Special Issue "African Ajami Literacies"

Islamic Africa, 14(2), 119-143 (w. Fallou Ngom and David Robinson), 2023

African ʿAjamī literatures hold a wealth of knowledge on the history and intellectual traditions of the region but are largely unknown to the larger public. Our special issue seeks to enhance a broader understanding of this important part of the Islamic world, exploring the ʿAjamī literatures and literacies of four main language groups of Muslim West Africa: Hausa, Mandinka, Fula, and Wolof. Through increasing access to primary sources in ʿAjamī and utilizing an innovative multimedia approach, our research contributes to an interpretive and comparative analysis of African ʿAjamī literacy, with its multiple purposes, forms, and custodians. We discuss the building blocks and historical development of ʿAjamī cultures in West Africa, outline the longitudinal collaborative research initiatives that our special issue draws upon, and explore the challenges and opportunities for participatory knowledge-making that accompany the rise of digital technologies in the study of African literatures and literacies. Published in Islamic Africa 14 (2023) 119-143 * The article is part of the special issue "ʿAjamī Literacies of Africa," edited by F. Ngom, D. Rodima-Taylor, and David Robinson

Islamic Africa, 2018

This study analyses five Bamana-language texts composed in the earlier twentieth century by Amadou Jomworo Bary, a Fulbe scholar from the Masina (Mali), that were hand copied in 1972 by the Fulbe scholar and researcher Almamy Maliki Yattara. The writing system, which uses modified Arabic characters to note phonemes specific to Bamana, is compared to other West African adaptations of Arabic script. The article also examines the doctrinal positions developed and world view implicit in the texts, which concern water rites in San (Mali), Islamic belief and practice, and healing. Attention is drawn as to how knowledge of local cultural contexts can contribute to a better understanding of these manuscripts.

The first chapter of my dissertation. Chapter one of this dissertation contains a thorough overview of Ajami traditions throughout Islamized Africa. This is intended to lay the groundwork for the analysis of Wolofal sources presented in the remaining chapters, but also to address a gap in the literature regarding the overall extent of scholarship on Ajami traditions and shared issues involved in the approach to Ajami texts. By critically examining scholarly work on Ajami traditions, the chapter demonstrates that in each case, Ajami texts represent the formation and transmission of localized Islamic discourses, informed by local knowledge systems as well as Arabo-Islamic knowledge systems. The employment of Islamic discourses as vehicles for social criticism and reform, and the importance of mystical and esoteric knowledge, are two overarching themes present across traditions. The analysis brings to light the interdisciplinary nature of the study of Ajami texts. Understanding the interplay between various knowledge traditions, and contexts of production and transmission, requires linguistic, cultural and historical knowledge from both local and Arabo-Islamic realms.

Approaches to the Qur’an in Sub-Saharan Africa, 2019

This work aims to open up new discourses about Islam in sub-Saharan Africa through the examination of how Muslims in this geographical and socio-cultural context have engaged with the Qur’an. Covering a period from the twelfth/eighteenth century to the early twenty-first century, this multidisciplinary volume examines a variety of geographical locations in sub-Saharan Africa including Burkina Faso, Kenya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, and Tanzania. The book’s twelve case studies use different frameworks and methodological approaches from the academic disciplines of anthropology, art history, historiography and philology. They explore a variety of media and modalities that Muslims in sub-Saharan Africa, as elsewhere, use in their engagements with the Qur’an. This volume moves well beyond the materiality of the Qur’an as a physical book to explore the ways in which it is understood, felt and imagined, and to examine the contestations and debates that arise from these diverse engagements. The volume covers textual culture (manuscripts, commentaries and translations); aural and oral culture (recitations and invocations, music and poetry); the lived experience (magic squares and symbolic repertoire, medicinal and curative acts, healing and prayer, dreams and spirit worlds); material culture (textiles, ink, paper, and wooden boards); and education. In seeking to understand the plurality of engagements that Muslims from diverse communities of interpretation and from different parts of sub-Saharan Africa have had with Qur’an, this volume adds to the scholarship on the Qur’an as well as the scholarship on Islam and Muslims in Africa.

2015

This meeting is the first in a series of collaborative programs on Islam in Africa organized under the auspices of the newly established Illinois-Northwestern Consortium for African Studies (funded by a U.S. Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center grant). It is being planned in anticipation of the ISITA-led workshops, projected for summer 2017 in Evanston and Africa, on aspects of the codicology of West African Arabic manuscripts, and also in preparation for PAS and CAS’s collaboration with the University of Birmingham on its 2016 Thirteenth Cadbury Workshop on “Bodies of Text: Learning to be Muslim in West Africa.” A special evening reception Thursday April 21st is planned to honor Professor John O. Hunwick, in whose memory the conference is dedicated. This will involve members of his family, his students, and additional community friends and associates in a time for remembering his many contributions.

