https://www.youtube.com/embed/0KdO3Czmlho
please allow me to start my presentation with a citation which explains my motivation to write this book and it is from gram furnace his book poetry prose and popular culture in Hausa, he said that the debate is taking place about post-colonial literature and society in Africa in which writing in English or French is pursued without any acknowledgement that the world the whole world of debate has been going on vigorously and at length in African languages now the question is arabic and african language and i would argue yes the majority overwhelming majority of Arabs live in which continent yes in Africa and you know it's the language by far the African languages most spoken or used by the people you know maybe 250 million Arab 250 million Muslim that is 500 thousand and spoken by more people than than than 90 Swahili which is the second with only about you know 100 million speakers so what ferny says there is no better illustration of this than two books that deeply influence the intellectual debate about the production of knowledge in Africa and on Africa so these books were so influential that their authors received respectively the Melville has proved its prize from the African cities Association of North America which is awarded annually to the best book on Africa written in English so both books both also some sorry come from a Christian background they had attended top Western universities they taught in prestigious American universities and they represented two dominant intellectual traditions in schooling in Africa which is Anglophone in front of all but what was more striking as the common denominator between the two authors which they share with African intellectuals trained in western languages was their very Eurocentric approach to the production of knowledge in Africa in on Africa who didn't pay for example argues that the writings have been contributed to the invention and the idea of Africa were for the most part produced by Europeans by Europeans during the colonial period and they formed what he called the colonial library and that the European interpreters like the African animist those categories and conceptual systems that stemmed from the Western epistemological order so for Appiah he stated that most writings produced in sub-saharan Africa were in Portuguese French and English and that consequently most intellectuals of subsonic Africa was what he called Bureau form in other words they wrote in European languages now what is this book about to summarize it in one sentence it's about the littoral cultures of West Africa why the title beyond timber - because the Old West African city of Timbuktu which is famous as a great center of Muslim learning from Islam's Golden Age renown for its Madras and archives of rare Arabic manuscripts is not unique it was one among many scholarly centers to exist in pre-colonial West Africa before the rise of Western Imperial and intellectual hegemony in the region now in Freetown Sierra Leone the church missionary society created the full of ecology in 1827 as the first college to offer instruction in a European language in West Africa at that time several Islamic centres of higher learning already exist in West Africa and one of the oldest is sand quarry which had been in Thimphu for which has been in Timbuktu since the 14th century and Sankara compared favorably with the best centres of Islamic learning in the Muslim world in the 16th century it attracted students and scholars from West Africa from the Maghreb and beyond and the rise of spiritual and intellectual centers such as Ankara rested largely on the economic prosperity of this region deniable Bend region now though Mali is today one of the poorest economies or poorest countries on earth the predecessor Empire whose name it adopted was the global supplier of gold when some quarry was established two centuries after the creation of Timbuktu an estimated two thirds of the world's gold came from West Africa a large part of which pass through Timbuktu and I hastened to add that historians are unsure of exactly how much gold was exported from SEPs and Africa to the north according to the best estimates it was slightly above one tonne a year between the ninth and the 15th centuries although this may look insignificant compared with amount of gold produced with the support of modern extracting technologies medieval mining techniques limited the quantity of gold that could be obtained anywhere in the world and limited geographical knowledge kept the gold of the new world outside global markets by the 10th century a West African girl was being minted into coins in the cities of the motherland before circulating widely in the rest of Africa and throughout Asia the girl was the main attraction for the Arabs to this region to belie the student land of the black and the huge country T's of gold exported by the West Western village Sudan by West Africa attracted the interest of Arab and Western geographers between the 9th and the 17th century no fewer than 75 trade routes were produced were produced by Arab geographers they gave detailed information on the exact position of trading centres and OHSAS and the length of Caravan routes and days of travelling between centers and in the year 1324 malice emperor mansa musa stayed three days in Egypt on his way to Mecca and he distributed so much gold that his massage was recorded in great details by Egyptians and even Europeans indeed a picture of Mansa Musa is future in the castle an advance of 1375 drawn by Abraham crest which is one of the first map maps to provide reliable information about Africa