BU NEH Ajami Project Sharing New Resources
The Boston University NEH Ajami project is pleased to share the resources it has developed in the course of the three-year research engagement, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The project, Ajami Literacy and the Expansion of Literacy and Islam: The Case of West Africa, has digitized a unique selection of manuscripts in Ajami (African language texts written with a modified Arabic script) in four major West African languages (Hausa, Mandinka, Fula, and Wolof), transcribed and translated them into English and French, prepared commentaries, and created enhancing multimedia resources to be made widely available to the scholarly community and the general public.
The NEH Ajami project is the first systematic comparative approach of several major African languages written in Ajami, examining the different patterns of Ajami development in these four languages and literatures, and the multiple forms and custodians of Ajami literacy. It also marks the first time that such varied African Ajami documents have been translated into two major European languages (French and English) and made accessible to communities and scholars worldwide. The project has also captured the musical traditions that have accompanied the written texts. The project has an equally unique participatory quality—with the help of our field teams and Ajami experts in Africa and the United States, it aims to facilitate interpretive knowledge about the meaning and purpose of Ajami texts, their social functions, and the voices of the people who have written, own, and use them. A selection of interpretive essays by the project members has been prepared for academic publication. The multi-disciplinary team of scholars and Ajami experts in Africa and the United States has digitized, transcribed and translated several thousand pages of texts and prepared selected video and audio files that can be accessed on our website: https://sites.bu.edu/nehajami/.
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