Andrea Brigaglia - The Arts and Crafts of Literacy

The articles in this volume were originally presented at the conference The Arts and Crafts of Literacy: Manuscript Cultures in Muslim Sub-Saharan Africa , held at the University of Cape Town, 5-6 September 2013. The conference was convened by the editors of the present volume while Mauro Nobili was a URC (University Research Committee) postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and Andrea Brigaglia his host. The Arts and Crafts of Literacy conference was jointly funded by the URC; by the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (Hamburg); and by the Centre for Contemporary Islam (UCT). Additional top-up funding was generously provided by the Tombo uct ou Manuscripts Project (UCT); by the NRF chair Islam, African Publics, and Religious Values; and by the Institut Franais dAfrique du Sud Recherche. We wish to express our thanks to all the participants to the conference, as well as to Cathlene Dollar and Rifqah Khan who helped to coordinate the event; to Abdul-Aleem Somers, who generously shared his friendly companionship and erudite insights; to Abdulkader Tayob, who provided constant encouragement and unwavering support, and to Fauziyya Fiji Brigaglia who, by offering copious snacks and contributing with her humorous comments to our breaks, nourished our creativity during our long hours of work in Cape Town.

The editorial process involved the valuable collaboration of several anonymous reviewers who added their comments on all the papers, and of Tammy Wilks, who proof-read the first draft of the volume. Our gratitude goes to the editors of the series Studies in Manuscript Cultures for having made it possible for us to conceive and publish this book as a volume in their series. The latest phases of the project were particularly challenging and without Michael Friedrichs constant encouragement and Cosima Schwarkes patient and competent support, we would have probably lost confidence in our ability to bring it to completion. We would also like to thank Joe McIntyre for his meticulous final proof-reading and Darya Ogorodnikova, whose expert advice came at a critical point. A final thank to all those who have kindly contributed the many images that appear in this volume, and in particular to Amir Golabi and Francesco Piraino, who generously shared their time to photograph the epigraphs of Tana Baru and Kaana Umars calligraphic copy of the Quran at UCT.

Any remaining imperfections in the volume are solely our responsibility.

This book is dedicated to all the calligraphers, scribes and craftsmen who have been transmitting the various arts of literacy in sub-Saharan Africa.

Andrea Brigaglia, Cape Town, June 2017

The study of Africa has suffered, and still suffers, from many stereotypes. One such stereotype was the assumption that there was no history in Africa before the arrival of the Europeans. After World War II, with the march towards independence of most African countries, a new generation of scholars, both from the continent and abroad, initiated a historiographical revolution that would eventually restore their past to the peoples of Africa. During this phase, scholars considered oral traditions as the authentic means of discovering the past and understanding the present in Africa. Although exceptionally useful, the problem with the drive to study orality as a source of history was that it overlooked a centuries-old tradition of Islamic literacy found in many areas of the continent after the conversion of Africans to the Muslim faith. However, this tradition of Islamic literacy has left a priceless heritage in manuscripts, both in Arabic and in various forms of ajam (i.e. African languages written in the Arabic alphabet), which have only recently attracted the attention of scholars.

The Arts and Crafts of Literacy: Islamic Manuscript Cultures in sub-Saharan Africa , focuses on this African Islamic literary heritage and offers a holistic approach to the study of manuscripts in Muslim Africa. Andrea Brigaglia and I have gathered twelve contributions presented at the international conference we organized and hosted at the University of Cape Town, 56 September, 2013, titled The Arts and Crafts of Literacy: Manuscript Cultures in Muslim sub-Saharan Africa . These articles look at the different dimensions of the manuscripts, i.e. at the materials, the technologies and the practices, the communities involved in the production, commercialization, circulation, preservation and consumption, as well as at the texts themselves.

As the Congolese philosopher Valentin-Yves Mudimbe underlines, [t]he reality of an African history, particularly for the sub-Saharan part of the continent, does not seem to exist, at least academically, before the 1940s. That Africa has no history was the argument of the famous eighteenth/nineteenth-century philosopher Georg W.F. Hegel. In his often-quoted lectures, published under the title Philosophy of History , he uttered the following, powerful statement:

Ideas such as those of Hegel went almost unquestioned in the colonial period. Indeed, they proved to be hard to dismiss and partially survived the end of colonialism. For example, the famous historian Hugh R. Trevor-Roper simply follows in Hegels footsteps. In 1965, he argued that [p]erhaps, in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is largely darkness, like the history of pre-European, pre-Columbian America. And darkness is not a subject for history.

Trevor-Roper accepts the Hegelian argument almost in its entirety. However, in the post-colonial context, he implicitly echoes a historiographical trend that, at the time, was finally fading away, i.e. that history is exclusively based on written sources. The origin of this assumption can be traced back to the nineteenth-century development of History as an academic discipline and is often associated with a statement in the famous manual of history Introduction aux etudes historiques by Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos (first published Paris: Hachette et Cie 1899).