Dr. Fallou Ngom, Boston University, gave a Baraza lecture on March 2nd titled “The Odyssey of Ajami in Muslim Africa.” Dr. Ngom is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the African Studies Center. His publications include: Facts, Fiction, and African Creative Imaginations (co-edited, 2010); “Ajami Scripts in the Senegalese Speech Community.” Journal of Arabic & Islamic Studies (2010); and Oral and Written Expressions of African Cultures (co-edited, 2009). His latest work, Muslims Beyond the Arab World: The Odyssey of Ajami and the Muridiyya, won the 2017 Herskovits prize for best book in African Studies.
The lecture centered on the use of Ajami in Muslim Africa. Ajami, according to Dr. Ngom, is an enrichment of the Arabic script through the addition of modifications such as diacritics to the standard alphabet. Ajami traditions emerged as pedagogy to disseminate Islam to the illiterate masses. However, there has been a longstanding neglect of Ajami traditions. African Ajami literates are often misrepresented because of the definition of literacy, which requires a standardized alphabet. Dr. Ngom notes that this has excluded million of people who regularly use Ajami from being regarded as literate.
The contents of Ajami materials are diverse and broad. Ajami has been found in medicine, pre-colonial government documents, advertisements, kinship traditions, national politics, mass communication, foreign language teaching, transatlantic slave trade, and poetry. Dr. Ngom divides scholars in Ajami into three categories based on major trends—social scientists, esoteric scholars, and poets or singers.
Dr. Ngom concluded the lecture by noting that the bulk of African Ajami sources remain unstudied, meaning that there are many odysseys of Ajami in Africa to be written. These Ajami materials, Dr. Ngom stated, force revisions of various aspects of our understanding of Islam in Africa, pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial Africa as well as the transatlantic slave trade.