Ajami Scripts in the Senegalese Speech Community

Islamic Africa 2, no. 1: 67-103. doi:10.5192/021540993020167., 2011

This paper shows how religious speeches by leaders of the Taalibe Baay, disciples of the Senegalese Sufi Shaykh Ibrahim Ñas, uphold Islamic knowledge and authority while accommodating competing yet intertwined knowledge regimes. French and Arabic enter into Wolof religious discourse in multiple ways through contrasting educational methods, uses, and language ideologies. These three languages are combined and separated in numerous linguistic registers that religious speeches juxtapose: classical Arabic prologues and textual quotations, “deep Wolof” narratives largely excluding loan words, more conversational registers using some French terms, and so on. Although orators typically use French terms sparingly, they sometimes break this pattern and use them liberally, especially when critiquing Western hegemony and secular values. They sometimes incorporate French discourses of “liberty” and “progress” in passages designed to demonstrate Islam’s superiority in achieving these ideals. Orators tend to replace common French terms for morally positive concepts with Arabic terms, yet they usually reinsert the French as a gloss to facilitate comprehension. I discuss these utterances as cases of linguistic “hybridity” in which contrasting voices combine to serve an authorial purpose. These rhetorical patterns fit into a larger pattern of accommodating, contesting, and appropriating hegemonic languages, institutions, and ideas while upholding Islam’s unique authoritativeness.

Since their independence in the sixties, West African countries have elaborated a series of linguistic policies in order to raise the literacy rate that was then very low. Less than a quarter of the total population was considered to be literate in Western terms. The situation has but slightly changed. Exclusive enforced literacy in official languages, the former colonisers’ languages, was a failure. Mass literacy campaigning Roman script for vernacular languages were also ineffective In the nineteen eighties a series of symposia took place in some West African capitals with the collaboration of UNESCO and ISESCO. The aim was to investigate and promote Arabic script as a medium for adult literacy. The attempts to standardize Arabic script for African languages, through the modernization of traditional Koranic schools, were not also successful. They were also carried out in a non- participative, non-integrative manner. I this article, I argue that, by deepen structural and pedagogical reforms of the Traditional Koranic schools, the use of Arabic script might become a powerful and less costly means to achieve literacy in some interior areas of Western Africa.

Tydskrif vir letterkunde, Vol. 45, No. 1, 2008, pages 133-142, 2008

Northern Mozambican Muslim population has been using the Arabic script for writing in KiSwahili and local African languages for centuries. Even today, many people continue using this script in private correspondence. Despite the abundance of the documents in this script that are housed at the Mozambique Historical Archives as well as in private hands, these documents have never been addressed or researched either from linguistic, historical, cultural or religious vantage points. For the last seven years, the Archives have been trying to draw attention of the scholars and obtain funds for the preservation and research of the documents. In this article two short letters from the collection of the Mozambique Historical Archives are transcribed and translated with the help of a local shaykh who was educated within the regional historical Islamic literacy tradition. Then, the content and the protagonists of the letters were identified and analyzed with the reference to the historical context and the events of the time. Besides serving as the evidence for historical occurrences, the letters also provide a general public with a unique opportunity of “hearing the voices” of the authors and in their own words (in first person).

Review article Quaderni di Studi Arabi - Published by: Istituto per l'Oriente C. A. Nallino, 2018

Taught from primary school to the university level – where new courses on the globalization of the Arabic writing system have cropped up (Abdallah 2014) – the Arabic script, with all its orthographic peculiarities and multiple facets, continues to shape languages other than Arabic, their communities and specific textual traditions. However, comparative research on the Arabic script as used to write langauges other than Arabic, as well as broader topics such as digraphia and allography, are still rather scarce. This holds particularly true for Africa. One interesting exception is the book The Arabic Script in Africa. The first part of this article is dedicated to situating this book within the wider context of studies on digraphia, allography and specific local adaptations of the Arabic writing systems, while also pointing out the necessity for further research; the second part discusses the case studies presented in this book and their implications.

Islamic Africa

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. Our Editorial Introduction to the special issue discusses the building blocks and historical development of ʿAjamī cultures in West Africa, outlines the longitudinal collaborative research initiatives that our special issue draws upon, and explores the challenges and opportunities for participatory knowledge-making that accompany the rise of digita...

2023

The international conference Arabic in Africa: Historical and Sociolinguistic perspectives brings together scholars interested in the study of Arabic in Africa. The Arabic language in Africa represents at one and the same time remarkable similarities in terms of language structure and socio-cultural status as well as well-profiled contrasts. Both of these coincide only partially with contemporary political, economic and geographic demarcations, such as have become established in MENA or Maghreb studies. “Arabic in Africa” considers Arabic from different approaches, perspectives and disciplinary frameworks and in quite different sociolinguistic situations. Parameters include demographic weight (e.g. “national nonstandard standard” or very local small variety), institutional status (e.g. official language, national language, minority with no state support) and historical provenance. We welcome contributions that approach Arabic in Africa from historical, descriptive and sociolinguistic perspectives. Topics include but are not limited to: • Basic descriptive and theoretical linguistic perspectives on Arabic in Africa. • Variation, prestige, unbalanced power in Arabic varieties in Africa • Language contact involving Arabic, Arabic-based pidgins and creoles in Africa • Arabic as L2, Arabic as lingua franca in Africa • Arabic in Africa - Arabic in the Middle East: comparative historical and sociolinguistic perspectives • Language politics and policies involving Arabic in Africa • Ajami script, Arabic script in non-Arabic-speaking areas in Africa • Arabic and Islam in Africa During the coffee breaks there will be poster sessions where the conference participants will be able to interact with the presenters and discuss their research. The conference will close with a roundtable discussion where distinguished scholars will synthesize the various ideas and research directions which have been presented and propose the state of the art on Arabic in Africa according to their own perspective. We are honored to count among our invited Raporteurs Prof. Jeffrey Heath (University of Michigan), Prof. Catherine Miller (CNRS, IREMAM), Prof. Fiona Mc Laughlin (University of Florida) and Prof. Stephan Prochazka (University of Vienna) and to have Prof. Jonathan Owens (University of Bayreuth) chairing the discussion. The conference is funded by the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence and the Chair of Arabic Studies of the University of Bayreuth.