you could see it here and the picture of Mansa Musa here in the map of a progress so on his return to West Africa from the pilgrimage Mansa Musa brought with him many books and even scholars and the emergence of the Portuguese as a novel power and the discovery of gold in the Americas somewhat shifted the center of gravity of regional trade and led to a reduction in Timbuktu s prominence over the course of the sixteenth century but Timbuktu remain an important regional commercial and intellectual hub until the Sargent invasion or the Moroccan invasion which precipitated the decline of Songhai was in 1591 the Moroccan expeditionary force was composed of Spanish Arab and Berber soldiers called ARMA from the Arabic word rumored or Musketeers subsequently the armour settled in the region declared their independence from the sardian monarchy and intermarried with the local elites the 1591 expedition precipitated the collapse of the last and most prosperous and powerful medieval west african state undermining its economic prosperity which supported a vibrant intellectual life this in turn led to the decline of intellectual centers that had flourished in West Africa prior to the invasion including Timbuktu in the 16th century and if you look at the map of West Africa now 15 of the 16 states have other capitals in the coast and these capitals you know used to be the trading centers created by the Europeans which means that what the arrival of the Europeans did was to move the economic center of gravity from the hinterland to the coast no 15 of the capitals of West Africa now you know used to be the Trading Post where the Europeans stayed you know whereas before the invasion it was cities of the hinterland like timber to gouge any which were really main important intellectual and commercial centers now although the armored Expeditionary Force quickly declared its independence from the Salian dynasty relations between Muslims in North and West Africa survived our mass secession and indeed persist in the 21st century throughout the second millennium black African Berbers and Arabs maintain close contact as shown by the Moroccan invasion and the no less infamous oriental slave trade their relations as time have been violent but as shown by the Islamic scholar tradition that this book analyzed they have also been mutually beneficial through intermarriage through trade through diplomacy and above all spiritual and intellectual exchanges yet those exchanges so far have been the least studied aspect of North African sub-saharan relations due to the ways the Western Academy has invented and studied Africa Western universities nowadays typically divide the academic study of Africa so that North Africa Morocco Libya Tunisia Algeria and Egypt fall within the realm of Middle Eastern Studies whereas the area south of the Sahara considered Africa proper is studied within the field of African Studies so such a division and its underlying assumptions on the fact that the Arabic language as a language of Islamic learning and liturgy was the glue holding to gather large populations of the Maghreb Basara in sub-sahara Africa and Arabic as a linguistic vehicle of knowledge transmission was as important in the history of the Muslim peoples in Africa and elsewhere as that he was in Europe and I cannot resist the temptation to tell you an anecdote when I was appointed to the unholy chair in at Harvard to teach you know Islamic intellectual history in Africa and the librarian of the Divinity School where I taught contacted me I said if you need books let us know and we'll arrange those books for you and I wanted to order books written by Africans with scholars from us Africa in Arabic he said that he doesn't have that expertise and that he only has expertise in Christianity and he directed me to the librarian of Middle Eastern Studies I want to see him requesting that he orders for me and he told me that he does didn't do such an Africa he there's just not Africa but directed me to the librarian of African Studies I spoke to the librarian of African Studies who told me that she does not all the books you know in Arabic because it is not an African language so I couldn't order books to teach a course although my position was established in order to promote the field of African accuracy thankfully the Dean you know use his discretionary funds to allow me to order the books but just to tell you that when I was appointed that was there there was that problem of division of labor center of Middle Eastern Studies center of African Studies vibran of the distances librarian of African Studies now what about this intellectual tradition in Africa which is expressed in Arabic that I am analyzing in this book so where would you get the books in order to to to teach them anyway so this is just an anecdote and so to check that to tell you that the main point that during the second millennium the Arabic language played a transom it transformative role in West African history some Islamize people in the Sahara gradually deserted the linguistic cultural and linguist the ethnic identities to claim exclusive Arab identities some Islamize people in the serra gradually deserted their linguistic cultural and ethnic identities to claim exclusive Arab identity others have retained their applicant languages but have used the Arabic script to transcribe them to compose scholarly treatise to chronicle history and to write poetry and there is attested usage of the Arabic script in 80 African languages and in West Africa alone we find you know Arabic literature in 29 languages so this is the most the most recent research about these languages