Portrait of Ahmad al-Tijani
Not on view
This suwer (or souwere, Wolof for reverse glass painting) portrays Ahmad al-Tijani (1735–1815), an Algerian religious scholar and mystic who, after having traveled extensively in North Africa and in Arabia, settled in Morocco and founded a new Sufi brotherhood, in 1781. Known as Tijaniyya, this spiritual order developed a strong following in Senegal in the second half of the 19th century. The image of the founder, on this and on other glass paintings, was often duplicated from a 19th-century Tunisian lithograph.
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