2014

25 years ago, Acting upon UNESCO’s pioneering experience of using Arabic script in transcribing African languages, ISESCO took upon itself to carry on this project, initiated in early eighties by the Senegalese Director General of the latter organisation Amadou-Mahtar M’bow with the intention of conducting forcefully literacy programmes in native African languages and rehabilitating related oral traditions and cultures. At the time, the project in question looked extremely complex and very intricate given the number of local languages in presence as well as both social and political hurdles strewn in its way. In the implementation of this ambitious cultural and educational undertaking, ISESCO set forth a number of objectives given here below: 1- To refine the Arabic script, develop it phonetically and technically and adapt it to writing the various languages of Africa in an accurate scientific way; 2- Safeguard the cultural heritage of the African peoples and develop their languages and cultures with the view to keeping pace with the scientific and technological revolution and developments in communication and telecommunications; 3- Secure mutual linkage among the languages of the African peoples by means of adopting a common Standard Arabic Script, being a bond connecting them with the language of the Qur’an and further securing communication and exchange between the speakers of these languages; and 4- The development of an acceptable and simple script for the local languages that were, hitherto, unwritten in order to use these languages in literacy programmes. To implement efficiently this programme, ISESCO adopted a scientific methodology based on the following approach: 1- Determine the frequency of the distinctive features of non-Arabic sounds in the African languages in question in order to design machines for printing these non-Arabic languages in Arabic script; 2- Check the characters adopted on the basis of a scientifically accurate analysis of symbols, and original sound forms of languages, and examine them on various levels with a view of finding the distinctive sound features of the languages in question; 3- Set up acceptable writing symbols in the light of historical, pedagogical, linguistic and aesthetic factors; and 4- Renew the distinctive sound features and the transcription symbols (characters) of special glottal stops. The standardisation of the Arabic script, to allow its use in the transcription of target African languages was not an easy task to undertake, it took seven years of hard labour and several workshops and seminars all over the African continent with the active participation of linguists, educators, literacy experts and officials before agreeing on a set of symbols that became the official Arab-African Alphabet (AAA).

2019

An updated version of the programme and abstracts of the first workshop of the DFG-funded project "African voices in Islamic manuscripts from Mali:<br> documenting and exploring African languages in Arabic script (Ajami)"<br> In conjunction with the meeting of the "Old Mande Research Network" held on 31 October to 1 November 2018 at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures. Blog: ajami.hypotheses.org/ Project: www.manuscript-cultures.uni-hamburg.de/ajami/index_e.html

Social and technological changes over the past several decades have led to widespread writing of "spoken" Arabic dialects. However, there is little quantitative research on this phenomenon and most existing research is limited to Egypt and Morocco. In addition, little is known about the characteristics of these newly written vernaculars, even though encoding an unwritten language in writing is not merely a technical assignment of sound to letter. Rather, it is a complex process that must balance practical considerations with ideological stances, such as autonomy from the standard language (Mühleisen 2005). The spread of vernacular into writing and the accompanying tension over its form constitutes the process of vernacularization. This dissertation documents and analyzes this vernacularization as it is occurring in Tunisia, examining how Tunisians writing in dɛrja collectively position themselves in relation to Standard Arabic, French, and other Arabic vernaculars. Using a 32-million-word online corpus and an innovative method for quantifying language choice, I found that the proportion of Tunisian Arabic on the online forum studied increased from 19.7% in 2010 to 69.9% in 2021.

Mediterranean Politics, 2016

This article studies the role of the Arabophone community in postcolonial social and political transformations. More specifically, it focuses on the case of the Arabisants in Senegal. Forged through the mobility between the two shores of the Sahara, they are willing to emerge as a more visible political force since the 2000s. This article sheds light on Arabisants’ endeavours to participate in various forms of political advocacy. It demonstrates that they intend to stand as the political entrepreneurs of the Muslim community, to challenge the hegemony of Sufi Brotherhoods, and consequently, to challenge the state’s alliance with the Sufi orders. In so doing, Arabisants emerge as counter-elite in the public and political debate in Senegal.

Department of Linguistics & Foreign Languages, Bayero University, Kano, 2019

This paper attempts to demonstrate the archetypal pedagogical approach to teaching and learning activities among the Kanuri people of North-East zone, Nigeria. Language being an effective medium of written and oral communication, the paper focuses on the techniques of teaching and learning the Qur'an only by the African child. for this purpose, Kanuri educators devised some native terms, terminologies and symbols as pedagogical tools to teach Qur'anic texts.

Journal of Qur'anic Studies, 2013

A Typology of West African Ajami Manuscripts: Languages, Layout and Research Perspectives, 2021

In the process of creating their manuscripts, the scribes in West Africa had two linguistic sets-Arabic and non-Arabic (Ajami)-and they had to visually express these repertoires following the logic of interplay between these different sets. The suggested classification of Ajami manuscripts tries to follow this logic. Besides establishing formal types, the classification provides a glimpse into specific cultural domains that generated different types of manuscripts and suggests research perspectives and methods of study relevant to each type.