ paper, entitled “Technologies of Devotion in the works of Sidi al-Mukhtar al-Kunti,” analyzed the supplicatory prayers attributed to a Sufi Muslim scholar from the Southern Saharan desert whose work in the late-eighteenth century greatly influenced the development of Muslim and Sufi intellectual traditions in the greater region.

Marcus-Sells’ paper argued that close attention to historic manuscript texts intended as devotional aids to ritual practice allows historians to reconstruct the relationship between devotional practice, cosmological and metaphysical thought, and Arabic manuscript production among pre-modern Muslim communities.

Ultimately, her paper demonstrated that Sidi al-Mukhtar drew on devotional aids circulating in the region during the eighteenth century, but reshaped these traditions in response to his own specific, Saharan context. 

Sponsored by the Department for Religious Studies and the Center for the Study of Religion, Culture, and Society.