Muslim Societies in West Africa: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives in Digital Form

Over the past decade, Matrix, the Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences at Michigan State University, has developed digital galleries blending text, sound, and image to portray the history of islamization and the practice of Islam in West Africa with support from NSF, TICFIA, and the NEH. The featured areas have been Ghana (as a Muslim minority country), and Senegal (as a Muslim majority area), as well as Gambia and Mauritania. The emphasis has been on the diversity, tolerance, and pluralism of Islamic practice in historical and contemporary terms, on female and male practitioners, and on laypeople as well as clergy. We have used European archives, Arabic and ajami documents, interviews, and a range of other sources to tell stories and show practices. The portal for this material is www.aodl.org. This article outlines some of the galleries that we have built; others will be added over the next two years. The authors of the galleries are faculty at Indiana University, Michigan State, Harvard, Boston University, and James Madison University. The designer of the galleries has been Catherine Foley, Director of Digital Library and Archive Projects at MATRIX, and the author of “Developing Materials for a Digital Library Gallery” in this issue of Islamic Africa.