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Kane Ousmane Oumar . Beyond Timbuktu: An Intellectual History of Muslim West Africa . Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press , 2016. ix + 282 pp. Note on Transliteration. Notes. Glossary. Acknowledgments. Index. $39.95. Cloth. ISBN: 978-0-674-05082-2 .
Sanneh Lamin . Beyond Jihad: The Pacifist Tradition of West African Islam . New York : Oxford University Press , 2016. Acknowledgments. Introduction. Timeline. Glossary. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xviii + 358 pp. $34.95. Cloth. ISBN: 978-0-19-935161-9 .
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Editors' note: See also Cheikh Babou's review of Lamin Sanneh's Beyond Jihad in this issue.
During the months when Timbuktu was under Islamist rule and the centuries-old shrines of its patron saints were hammered down, the fear that its "manuscripts" would be also destroyed and lost was widely expressed. The "Timbuktu manuscripts" became a commonly used phrase in the press as international opinion came to realize that there were indeed centuries-old texts kept in that legendary city which bore testimony of a tradition of written erudition in West Africa in need of protection. "Written erudition" is not an unnecessarily tautological expression, as the notion that sub-Saharan Africa is the continent of orality is the premise, still largely unquestioned, upon which colonial and postcolonial literature on African societies and cultures has been built. As a consequence, the existence of an African library made of books and manuscripts that were studied, taught, and written by local clerics was ignored and obscured: a division of labor was established according to which "Orientalists" would study Islam in "Oriental" societies and cultures while "Africanists" could pay little to no attention to Islamic scholarship and education in their studies of cultures and societies south of the Sahara. Against that view, or rather beyond it, two excellent books converge in bringing to light the history of written erudition in West Africa, a region historically known in Arab chronicles as Bilad as-Sudan (or simply Sudan), "the land of the Black people": Ousmane Kane's Beyond Timbuktu and Lamin Saneeh's Beyond Jihad.
In Beyond Timbuktu Kane argues convincingly that the study of the literary tradition that developed in West Africa in Arabic language, but also in local languages using the Arabic script (a literature known as ajami), is necessary not only in order to reconstitute...