according to historian of Timbuktu harmonious Sudan II converts to Islam might have started to transcribe their language with the Arabic script as early as the 12th century when they began to preach the religion among their people the use might have been very limited however there is consensus that that if small wives would use began in the 18th century which coincides with the formation of the critical mass perfume some scholars among them those intellectual originating from the countryside led movements of religious and political reform and captured political power in various region of West Africa and establish Islamic states in the 18th century and virtually half of West Africa worse and the Islamic rule in the mid 19th century North Arabs as we know wrote much of what has been written in Arabic in the Arabic language in the formative period of Islamic civilization from the 8th to the 15th century as more people converted to Islam in subsequent century Arabic became a language of learning for even more people including us Africa and Arabic and our Jaime were a major or the major medium of instruction for Muslims and with the rise of Western hegemony by the 18th century several scholarly communities you know writing in Arabic or argument flourished in West Africa we know this not just from the Arabic sources but also from the testimonies of European travelers the governor of the French government of Senegal bajo washi wrote that they work in Senegal more Negros who could read and write in Arabic in 1828 than French peasants who could read and write French France is more an employee of the Royal African company of England a chartered company established in England and active in Senegambia Road in his travel narratives that in every Kingdom in country of the river gambia who are speaking community spoke Arabic and that they were generally more learning in the Arabic than the people of Europe in Latin for they can most of them speaking though they have a vulgar tongue besides called Foley several other experts before in afternoon including even Battuta and I will comment on him in the 14th century they were Africans in the 15th century the European explorer Mungo Park in the 18th centuries and others in the 19th century testified to Islamic education in West Africa long before the colonial scramble of the late 19th century and the French explorer Danika a who visited Timbuktu in the early 19th century stated that all the Negroes of Timbuktu are able to read the Quran and even know it by heart now what is the content of this archive according to John Henry 400 suggested that Islamic writings in Africa fall broadly into four categories historical writings pedagogical writings devotional writings and political writings and I will add a fifth category which I describe as political writings for lack of a better term and these five overlapping jars form the bulk of the Islamic library in West Africa in the main they are written in Arabic but among the political writings in particular portion was written now the first category is that of historical writings which includes in addition to chronicles that provide much of our knowledge of the people in the West African states the number of documents describing the customs of the people and as well as a jihad or authorization to transmit knowledge or or Fatah WA here you see the two famous two chronicles data from Fatah shanterrica Sudan which had been used for the reconstruction of political history of West African especially the succession of the three major empires medieval empires Ghana Mali and saga so the second category is made up of pedagogical writings although Islamic texts produced outside West Africa have been circulating in the region for centuries Sudanese chef or people from the bloody Sudan shoe from the ganado Sudan they produce their own coventry and textbooks they often wrote testified conventions of classical text to make them easier for their students to learn this is true for this is true of the dead intellectual centers in present-day Senegal and Mali as well as those of remote regions where Muslim communities were isolated from the major trade networks and where copies of books world's difficult to obtain the third category devotional writings they are found in most collections of s African Islamic manuscript a consists essentially of query written in Arabic but also in African languages such as full full day house' and Wolof and most Sufi scholars wrote poems of poems or collections of rhymes in praise of the Prophet Muhammad and these poems are often recited during Sufi rituals and festivals now the fourth category political writings these were produced abundantly from the beginning of the 19th century when it was mainly a future of their I believe the rivalry between the card idea in the tjanus Rufio starting in the second half of the 20th century as the wahhabi impact on West Africa increased political writings consisted mainly of attacks on and defense of Sufism and in the late 20th century from Senegal to Kenya there was no African state country with the Muslim population that had been left untouched by the polemics in regard to Sufism and its opponent and here I am just giving you an example of text written by Immortal who was the major figure of Islam in West Africa towering figure of the 19th century and who established a state following a jihad you know which was the largest in the region never before never again was such a huge state submitted to an Islamic Authority in the Sahel in and he wrote this book where Malacca which was politics between him and the leader of Messina before conquering Messina, so the last and