Buffett Q&A: Professor Zekeria Ahmed Salem on Islamic Knowledge

For this installment of our Buffett Q&A series profiling faculty and students in the Roberta Buffett Institute community, we spoke with Zekeria Ahmed Salem, Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences, outgoing director of the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa (ISITA), and 2024–25 Buffett Faculty Fellow.  

Could you tell us about the focus of your research and what inspired you to focus on that topic? 

The main focus of my research is global Islam and transnational Muslims—their activities, ideas, circulation, and connectivity. My research has always been driven by the desire to understand how downtrodden people move up the social ladder. I am very much interested in social mobility, especially in communities where access to knowledge is reserved for an elite—for example, in cases where marginalized people such as former enslaved people who, barred by birth and/or socioeconomic status, manage against all odds to break barriers and rise to new status.

I thus mostly study how people from humble beginnings use newly acquired Islamic knowledge to assert authority and ascend to new positions of power. In my ongoing project, I focus on how Islamic scholars hailing from the so-called periphery of the Muslim world move to the center of the global Islamic intellectual arena and especially how they become key players on the global scene of Islamic religious authority and political influence.

Do you have a personal connection that made you interested in this topic? 

I am from a country called Mauritania, located on the edge of the Saharan West. The region has developed over the centuries a very refined intellectual tradition of Islamic knowledge. Furthermore, I come from a city called Atar, only few miles away from the medieval city of Shinqit, one of the main Saharan centers of Islamic learning and today a UNESCO World Heritage Site known for its prestigious past, medieval architecture, and manuscripts libraries.

As a kid, I had no idea. I remember marveling at the sight of caravans of Western tourists flocking to this remote place, wondering what such interest really meant. As I grew up and traveled the world, I started to understand that this tiny place that I used to see as very peripheral was quite well known outside of the confines of West Africa for a long-standing cultivation of Islamic knowledge and cultural heritage. I had no idea that the village I used to think of as a lost city known only for the vestiges of a bygone era of intellectual fame has in fact given its name to the entire Saharan West, especially in places as far away as today Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, and among Sunni Muslim communities in the West...

I discovered what many people already knew in general terms, namely that by the nineteenth century, few West Saharan scholars had already started to travel the world and gained some repute for their works and interventions, especially at the new age of print and steam. That increased mobility and connectivity allowed by those new technological changes enabled people from faraway places such as today’s Mauritania to deploy their traditional knowledge in places like Cairo, Istanbul, and other places in the Gulf. The world had discovered that these highly mobile subjects were the custodians of a very authentic tradition of Islamic learning and that they were able to engage any other Muslim or Arab scholars trained in otherwise widely known religious traditions. In a few cases, these Saharan intellectuals even earned a reputation as leading figures in fields such as Arabic language, classical poetry, and Quran commentary.

What struck me as even more interesting is how this Saharan tradition of learning survived the test of time and, specifically, how the traditional institutions of learning of the Mauritanian desert continue to this day to attract Islamic knowledge seekers from around the world—especially from the US, Australia, Indonesia, and South Africa—who continue to flock to the Mauritanian desert in search of what had been sometimes framed with some exaggeration as “an authentic Islamic knowledge tradition unadulterated, unpolluted by modernity.”

I also realized that this extraordinary story has never been told. Despite the availability of a treasure trove of information and sources on these peripatetic scholars and their background, we know little about who they are, how they achieved success, in what conditions, and what it all meant for those of us who are interested in understanding how Islamic intellectual and religious authority is built, construed, performed, and used to wield political influence at home and most importantly abroad, especially in a post-9/11 world, in the age of the war on terror, and in the aftermath of the Arab spring.

In addition, I seek to understand the resilience of the Mauritanian Islamic tradition of learning as its institutions of learning and religious seminaries continue today to attract Islamic knowledge seekers from all around the world, who flock to the Mauritanian desert in search of what some of them frame as an authentic way of Islamic and Arabic learning supposedly unadulterated, unpolluted by modernity.

How did your Buffett Faculty Fellowship impact your research?

I was able to travel to visit libraries and conduct interviews with Islamic scholars and historians in Saudi Arabia’s two holy cities, Mecca and Medina. When I visited Saudi Arabia, I chose to tie my visit to the great pilgrimage, the Hajj. I used that opportunity to study the repositories of manuscripts in the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina. I was also able to do archival work in the United Arab Emirates. There, I collected a number of documents that had never before been discovered or studied.

However, one of the highlights of my visit was discovering that one of the Saharan scholars I was studying had, in 2023, his name given to a major street in Medina. The scholar, who migrated late in his life to Saudi Arabia in 1948, became a prominent religious and even political figure in the Muslim holy lands, both within Saudi Arabia and well beyond. He is today celebrated as a major global Muslim figure. His footprint and prestige as well as many works are a testimony to the currency of his original training, and how it allowed him to outshine many of his contemporaries coming from more widely renowned centers of learning. This is the kind of personality that I was after. My book portrays a few others with similar profiles and trajectory.

When you were doing interviews, did you speak to anyone who shared something that really surprised you?

One of the things that surprised me was that many of these scholars were not aware of the political impact of their career or trajectories or statements. They didn’t think of themselves as politicians or people who can affect politics. However, when you have a position on violence or on the relationship between spirituality and politics, you are actually making a political statement.

Tell us more about your forthcoming book.

The title of my book is Islamic Knowledge Unbound. It traces the trajectories of Saharan Islamic scholars who harnessed their knowledge acquired in the far periphery of the Muslim world—scholars who traveled the world to center themselves in the global arena of Islamic authority and knowledge and became highly influential on the global scale.

The central questions my book seeks to answer are: Who gets to speak for Islam? What is the location of Islamic authority? People always complain that Islam doesn’t have a central church, but Islam has lots of voices that speak in its name. The fact that there is no central church does not mean that people are not following instructions, ideas, and commentaries articulated by particular scholars.

Could you talk about why this topic is important in today’s world?

I am investigating how marginalized people harnessed their acquired knowledge to rise to new positions and take part in the conversation about their faith, their communities, or other aspects of human life. The transformative power of knowledge, and its ability to change people, has always been at the center of my work.

I think that anything that could contribute to a better understanding between cultures and communities, especially demonized communities such as the Muslim community, is welcome in times where heightened debate about identity politics can sometimes have dire consequences. The more we know about other societies and how we are all connected as human beings, the more we increase the chance of bringing about global peace and mutual understanding.

To learn more about Professor Salem’s research, read his firsthand account of his travels >>