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Instructors: Dr. Dmitry Bondarev
Event type:
Seminar
Displayed in timetable as:
West Afr
Hours per week:
2
Credits:
5,0
Language of instruction:
English
Min. | Max. participants:
- | 20
Comments/contents:
Most of manuscript cultures of West Africa developed in the context of Islamic literacy. Islam reached various territories of West Africa at different times. Muslim presence is already evident in the late ninth century in the political formation known as ancient Ghana, associated with the Soninke language, which occupied what is now areas between Mauritania, Senegal and Mali. The Songhay-speaking people of Gao, in present-day eastern Mali, encountered Islam in the late tenth century. Further east, in what is now northern Chad and southern Libya, the rulers of Kanem, who spoke the Kanembu language, converted to Islam in the eleventh century. The kingdom of Mali embraced Islam in the twelfth century and its successor state the Songhay Empire spread the faith along the vast swathes of the middle bend of the Niger river from the late fifteenth to the late seventeenth century. Around the same time, the Hausa city-states in present-day northern Nigeria were converting to Islam, thus bridging the Muslim communities under the Songhay in the west and those under Kanem in the east.
Islam brought Arabic as a language of religion and education – a scholarly lingua franca compared to Latin in pre-industrial Europe. Consequently, literacy in Arabic prompted many African languages to become written in Arabic script. Hundreds of thousands of manuscripts surviving in modern-day West Africa are witnesses of this long history of writing in sub-Saharan Africa. This seminar will look into the form, content and function of West Africa Islamic manuscripts and explore relationships between Arabic and African languages as observed on pages of manuscripts.
Some of the topics addressed are as follows: libraries of Timbuktu and other manuscript collections, physical and visual properties of manuscripts, manuscripts in Islamic education and translational practices (from Arabic to local languages), regional script styles, African languages in Arabic script.
Knowledge of Arabic, African languages and Arabic script is not required for the course.
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