Lighting the Way of the Learner: Towards a Social Virtue Epistemology in Aḥmad al-Ṣaghīr’s The Faqīh’s Lantern
Abstract
This thesis offers an original translation and analysis of a West African didactic poem in Islamic ethics and law, by the Mālikī-Ashʿarī Mauritanian scholar Aḥmad al-Ṣaghīr (d. 1272 AH/1856 CE) called The Faqīh’s Lantern (Miṣbāḥ al-Faqīh). In addition to the critical translation, I examine the poem thematically through the lens of social virtue epistemology. Chapter 1 sketches the background of the text and author, positioning the author historically as a product of a rich scholarly and pedagogical tradition while noting Mauritania’s contemporary place in the North American Muslim imagination. Chapter 2 is the translation of the text, making this classical poem accessible to the modern reader. Chapter 3 is an analysis of the poem centred around four major themes: intellectual virtues, embodiment, expert identification, and self-trust. This unique theoretical lens points to several nodes where Islamic studies and the Anglo-American philosophical tradition intersect, with respect to theories of knowledge.