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Fallou Ngom, Muslims beyond the Arab World: The Odyssey of ʿAjamī and the Murīdiyya, AAR Religion, Culture, and History (New York: American Academy of Religion and Oxford University Press, 2016). Pp. 336. $105.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780190279868
The term ʿajamī has long been used by Africanists to refer to African language writing in the Arabic script, a tradition that has flourished in Muslim societies across the continent from the Atlantic to the Swahili coast. In this highly original work on the Muridiyya, an indigenous Senegalese Sufi order, Fallou Ngom expands the definition of ʿajamī through his coining of the word ʿajamization to mean something much larger, namely the interplay between Islamic and local traditions, which he characterizes as a process of enrichment. The power of this expanded view of ʿajamī lies in its potential to bring local written African knowledge, in African languages and in Arabic, to bear on scholarly understandings of Islam as experienced in Africa and elsewhere beyond the Arab world, which Ngom successfully does in this volume.
The point of departure for Ngom's exploration of the spiritual and intellectual life of Murids and the ways in which they remember their founder, the principal themes of this book, is a vast body of Arabic script writing in the Senegalese language Wolof, a robust tradition known locally as wolofal. The ʿajamī texts he focuses on for their illumination of Murid foundational beliefs include a collection of hagiographic poems about the founder of the order, Shaykh Ahmadu Bamba Mbakke (1853–1927), known familiarly as Bamba. These texts, many of which are devotional or didactic in nature, were written by Muslim intellectuals and scholars who were Bamba's contemporaries, namely Samba Jaara Mbay (1870–1917), Mbay Jaxate (1875–1954), Moor Kayre...