The Mother of Proofs (The Small Creed)

Introduction

Muhammad al-Sanusi’s “Mother of Proofs” (Umm al-barāhīn), also called “The Small Creed”, is the shortest of a series of creeds he wrote in Tlemcen in the fifteenth century. In a few pages it states what every adult believer must know: what is necessary, impossible and possible for God and for the prophets, each point with a short rational proof, and it ends by showing that the profession of faith contains all of this. Behind its brevity stands al-Sanusi’s demand that belief rest on proof rather than imitation. The text was memorised, versified and commented on across North and West Africa – in Timbuktu a scholar of the sixteenth century put it into verse – as well as in Egypt and Southeast Asia, and adapted into Berber, Fulani, Turkish, Malay and Javanese.