Conclusion: The Study of Islamic Scholarship and the Social Sciences in Africa: Bridging Knowledge Divides, Reframing Narratives

Summary

This book showcases cutting-edge research in the study of Islam and Islamic scholarship in Africa. In many ways, it also shows how the study of Islamic scholarship in Africa has led to a formidable extension of the frontiers of the study of Africa, and of African scholarship.

I would like to begin with a personal experience. In the mid-1990s, while I was programme officer at CODESRIA, Ousmane Kane, who was then head of the Department of Political Science of Gaston Berger University, in Saint-Louis, Senegal, invited me to teach a course on ‘Contemporary political problems’ in his department. For five years, during the second semester, I used some of my leave days to go every week on an overnight trip to Saint-Louis, which is 260 km to the north of Dakar, to teach the course. Instead of using the accommodation provided by the University, I used to spend the night in Ousmane's house. Through our conversations, I came to realize how segmented the African intellectual community was.

One evening, I was looking at Ousmane Kane's Handlist of Manuscripts in the Libraries of Shaykh Mor Mbaye Cissé, al-Hâjj Malick Sy & Shaykh Ibrahima Niasse, and listening to Ousmane explain with passion, but also with great anxiety, how tens of thousands of precious manuscripts lying in private libraries all across West Africa, particularly in great centres of learning like Timbuktu in Mali, and Pir, Koki, Touba, Tivaouane and Medina Baye in Senegal, could be lost through serious deterioration if something was not urgently done to preserve them. It then dawned on me that even with all the research and publishing that CODESRIA was doing as the leading pan-African social science research council, we actually knew very little about what the thousands of manuscripts that Ousmane was talking and writing about were discussing, in part because most of the manuscripts were written in Arabic or were using the Arabic script (‘Ajamī). It was clear that there were other important intellectual debates that had been going on in Africa that neither CODESRIA, nor most of the African universities and research centres modelled on those of the West, were engaging with. Very few were the African scholars who had read the Timbuktu manuscripts, for instance, and were familiar with the debates captured in the huge number of manuscripts to be preserved.