final category is that of political writings it was particularly true for the Fodiawa or the community of Uthman Dan Fodio which found it you see the map here the Sokoto Caliphate was also a large polity in the Central Sudan so and this is the Kitab al-farq of Uthman Dan Fodio which he wrote and in which they criticize the Hausa kingdoms before making the jihad against them and and in toppling them now post jihad reformers after bringing down the pre-jihad house the kingdom they restored the very system against which they had fought and this led to the production of writings by opponents who condemned them why because drastic political change such as that witness in housa land under the leadership of Uthman Dan Fodio could come only with huge sacrifices like sacrifices and we with huge expectations and whenever the leadership failed to meet these expectations the instrument used to overthrow the status quo ante would be effectively exposed to support the new order then in chapter 5 of the book I draw from this archive of writings to analyze the ways in which in the pre-colonial period muslim scholars endeavoured to shape an islamic space of meaning in west africa and they try to define the political community delimit expounding they also strove to record the social and intellectual history of the muslim community for future generations and these two concerned I argue have been central in the endeavor of system intellectuals in the period from the 17th to the early 20th century Timbuktu was conquered by the French three centuries after the Moroccan invasion of 1591 European colonial rule paved the way for the spread of modern colleges in West Africa such as Fuller Bay College which I mentioned previously established by the church missionary societies at the beginning of the 19th century now, Fuller Bay College was one such island of Western higher education in an ocean of Arabic speaking colleges in West Africa that was in the nineteenth century but in the late 20th century the impact of European in the the impact of European colonies of had reverse this and French English and Portuguese has become the official languages of schooling and administration in the whole of West Africa of the hundreds of modern colleges and universities created in West Africa at the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century less than 5% offer instruction in Arabic and the oldest of them is the University Islamic de Say which was inaugurated in 1987 between the building of the SanKore mosque in the 14th century and the inauguration of the University Islamic de Say, in 1987 higher Islamic education wax and waned in West Africa but the Arabic language itself has remained central to the social and intellectual life of Muslim communities Arabic has become the language in which more than 250 million people south of the Sahara say they their daily prayers and and this represent 15% of the global Muslim population they share this language and many aspects of Islamic aid culture with more North Africa however as a language of administration and scholarly production Arabic has been displaced by the rise to prominence of intellectual educated in European languages and as I said philosopher Kwame Nkrumah called these europhone intellectuals in the sense that through education and in the colonial language through education in the colonial language colonialism produced the intellectual ingredients through which colonial subjects educated in European languages understood their own universe in 1912 French scholar and colonial administrator Maurice De La Force produced the Magisterial work on the French colony of Senigal and Niger that had been created in 1904 De La Force's book provided a detailed historical ethnography of the people cultures and religions of what would become a central part of francophone Africa following the steps of De La Force colonial scholars in charge of Muslim affairs wrote abundantly about Muslim communities the most prolific of them was Paul Marti director of the Office of Muslim Affairs who authored six studies on Islam and Muslims totaling thousands of pages colonial writings produce analytical categories to make sense of the social organization of the people borrowing from French social theorist Michel Foucault Congolese philosopher Valentin Mudimbe which I mentioned earlier called this documentary work the colonial library the colonial library that is a body of writings by colonial scholars that create that creates a system of representation of African science the colonial library produce an intellectual framework to make sense of Africa and that framework informed writings in European languages so according to Mudimbe this library operates in the same western epistemological order yet I will argue Mudimbe tells only part of the complex story of higher learning in West Africa throughout the post-colonial period debates on the production of knowledge in and about Africa in English and French were conducted with little mention of Sankore with little mention of this Islamic scholarly tradition as I showed in this book the breadth and depth of this intellectual tradition and its vitality and versatility are seen, some of which feel European intellectuals both Africans and Western are aware, the history of African literacy did not begin with the colonial encounter I argue that a discussion of the African library or intellectual history does little justice to the vibrant intellectual life between the formation of Sankore and the creation of Fuller Bay College if it begins with the colonial period the dominant epistemological framework for this period could not have been questioned.
