Due to its Christian roots, western education in Nigeria was initially resisted by Muslims as Judeo-Christian agenda, despite some acquiescence and appropriation of values of western education for Islamic education system. However, from the mid-1980s, neoliberal economic policies led to decline of government responsibility over education, and by the new millennium, private enterprise had become the major provider of education in Nigeria. The fear of Christianisation through education particularly challenged the Muslims. Socio-economic contingencies and prodding by the Muslim populace encouraged some of the ulama to venture into edupreneurship. Using the infrastructures of the madrasa, they adapted by establishing Western-style nursery/primary schools, running the two systems in the same space but at different times. What are the arguments of these scholars? Using the analytical lens of adaptive position-taking, this paper argues that, apart from the economic benefits, the trend also broadens Muslims’ socio-economic and political agenda.
Abstract Miṣbāḥ al-arwāḥ fī uṣūl al-falāḥ, written by a fifteenth-century Maliki scholar from Tlemcen, Muḥammad al-Maghīlī (d. c. 1505), had a great influence on the religious and legal thought of ʿUthmān b. Fūdī (d. 1817), the founder of the Sokoto Caliphate, and the issue of takfīr in the history of his jihad movement. Although this work has not been fully examined because only one manuscript was previously known, I recently identified two manuscripts of this work held at al-Khizāna al-Ḥasaniyya (mss. 13446 and 13722). In the present paper, I provide a brief examination of these newly identified manuscripts, particularly from the perspective of the historical study of the early Sokoto Caliphate.
Qur'an exegesis (tafsir) in African Muslim societies represented the pinnacle of scholarly achievement, and public explanation of the Qur'an was the event that marked the emergence of one of Africa's most successful Sufi revivals, the "Community of the Flood" of the Senegalese Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse (d. 1975). Niasse's network of knowledge transmission, foregrounding the direct experiential knowledge of God (maMODIFIER LETTER LEFT HALF RINGrifa bi-Llah), continued to emphasize Qur'an learning, but Niasse's own recorded Arabic tafsir demonstrated a shift away from traditional West African sources in this field. Prior understandings of the West African tafsir discipline locate the fifteenthcentury Egyptian Tafsir al-Jalalayn as the primary influence on West African understandings. But Niasse's tafsir exhibits a clear preference for an early eighteenthcentury Ottoman multivolume work, Ismail sigma laggis "Spirit of Explanation" (Ruh al-bayan), one of the most comprehensive summaries of Sufi understandings of the Qur'an. This paper not only demonstrates the globally-connected nature of Islamic knowledge production in West Africa but also argues that Niasse's emphasis on gnosis built on the Ru13 al-bayan to ultimately occasion a noteworthy addition to the existing literary corpus of Qur'an exegesis.
Using Mandinka ʿAjamī sources, the article explores the meaning, purpose, and usefulness of proverbs among the Mandinka people of Casamance, Senegal and The Gambia who speak the variety known as Western Mandinka. Proverbs are by nature vehicles for the transmission of moral, ethical, and philosophical wisdom in society. Therefore, they serve as pivotal educational tools. This article examines their persistence, spread, and social purpose in Mandinka societies of Senegambia and beyond. The examples discussed show how proverbs are not isolated sayings, but function in a complex social and cultural context. The article suggests that they present specific challenges for translators and interpreters who may not be familiar with relevant cultural and linguistic intricacies. Consulting with local communities and local language experts is therefore an indispensable part of such research.
This article provides an in-depth look at the past ten years of the African ʿAjamī Library project, founded and led by Dr. Fallou Ngom, Professor of Anthropology and former Director of the African Studies Center at Boston University, with the goal to serve as a digital continental open access public repository of aggregated digitized ʿAjamī texts from non-Europhone Africa. With over 31,400 pages of manuscripts – hosted at Boston University’s institutional repository, OpenBU – the African ʿAjamī Library has had over half a million individual views and downloads to-date. The article examines the types of manuscripts digitized; manuscript impact, visibility and usage; fieldwork locations and methodologies; the importance of local project teams and partnerships, and what the next ten years might look like for this project.