Manuscript and Print in the Islamic Tradition

This article examines the social and intellectual ramifications of print as both an innovative new medium and an extension of the manuscript tradition, from the middle of the nineteenth century to the 1950s. Taking a broad transregional framework that highlights the emerging connectivity between the Islamic centers of learning and print production in Egypt, on the one hand, and Muslims in East and Northeast Africa, on the other hand, it examines how print created new sets of discursive webs and relationships that entangled Muslims across various physical and conceptual spaces. Furthermore, this piece surveys the elements of the manuscript tradition that find their way onto the printed page exploring how such elements persist from one media to the next and the transformations they undergo in the process.

Working Papers in Educational Linguistics, 2013

Ajami (عجمي) is a term frequently used to refer to the use of the Arabic script to write sub-Saharan African languages. West African lingua francas such as Hausa, Wolof, and Fulani have a rather well-documented record of Ajami artifacts and use. In Eastern Manding varieties such as Bamanan and Jula, however, Ajami practices and texts have been viewed as rather limited in comparison. Recent 2012 fieldwork in Burkina Faso however suggests that Ajami practices in Jula have simply escaped the notice of the Western scholarly community. Drawing on ethnographic fieldnotes about production of Esoteric Islamic medicinal treatment recipes in addition to dialogues, descriptions and songs produced at my request, I explore Jula Ajami as a grassroots literacy existing alongside the Koranic schooling tradition. Turning to the texts themselves, I analyze the graphic system in use as well as the linguistic characteristics that suggest the enregisterment of Kong Jula as appropriate in Jula Ajami texts.

Journal of Islamic Studies , 2021

Applying network analysis on five Ibadi siyar, from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, with each one representing roughly one century, Love has written a unique history of the Ibadi community in North Africa in the Middle Period. Its uniqueness stems from the relationships Love was able to map out among Ibadi scholars throughout centuries and across regions, between scholars (human network) and manuscripts (written network), between the Ibadi communities and the non-Ibadi Muslim ones, between Ibadi history and the broader North African and Islamic histories, and between the construction of the Ibadi tradition in the past and the invention of Ibadi tradition in the present.

The Arts and Crafts of Literacy, 2017

The study of Africa has suffered, and still suffers, from many stereotypes. One such stereotype was the assumption that there was no history in Africa before the arrival of the Europeans. After World War II, with the march towards independence of most African countries, a new generation of scholars, both from the continent and abroad, initiated a historiographical revolution that would eventually restore their past to the peoples of Africa. During this phase, scholars considered oral traditions as the authentic means of discovering the past and understanding the present in Africa. Although exceptionally useful, the problem with the drive to study orality as a source of history was that it overlooked a centuries-old tradition of Islamic literacy found in many areas of the continent after the conversion of Africans to the Muslim faith. However, this tradition of Islamic literacy has left a priceless heritage in manuscripts, both in Arabic and in various forms of 'ajamī (i.e. African languages written in the Arabic alphabet), which have only recently attracted the attention of scholars. The Arts and Crafts of Literacy: Islamic Manuscript Cultures in sub-Saharan Africa, focuses on this African Islamic literary heritage and offers a holistic approach to the study of manuscripts in Muslim Africa. Andrea Brigaglia and I have gathered twelve contributions presented at the international conference we organized and hosted at the University of Cape Town, 5-6 September, 2013, titled The Arts and Crafts of Literacy: Manuscript Cultures in Muslim sub-Saharan Africa. 1 These articles look at the different dimensions of the manuscripts, i.e. at the materials, the technologies and the practices, the communities involved in the production, commercialization, circulation, preservation and consumption, as well as at the texts themselves. As the Congolese philosopher Valentin-Yves Mudimbe underlines, '[t]he reality of an African history, particularly for the sub-Saharan part of the continent, does not seem to exist, at least academically, before the 1940s.' 2 That Africa has no history was the argument of the famous eighteenth/nineteenth-century philosopher Georg W.F. Hegel. In his often-quoted lectures, published under the title Philosophy of History, he uttered the following, powerful statement: || 1 Michaelle Biddle and Alessandro Gori could not attend the conference; nevertheless, their articles are presented here. Halirou Mohamadou's paper was solicited by the editors. 2 Mudimbe 1994, 21.

Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures (General Editor Suad Joseph), 2016

Research on Muslim women in West Africa has received more attention in the last few decades, though it remains a rather marginal area of study. Similarly, although the use of locally produced Arabic-language documents as sources for the history of the region has received wider attention recently, it is also peripheral to mainstream African historiography. Therefore, research on Arabic-language documents as potential sources for studies of women’s lives, societal roles, and cultural practices is truly exceptional. Moreover, there is a marked tendency in the literature to exploit these documents exclusively for their textual content, and often overlook their significant features and functions as artefacts and objects. In this overarching context, the role of women in the production, preservation, and circulation of Arabic-language documents in West Africa has received almost no academic attention. Thus, this entry ventures into unchartered terrain, offering glimpses from recent historical, anthropological, and religious studies of the region.