tent post, unrecorded Tuareg artist

Across Northwest Africa, nomadic and semi-nomadic Tuareg pastoralists traveled in the vast Sahara Desert, oasis towns, and surrounding areas to water their camels and livestock. As Muslims, they contributed to the shaping of Islamic beliefs and practices and tensions over powerful relationships within Islam. Tuareg beliefs in the spirit world embraced Islamic fire spirits (djinn) and the forces of baraka (God’s benevolent force), as well as non-Islamic spirits and forces associated with artistic technologies. Tuareg artists of the Inaden (blacksmith and wood-carving) class controlled the non-Islamic fire spirits of the forge. Artists’ specialized and complex relationships to particular spirits placed them in an antagonistic relationship with Tuareg religious figures (marabouts) and Islamic scholars known as Ineslemen. Although all Tuareg tents required structural and decorative posts carved by the Inaden, the artist class nonetheless maintained a degree of spatial separation from society and positioned their tents at a distance from mosques and the tents of the marabouts.