From 2019 to 2022, ISITA’s associate director Rebecca Shereikis and Northwestern University Libraries collaborated with a team led by Fallou Ngom and Daivi Rodima-Taylor at Boston University on the project “Ajami Literature and the Expansion of Literacy and Islam: The Case of West Africa,” funded by a Collaborative Research Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The project aims to advance understanding of Ajami (the phenomenon of writing languages other than Arabic using modified Arabic script) by exploring the Ajami literatures of four main “Islamic languages” of West Africa: Hausa, Mandinka, Fula, and Wolof
The result, an open access web gallery, contains digitized images of twenty manuscripts from each language, alongside transcriptions into Latin script, translations into English and French, and video-recorded recitations or readings of many of the manuscripts. The web gallery can be accessed at https://sites.bu.edu/nehajami/.
Seventeen of the Hausa Ajami manuscripts in the gallery are from the Herskovits Library of African Studies’ collection of Arabic Manuscripts from West Africa and were digitized by Northwestern University Libraries’ Digital Collections team.
The project team also produced a special issue of the journal Islamic Africa (vols. 14.2 and 15.1), titled “Ajami Literacies of Africa: The Wolof, Mandinka, Hausa, and Fula Traditions.” The contributions to the double special issue situate African Ajami studies within participatory multimedia and digital archiving approaches and analyze the role of Ajami literacy in mediating grassroots communities. They enable unique comparative perspectives on Ajami use in four major West African languages, contributing to the interpretive and contextual analysis of Ajami literacies and their social role.