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Abubakar Sadiq Abdulkadir is completing his PhD in the Department of History, Classics and Religion at the University of Alberta, Canada. His research explores the ‘emergence’ of the seventeenth century classical Arabic poetry tradition in Mauritania --  “the Land of a Million Poets”--  and the central role that this literary and intellectual tradition served in the transmission and embodiment of the cultural ideals and religious doctrines of Islamic scholarship in West Africa to this day. He is an interdisciplinary scholar with a wide range of interests, including the construction of Islamic religious authority, Arabic [Sufi] poetry, Islamic Spirituality, Qur'an exegesis, Arabo-Islamic manuscripts, decoloniality and race. Abubakar holds an MA in Semitic Languages and Cultures with a focus on the Study of Islam from the Department of Religion at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He also earned an advanced diploma in Arabic Language from the Arabic Language Teaching Institute in Mezzeh, Damascus-Syria. He has studied extensively with Muslim scholars in Syria, Mauritania, Senegal and Nigeria, and has obtained traditional teaching licenses and diplomas (ijāzāt) in a variety of Arabic and Islamic Sciences.