Al-Ḥājj ʿUmar b. Sa’īd al-Fūtī Tāl (1796–1864) was among the most prominent West African scholarly figures in the nineteenth century. His magnum opus, the Kitāb Rimāḥ Ḥizb al-Raḥīm ‘alā Nuḥūr Ḥizb al-Rajīm (‘The book of the spears of the league of Allah the Merciful against the necks of the league of Satan the accursed’), is considered one of the most important – yet understudied – works of the nineteenth century in the Muslim world. According to Louis Brenner, al-Rimāḥ is arguably ‘the most widely disseminated text by any nineteenthcentury West African author’. The work is normally printed on the margins of the major work of ‘Ali Ḥarāzim's Jawāhir al-Ma‘ānī. After leading armed anticolonial resistance against the French, Al-Ḥājj ʿUmar formed a state in 1860 which, although short-lived, was one of the largest ever seen in the Western Bilad al-Sudan. More academic attention has been paid to Tāl's political life rather than his writings and intellectual stances, at least in the European-language literature. The fascination with Tāl as a warrior and not as a serious scholar is perhaps due to the Western academic tendency to view African and Islamic studies through separate lenses. In Jihad of the Pen: the Ṣūfī Literature of West Africa, Zachary Wright remarks that ‘the near absence of their [Ṣūfī ‘ulamā’ from West Africa] authorial voices leaves a void at what should be the heart of an intellectual history’. Focusing on the intersection of the Sufism and Islamic law in the Kitāb al-Rimāḥ, this chapter is motivated by the effort to bring Tāl's contributions to the fore of modern Islamic intellectual history. Kitāb al-Rimāḥ is normally classified as a ‘Sufi’ text. In it, however, Tāl discusses a range of topics from fiqh to theology and cites more than 650 direct quotes from over 100 sources. Almost half of the quotes come from ‘Abd al-Wahhāb al-Sha‘rānī (d. 1565), whose seminal work, Al-Mizān al-Kubrā (‘The Supreme Scale’), compares the rulings of all four Sunni schools as if they were a single school.

The erudition and mobility of Tāl, no doubt propelled by the edicts of the modern Sufi order, the Tījāniyya, which stressed the importance of the attainment of knowledge, exacerbated his scholastic rigour and his ability to memorize and transcribe a large corpus of oral and written sources.