Now to fully appreciate the African library in the long delay I will turn the discussion it's discussion the discussion of Africa libel on its head and start with Sankore as a paradigm for knowledge production and transmission and then I will address how much later how only much later the rise of Western colonial hegemony displaces paradigm and place uniform intellectuals at the center of West African public life now let me address the pre-colonial paradigm of knowledge transmission Islamic in Islamic education in West Africa started at the beginning of Islamization during the first millennium among the eye among the eyewitness accounts of this scholarly tradition in medieval Mali notable is Ibn Batuta who I'm sure you all know about and who wrote the following about the people of Mali you know a century after the creation of Sankore, so I just wanted to emphasize the fact that he was the first of the Arab scholars to go actually and visit it, he was the first eyewitness many others wrote about the Bilad al Sudan but you know from information that they received from versions but even Batuta what I was the first eyewitness he said about the people of Mali that "They are very zealous in their attempt to learn the whole of Quran by heart in the event that their children are negligent in this respect fetters are placed on the children's feet feet and left until the children can recite the Quran from memory on a holiday I went to see the judge and seeing his children in China I asked him aren't you going to let him go he and said I want that then go until they know the Quran by heart now an important element of classical homology that transpired from it's from this testimony is the centrality of the memorization of the Quran if necessary through harsh punishment inflicted on the body memorization was valued in the Classical period Islamic scholarship Islamic studies in West Africa started at the Quranic school where pupils as young as four were admitted and taught to memorize the Quran and write in the Arabic but unlike the widely disseminated cliche that 70 the stereotypes this as mayor rote memorization such education include far more than that Rudolf Ware's seminal work entitled the workmen who earn shows that in it entailed the process of personal transformation based on the living example of the Quranic teacher the imitation of the teachers gestures and comportment was as much part of the educated process as the text one was required to read that's what where are these persuasively successful completion of Quranic studies paved the way to what we can call high Islamic studies in which advanced students were taught a wide variety of subjects and like beginners who learn mostly by memorization high Islamic studies students developed the linguistic proficiency required to understand the Quran and other religious texts and to speak Arabic but at this stage of higher education to memorization remain important in the pedagogy of Islamic studies this was not due to the rarity of books and relatively high cost of paper but rather to the fact that committing a text to memory was a mark of scholarly distinction even important as testimony validates the notion that harsh physical punishment was an element of Islamic schooling pedagogy the goal of religious education was to create a virtuous Muslim subject achieving such a noble goal for Muslims justifies inflicting physical pains on others or on the self, when speakers of one of predominant language instead in Senegambia predominant language Senegambia described a person as a working for Anna they mean that he was transformed through education to become the virtuous Muslim someone who throughout his life follows the teaching of the Koran and different from this rubbish prohibition and this idea of working Quran come from a hadith attributed to Iesha now michel foucault talal asad and others note that the cultivation of technologies of the self were known in ancient societies including in ancient greece and during early and medieval Christianity and Foucault argued that those technologies permit individuals to affect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls thoughts conduct and way way of being so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness purity wisdom perfection or immortality end of the code and this rigorous tradition of education was never abandoned in West Africa the majority of Muslim families continue to invest in Islamic education for their children even if they also attend schools offering education in western languages this is because schooling is not just about receiving instruction it was not just about receiving instruction but about receiving a more holistic education under the supervision of a master and such close master-disciple relations were an important element of Sankare pedagogy and and the system Now Sankore was a place of worship and learning in which highly knowledgeable scholars engage in sophisticated intellectual conversations but Sankare or for that matter other Islamic institutions of higher learning in North Africa and elsewhere did not operate like the universities we tend to call to mind and George Matisse's comparative study of medieval high education in Islam and West highlighted parallels in the methods of instructions and of course but also differences and let me just emphasize some of those differences there was no single unified curriculum in the Sahel region and in the city of Timbuktu In particular so unlike in modern universities they were there was no central administration no recruitment or graduation exam in law school DB university libraries as we know them now did not exist, teachers however were very learner scholars some of them have studied in Egypt or elsewhere in West Africa with the highest intellectual authorities of the time.
