Brittany Landorf

PhD Candidate, Emory University

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I am an Islamic Studies doctoral candidate in the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University in Atlanta, GA.  My research traces the ethics of madness, gender, and sexuality in North African Islamic mysticism, otherwise known as Sufism. I explore the ambiguity of madness, following the wandering figurations of the divinely mad Sufi saint, the majdhūb, as it travels from tenth-century Khorasan, to medieval Andalusia, and into early modern North Africa. I interweave textual analysis of mystical treatises, biographical dictionaries, and Qur'anic commentaries alongside studies of oral poetry and narratives of mad saints in North Africa today.

I ask: What makes the majdhub divinelymad, and not merely a madman? This question, I argue, is as much about negotiating authority, selfhood, and the society as it is about the mad saint. By examining the domestication of divine madness, I consider the ambiguities that drive as well as frustrate attempts to orderthe world. This study has implications for how we understand the relationship of marginal religious practice to so-called orthodoxies, suggesting that orthodoxy is a capacious category that is always developed in relation to ambiguity.

As a scholar of early Islam and its modern resonances, I am interested in the lives of Islamic texts, how they are lived out in place. In order to convey the lived intertextuality of Islamic textual traditions, I have turned to mapping. My current digital humanities project, Mapping the Female Saints of Fez, Rawḍ al-Awliyā’, presents the first full translation and maps the burial location of the female saints recorded in the hagiographic compendium Salwat al-Anfas composed by 19th-century Moroccan scholar Muḥammad ibn Ja’far al-Kattānī. You can visit the saints here.

When not writing or wandering in North Africa, I spend my time reading, gardening, and chasing after my two dogs with my partner in Minneapolis, Minnesota.