Completing the Largest Digital Archive of Fuuta Jalon Scholars’ Arabic and Ajami Manuscripts
Our African Ajami scholars completed a landmark multi-year project, Digital Preservation of Fuuta Jalon Scholars’ Arabic and Ajami Materials in Senegal and Guinea, funded by the Endangered Archives Programme of the British Library. The project digitally preserved 49 collections of endangered Arabic and Ajami manuscripts (African-language texts written in an enriched form of the Arabic script), totaling 52,415 pages produced by Fuuta Jalon scholars who lived between the eighteenth and the twenty-first century in the Republic of Guinea and Senegal. The collections include original works of local scholars as well as handwritten copies made by their students, followers, and family members and maintained in private libraries across the Fuuta Jalon region of Guinea and Senegal, the home to the second largest Fuuta Jalon community in Africa. The resulting archive constitutes the largest digital collection of these materials in the world.
The project advanced scholarly knowledge of the rich bilingual corpus produced by Fuuta Jalon scholars. Such knowledge had long remained limited, due in part to Guinea’s isolation following its independence from France in 1958 and the absence of accessible public manuscript repositories. The preserved texts address a wide range of religious and secular themes in both prose and poetry. They explore theology, Qur’anic exegesis, praise of the Prophet Muhammad, Islamic law (especially the Maliki school), Sufism (including the Tijaniyya order), ritual practice, eschatology, and the lives of the prophets. Many texts include prayers, dream interpretation, talismanic formulas, and protective incantations for health, prosperity, and security.
Other works treat subjects such as logic, Arabic grammar, education, ethics, medicine, astrology, farming, and social relations, alongside school and family records. Historical texts recount the migration of the Fulani people to the highlands of Fuuta Jalon, the founding of their theocratic state (c. 1725–1896), their major battles and lineages, French colonial rule, and even the presidencies of Sékou Touré and Lansana Conté in the Republic of Guinea.
By making these materials accessible, the project laid a foundation for future research on the legacy of Fuuta Jalon in the New World. It also enabled scholars, students, and the broader public to better understand how enslaved Africans from the region, such as Abdu Rahman (1762–1829), had acquired advanced literacy skills prior to their enslavement in the Americas.
Although African Ajami literatures have remained largely unknown to the broader public, they have preserved a wealth of knowledge about the history and intellectual traditions of numerous African communities. Fula communities played a central role in the composition, teaching, and dissemination of Ajami in West Africa. Fula, the language of the Fulɓe people, developed across a vast region stretching from Senegal to Nigeria and Cameroon over the past millennium. Muslim scholars in these regions emerged as influential critics and reformers of Islamic practice in the Sahel and established several Islamic states during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These states, particularly in Fuuta Jalon and Sokoto, stimulated the growth of rich traditions of Arabic and Ajami literacy and literature.
The project focused on preserving manuscripts central to these important legacies. Many manuscripts have been poorly preserved. Most showed visible signs of deterioration and were stored in old trunks, suitcases, or boxes, with some wrapped in animal hides. Kept in private homes in Senegal and Guinea, they had been exposed to risks such as water and fire damage, as well as termite and vermin attack.
The project preserved these primary sources and made them accessible to researchers, educators, students, and the broader public worldwide. Using on-site digital photography, the team digitized the materials directly within the communities where they were held. Field teams included local scholars and facilitators whose linguistic expertise and deep familiarity with local communities were essential to the project’s success. In identifying manuscripts for digitization, the teams worked closely with manuscript owners and community members. Local facilitators, often respected elders and recognized experts on Ajami texts, their authors, and collectors, played a key role in locating materials and establishing trust.
Team members consulted with owners and local specialists about the history, meaning, and use of each manuscript. These discussions provided critical historical and cultural context, supported accurate interpretation, and informed the development of detailed and reliable metadata for the collection.
Our African Ajami projects highlight the central role of local experts, scholars, community members, and facilitators in knowledge production. Through field interviews, the research teams gathered insights into the daily practices of Ajami users, as well as their educational and professional backgrounds and their histories of learning and using Ajami. This work generated valuable information about the contemporary role of Ajami in West African communities, shedding light on the meaning and purpose of the texts studied and amplifying the voices of those who had written, collected, preserved, and used them.
In addition to the completed preservation project, we carried out several other major African Ajami research initiatives. Ajami Literacy and the Expansion of Literacy and Islam: The Case of West Africa, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, undertook a comparative study of Ajami manuscripts in four major West African languages: Hausa, Mandinka, Fula, and Wolof. Our international team digitized the manuscripts, transcribed and translated them into English and French, prepared scholarly commentaries, and developed multimedia resources. This project marked the first time such a diverse body of African Ajami texts had been translated into two major European languages and made globally accessible. Another major initiative was Readers in Ajami, funded by the United States Department of Education, through which we developed specialized Ajami readers in Hausa, Wolof, and Mandinka, along with a companion multimedia website. The project provides students, teachers, scholars, and professionals with the linguistic and cultural tools needed to engage Ajami users in West Africa.
Drawing on this collective work, we published a double special issue of Islamic Africa (vol. 14/ 2, 2023; vol. 15/1, 2024), which examined Ajami literatures and literacies in West Africa and situated African Ajami studies within participatory multimedia and digital archiving approaches.
The core team of the EAP-1430 project consisted of Prof. Fallou Ngom (PI), Dr. Daivi Rodima-Taylor (Project Manager), Mr. Ablaye Diakite (Local Team Leader), Mr. Mouhamadou Diallo (General Coordinator), Mr. Oumar Diallo (Regional Facilitator), Mr. Ibrahima Ngom (Cameraman), and Mr. Mamadou Billo Sall aka Bappa Sall (Senior Facilitator). We acknowledge the support of the Provost’s Office and the Associate Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, as well as the technical support of Brian Anderson of CAS IT who did the checksum tests of the collections. We also wish to honor the memories of Mr. Elhadji Djibril Diagne and Mr. Abdoulaye Diallo, whose contributions to our Ajami projects have been invaluable and whose presence is deeply missed. We are profoundly grateful to all our collaborators and the communities we worked with in West Africa.