Many Timbuktu scholars possessed personal libraries of hundreds or thousands of books. Scholars offered instruction inside mosques such as Sankore but most scholars imparted knowledge to students in a special room in their home which also housed their books and masters delivered authorization to teach specific text to their students the prestige of the authorization depended on the pedigree of the scholar pursuing higher education consisted of studying with a sheikh either in his own mosque in his house in a zaouia or in a public space in major centers such as Timbuktu, students found instructors who could teach the most subjects but most students did not live in such centers for them a very particular scholarship was the rule for Quranic education and initiation into the basic text might have been available in many rural and urban centres in the Sahel but study of advanced texts required most students to travel tens if not hundreds of thousands of miles to the village of a sheikh with expertise on a specific subject or book and unlike in modern times when anybody can seek knowledge by ordering a book from amazon.com or another bookseller and studying alone, only a scholar who received certification or permission was allowed to teach a text and this is a fundamental difference between pre-colonial Islamic epistemology and that of Western origin.
In addition to lectures addressed to sizable student groups a system of mentorship linked masters to a smaller number of promising students to whom they imparted knowledge on on an individual basis members of inner circles of established scholars also served as assistants or secretaries and through this system of intellectual patron client relationship known as mullahsama, students not only studied important books from a master but they also had access to prestigious authorization to transmit knowledge in addition they learned from their masters are the forms of knowledge not available in books such as mystic secrets on how to acquire one influence or greater piety and the most zealous teaching assistants were likely to obtain the relevant potentials that ensured their gradual acceptance into the ranks of respected scholars the search for knowledge was linked to the struggle for self-improvement unlike in modern colleges where there was no fixed timeframe for studying a text or a particular subject unlike in modern colleges there was no fixed timeframe for studying a text or a particular subject students could study for many many years and often had to use and often how to read I'm sorry and listen to a commentary of a major text several times students were taught the virtue of humility typically the master alone would sit in a chair surrounded by students who sat on the floor and listened this tradition is still maintained today in many theological schools of West Africa students showed their devotion to the master through physical work but also by writing poems in praise of him and indeed in the surviving Arabic literature of West Africa the most common jar is devotional literature in prayers of the Prophet Muhammad like the poem that I just you know that we just listened to a sheikh or a teacher and these works may consist of writing an original poem or expanding and commenting on an original poem by adding more verses of a similar metal in modern colleges of West Africa the teacher provides instruction and may continue to serve as a mentor even after the student graduates he may write reference letters in support of the student application but he is not believed to have supernatural powers to influence the course of things in medieval center of learnings in contrast the teacher taught the Quran and rules of grammar in other subjects but he did more than that he played a central role in most life cycle events where they birth death illness employment harvest travel the teacher intervened before and after to pray that he's following he's following or disciple might succeed and be safe from reversal of fortune and he is able to do that because he was believed to be a friend of God and but some were born as Aswali but others also could reach that high spiritual status to learning and piety performing spiritual exercise combining retreat from the world halwa repeated recitation of one of the beautiful