Dakar, Jul 20 (APS) – The book ”Islamic scholarship in Africa” (437 pages), published by several authors under the direction of Senegalese scholar Ousmane Kane, sheds light on the intellectual contribution of Muslim societies in Africa dark to the radiance of Islamic knowledge.
The book published in 2021 by CERDIS and James Currey editions brings together 17 forums and articles.
“This interdisciplinary collective work, written by eminent researchers, fills an important gap” by “refuting (…) the idea that Muslim societies in black Africa are on the periphery of the Muslim world”, is- he writes on the back cover.
The authors set out to ”challenge” the implicit assumption that Sub-Saharans are ”secondary partners” in the intellectual relations of the Muslim world.
The book is also published in English under the title ”Islamic scholarship in africa”, with the subtitle ”New directions and global contexts”. It explores the intellectual and spiritual exchanges between the populations of West Africa, East Africa, the Sahara, the Maghreb and the East, as well as the Muslim diasporas in the West.
“Africans south of the Sahara, like any other people in the Muslim community, have been contributors in their own right to Islamic knowledge,” said the book’s coordinator, Ousmane Kane, during of the book presentation ceremony on Tuesday in Dakar.
Mr. Kane, holder of the chair of Islamology at Harvard University (United States), also insisted on the role of the pilgrimage to Mecca (Saudi Arabia) in these intellectual exchanges. Before colonization, “the text and the scholars circulated without hindrance”, he insisted on recalling.
“The pilgrimage to Mecca was not only a ritual act, it also allowed Africans to rub shoulders with other scholars from the Muslim world,” Ousmane Kane explained of the book.
Travel, at that time, was generally made by land, which favored the visit of major centers of learning by Africans, including Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon and Jerusalem, according to the Senegalese academic.
The book tells an anecdote about Cheikh Ibrahima Niasse (1900-1975), whose erudition surprised an Egyptian scholar he had met in Mecca. In the opinion of the man from Egypt, that a Sub-Saharan, especially from West Africa, could acquire such Islamic scholarship without going through al-Azhar University was a miracle.
Ousmane Kane, after recalling the “scholarly past” of the African continent, deplores the fact that specialists privilege the “political career” of fifteen years of El Hadji Oumar Tall over his “intellectual career” which has lasted fifty-five years.
The spread of Islam paved the way for the development of Ajami, the transcription of African languages into Arabic script, according to Kane and his co-authors.
“It is well known that African scholars have used Ajami to explain complex notions of Islamic theology to the masses who do not know Arabic,” the book says.
African languages, including Swahili, Hausa and Wolof, have been used to transmit Islamic knowledge and have served to transmit sophisticated knowledge.
According to Ousmane Kane, the scholars Serigne Mor Kaïré and Serigne Mbaye Diakhaté, whom he nicknamed ”the Mouride pleiad”, Serigne Hady Touré and Cheikh Gassama helped to spread Islamic knowledge of Wolof expression, for the Mouride brotherhoods and tijane.