Rex Sean O'Fahey

Rex Seán O'Fahey (1943 – April 9, 2019) was an Irish historian specializing in Islamic Africa. He was especially known for his work on Sudan and on Sufism.

Career O'Fahey was brought up partly in Mombasa in Kenya and then in England but always self-identified as Irish, using the Irish middle name Séan rather than Rex for much of his later life. He studied at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, where he then did a PhD under P. M. Holt, the leading historian of Sudan, on the history of Darfur, a part of Sudan, where he conducted fieldwork between 1969 and 1976. He taught at the University of Khartoum from 1970 to 1973, and after a year at the University of Edinburgh, moved to the University of Bergen, where he spent the rest of his career, first as a research fellow and finally a professor. He retired in 2013. He also taught at Northwestern University in Illinois, where he held an adjunct professorship and cooperated closely with John Hunwick, a Northwestern professor and a fellow Africanist from SOAS, with whom he founded the Brill book series on the Arabic Literature of Africa, and also the journal Sudanic Africa, later renamed Islamic Africa. O'Fahey also helped found the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa at Northwestern. His work on Sufism and the Sudan was taken further by a number of his PhD students, including Anders Bjørkelo, Ali Salih Karrar, Knut S. Vikør, Endre Stiansen, Albrecht Hofheinz, Anne K. Bang, and Mark Sedgwick. The American historian John O. Voll responded to "Neo-Sufism Reconsidered" in 2008 with his own "Neo-Sufism: Reconsidered Again," and the debate continues.