names of God Thikr fasting and nightly vigils were efficient ways to be promoted to a higher spiritual ream, this level of spiritual dynamic dynamics is found mostly within the sufi orders and before the 20th century most of the scholars were initiated into Sufism and they transmitted words of the Sufi orders and the contribution of the Sufi orders especially the Kardenia & Tijaniyyah to Islamic scholarship in Africa in West Africa is second to none they establish Quranic schools mosques and Zawiya for the purpose of teaching and worship and one of the most widely disseminate research order in the modern world is the Tijaniyyah which has tens of millions of followers the overwhelming majority of whom live in sub-saharan Africa but it's not just in numbers that subs-saharan African Muslims dominate the Tijaniyyah but also in intellectual production and some of the major doctrinal elaboration of the Tijaniyyah was the work of West Tijanni and for the sake of time I don't I will not enter into details on their contribution but but just clearly you know this shows that sub-saharan African Islam is far from being a minor threat in the larger Islamic tapestry now the turn of the 20th century witnessed the expansion of European colonial powers and the Islamic states created in West Africa in the 18th 19th century they all succumb to European military might as Omar Al-Nakar notes in his study of the pilgrimage tradition in West Africa there were Muslims who left for the Holy Land because they did not want to live in a land governed by infidels, Ahmed Shafiq has documented that these African Muslims who settled in Saudi Arabia in the early 10th 20th century were actively involved in proselytizing and teaching and thus they helped the regime of King Ibn Saud at its beginning in the field of teaching and spreading Salafi Wahabi Islam both inside and outside Saudi Arabia African such as Abdul Rahman an authority from Allah Shah Geelani from Ethiopia and others were among the most prominent teachers in Medina and this again refused the refused the dominant narrative that Wahhabism only spread globally from Saudi Arabia to the periphery of the Islamic world thanks to the Saudi.
Now I want to say a few things about few words about the Islamic the pilgrimage tradition and how it contributed to the spread of literacy in in West Africa the pilgrimage tradition has the thousand year history in black Africa and more than any factor it was the pilgrimage that Ulta grated the Islamic scholarship offers Africa into the larger Islamic intellectual tapestry in the second medium nowadays two million Muslims fly to Mecca from all over the world to perform the refuse of pilgrimage in a few days and return home by contrast in past centuries it took many years to reach the Holy Land not only because of the difficulties of travel but also because the purpose of the pilgrimage was not only the means of accomplishing the rituals in the Holy Lands but also interactive pursuits students stayed for a while in centers of learning along the way and also in the Holy Lands themselves to study and to receive intellectual credentials as scholars in as sheikh, and Cairo had become a major center of Islamic learning when the pilgrimage tradition started in West Africa it was a resting point for all pilgrimage routes and there is evidence that Muslim students from sub-saharan Africa have been studying in Cairo since the mid 13th century at least one such piece of evidence is the madrassa IIbn Rashiq the school established in Cairo in 1258 for the benefits of students from Borno through an endowment given by Borno merchants to Alam al-Din Ibn Rashiq after whom the school was named so this is mostly this this most probably the first West African foundation in the Middle East and it received Borno students until the 18th century there is another piece of evidence you know of West Africans presence as students in Cairo it is the Riwaq al-Barnawi more students were student hostels for the students of Borno which were residence for these students in Cairo which was established in 1258 through a donation from the king of Borno now over the course of many centuries West African pilgrims study in Egypt with major luminaries including Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti for example.
