FORMING THE KNOT—ʿABDULLĀH AL-GHUMĀRĪ›S ICONOCLASTIC SUNNĪ NEOTRADITIONALISM

This article studies the life and thought of ʿAbdullāh al-Ghumārī (d. 1413/1993), an accomplished, yet uncelebrated, Muslim scholar from Morocco. After a brief biographical sketch, I present an overview of his thought (including numerous nonconformist views he held) in the fields of theology, law and Sufism. I proceed to analyze his methodology and what it tells us about his interaction with modernity and the Islamic scholarly tradition. Finally, I draw some more general conclusions about Islam in modernity, in light of the views of contemporary French sociologist Hervieu-Léger. I infer that Ghumārī was a nonconformist thinker who leveraged a broad understanding of tradition to remold or revive the tradition from within. The early-modern milieu may have contributed to and facilitated his attempts to restore dynamism to a religious scholarly tradition that had (in some ways at least) become static or stagnant.