Sidiyya Baba

Shaykh Sidiyya Baba (1862–1924) was a Mauritanian scholar and Sufi leader, born about 1862 — an Al Jazeera Centre for Studies report gives 1860 — and died in 1924 according to the scholarship, while Wikidata gives 1923; both discrepancies are preserved.¹²³ He came of a clerical and trading lineage of the Trarza in southwestern Mauritania: his grandfather was Shaykh Sidiyya al-Kabir, who founded the zawiya of Boutilimit and the Qadiri branch known as the Sidiyya, and his father Sidi Muhammad headed the zawiya and its network of students. The headship of the Sidiyya passed to Baba, who consolidated and led it, his influence radiating through disciples and allies across southwestern Mauritania and Senegal.¹

Baba is known above all for his fatwa of January 1903, which set out the Islamic rationale for accepting French overrule; it was published in French translation in 1907 with Shaykh Saad Buh's endorsement. His close bond with Xavier Coppolani, the French officer charged with the "pacification" of Mauritania, made his courtyard at Boutilimit a staging area for the conquest, and his zawiya was afterwards integrated into the colonial administration as a source of intellectual influence for it.¹ In 1914 he declared his support for France in the First World War, and in the early 1910s, at French encouragement, he wrote a history of the western Sanhaja.¹

Baba's was the path of accommodation — the exact opposite of his contemporary Shaykh Ma al-'Aynayn, who chose armed resistance to Europe; between the two men stand the two faces of the Sahara's scholars' response to colonisation at the opening of the twentieth century.¹