The works of Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti were taught in west Africa during his lifetime especially his famous perceive the the famous star Cyril de la reine which he co-authored with so as early you know during his lifetime his work would being taught in West Africa because of the students were who were going there to study so the intellectual contacts that the trade routes generated not only took students scholars to Egypt to study with a different sheikh but also encouraged Egyptian scholars to visit the West and central Sudan where this where they serve as advisors to the black African Kings and were generously rewarded so West African scholars I must emphasize were not always junior partners in this intellectual conversation some of their teachings had a great impact in North Africa Ahmed Burbur A-Timbukti for example is you know one of such scholars he was arrested and deported to Morocco after the Moroccan invasion and his 1600 volume library was confiscated in the aftermath of the Sardian conquest of Shanghai Ahmed Baba resided in Morocco between May 15 15 94 and February 6 1608 and he was freed after two years of house arrest but was required to remain in residence in Marrakesh and he was invited to teach in the major Marrakesh College the Congregational Mosque of the Sheriff and some of his students became very very influential scholars and helped consolidate his reputation I would just cite one of them Ahmed ibn Muhammad al-Maqqari who died in 1632 and who is you know the author of The Breath of Perfume from The Branch of the Green Andalusia, one of our most important reference on the interactive history of Muslim Spain and Ahmed Baba was also a major very prominent scholar of Medici Scholar Right another scholar with worth mentioning who made a great impact in Egypt is Mohammed al-Kashinawi, he was trained in Kushina in northern Nigeria he left his country for the Holy Land for the Holy Lands performed the Hajj and on his return settled in Cairo where he lived and taught until his death in 1741 and the work of Dalia Abu Bara has shown that his work kushina's passion now is worth double mangu displays and I quote Dalia Abu Bara "extensive knowledge of scientific and cosmological theories that had prevailed over the centuries in all of the Islamic Christian and Jewish traditions as well as their precursors in classical antiquity." Now having described this system and how it operated before colonialism I would like now to conclude with the impact that European colonial rule had on this intellectual tradition Western methods of learning imported to West Africa after colonialism were influenced by Enlightenment ideas so that ideas of absolute devotion to a master the search for knowledge as an act of devotion physical pain and suffering as a central essential in character building all those ideas different markedly from conceptions of human welfare and freedom embodied in colonial pedagogy and epistemology memorization which had been the key method of storing information in the classical system epistemology is now decried as the polar opposite of rational reasoning and above all the paradigm of knowledge transmission would exist you know before was challenged by the time African countries became independent Western conceptions of of schooling had become very influential indeed Muslims in West Africa realized That modern education leading to the receipt of a degree also facilitated you know securing a well-paid job many Muslims receive education in colonial languages among those who opted for Arabic language education many embraced the organization of schooling into eight groups according to a specific timeframe and using a united curriculum which is largely the European modern traditional master-disciple relations have been critiqued also but this practice still you know exists because for Muslims you know they do not so much have to choose between the old and the new at least for some of them but they can embrace both and as each fulfill the function that the other does not.
Now I conclude maybe with the you know main argument of the book I don't have the time to this is you know how Africa was colonized you know by European and you can see the map of colonial Africa and some of the changes that happen you know during colonialism and how the system of knowledge production was completely transformed but the main argument of the book is that Africa has been represented in academia as well as in popular representation as a continent of warring tribes and one of the main challenges of nation-building so the story goes was to create a sense of belonging among different tribes separated by colonial and postcolonial boundaries and this has been so well documented that it has become if not the single story at least the dominant narrative and what I argue is the large sections of you know people in West Africa and in Muslim Africa in general have in the past and the present proven their ability to transcend parochial identities and difference in the common cause and they have indeed claimed the independence of thought and common destiny and more than anything this is embodied in a long literary tradition that has been obscured by European colonial hegemonic discourses of the past century which tend to represent Africa essentially as a continent of orality and obstacle the tradition I have speaking to spoken for fifty-five minutes so I think I would just stop here and we'll be happy to answer and questions.
Thank you for that lecture.
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