 That's a busy schedule. It's huge, you see, it was supposed to be a live event and then because of COVID, we couldn't run it. And then it had to be moved online. Okay. But it's a packed week. I was at the opening event earlier this morning. That was really exciting. You know, it's a big topic at the moment. Very nice. And also it's exciting. We're just going through transition with the new director coming in. Okay. So Adam Habib who spoke this morning, he will take up the directorship in January. Okay, I see. Nice. And, you know, he, you know, he has, he's, you know, very, you know, very well-versed and, you know, quite well known in that area. Yeah. So it was a really interesting discussion. And then, you know, I can say a little bit more about it just now in the introduction, but it's a really nice mix of events. There's panel discussions, talks, performances, things. That's great. Is it a yearly event? It's, it's the first time we're doing it this way. There's, you know, there's a number of other events. There's, you know, it's called being human festival, which brings together a number of universities. And this one in this form, it's the first one that I think so far it's really successful. That's great. Well, 80 attendance, 80 attendance is actually very, very high. I think it's generating a lot of decisions. It's a nice thing. So, so I have two, two minds with the, with the COVID situation because you can't travel, which is a real hindrance. But of course, everybody can join all these online events. That is correct. Yeah, that is correct. So in that sense, it makes it much more accessible. Yeah. Yeah. And it makes sense. That's probably why the reason the attendance is usually higher. Because people are now locked down in their homes. But also really for bringing international communities together. I mean, and the cost and also the environmental cost of flying to a conference. I don't know. Definitely, definitely on Accra. And, you know, you're there for two, three days to fly back. Well, it's like this. It's a much lower impact. And you can, you can do more of it. And also we've moved to teaching online as well. That's also makes it interesting. Let me see what I have to do anything. Oh, we are a gentleman. I'm so sorry. Everybody can hear our conversation. I think it was nothing, nothing controversial we said. But maybe I should also mute myself. Before we start. Good. I think I got the, I got the green light. It's 1904. So, you know, yeah, I think I'll start. So let's wait another little minute just for people to join. And then I kick off officially. We have a little. Okay, so I'm just checking attendance and good. 1905. Let's get started. Very good indeed. Good evening everyone. Good evening here in London that is it's a certain look in the evening but also good morning. Good afternoon to everyone who is in other places and other time zones. My name is lots Martin. I'm based here at so as I'm a professor of general and African linguistics. And I'm very pleased to be the host for this exciting events today. And the event today is part of our source virtual festival of ideas, which is a week long series of starting today of virtual events, including panel discussions, student led installations master classes performances, and public debates and keynote lectures. And indeed the lecture this evening is the first of these, these keynote lectures. And the events festival of ideas started today so we have the opening this morning. And so please join us so there will, there will be events for the rest of the week after Friday please join us throughout the week for the many exciting brilliant challenging sometimes but certainly engaging and events which are still to come. The overarching theme of the festival is decolonizing knowledge. And we will take the week to critically review and question processes of knowledge production, learning and teaching universities, and then together different audiences of communities to join the conversation. And decolonizing knowledge of course resonates a lot throughout the world at the moment thought Africa certainly am here so as we've been working quite a bit on different aspects of decolonizing so it's really nice to bring this work together in a very concentrated form throughout the week. In the opening event this morning with the keynote address by by Professor Adam Habib, who many will know as a leading thinker in the area of decolonizing knowledge and decolonizing universities, but who is also the incoming director of so as he will join us at the new director in this morning the discussion kicked off with by with a variety of different aspects of decolonizing knowledge and relating to teaching at the curriculum agendas of social change and activism with academia, the role of humanities, arts languages and social sciences and the discussion there, and also with the rethinking of the institution and financial structures in which universities operate so all these themes I'm sure will be taken up for a week. And one particular aspect which was mentioned this morning is particularly relevant to today's lecture. And that is the question of whose knowledge matters, whose knowledge is heard, whose knowledge is represented on which knowledge academic discourse is based. And our, our distinguished and esteemed guest speaker today, and Professor Falun Gom, and has made key contributions to this question. And we are very pleased indeed that he's joining us today, and will share with us some of his thinking. And he is Professor of anthropology and Boston University. And his research interest includes the interaction between African languages and non African languages and language contact situations. And the adaptations of Islam in Africa, and a jammy literature so this is what something which we will focus on today. And that is records of African languages written in enriched forms of the Arabic script, both in Africa and in the diaspora. And his recent work focuses on Islam and grass with literacies in Africa on social linguistics and linguistic anthropology. And his 2016 book on which part of what he's talking about today will be based. Muslims beyond the Arab world, the Odyssey of a jammy and the more media, published by Oxford University press, won the 2017 Melville J. Herskovitz price for the best book in African studies so it has, has made a strong storm impact, and really changed a lot of the thinking that Ariel hasn't made many of us, and rethinking our understanding of literary practices in Africa. And he has also recently co edited with Mustafa Kofi and toy in fallola the whole great handbook of East Africa. It's, I think it's more than 30 chapters of substantive volume, which came out earlier this year so on that's many congratulations. And, and over all his work touches on language, languages, linguistics, writing, knowledge production and perception of knowledge production and to direct direct several research projects related to a jammy, both so the writing of African languages and Arabic script. Both in terms of its use in African traditional writing established writing, but also in the modern virtual world. He was awarded earlier this month a large grant and procreating digital a jammy materials and house a wall of in Mandinka. And so his work, very pointedly and very impressively combines erudite scholarship of very academic vain, but also practical applications in education and changing literature practices now and for young generations. And so it's a it's a huge span of activities so we're very, very pleased to have to have Professor and go with us. And without further ado I'm going to introduce I'm going to end introducing a balloon gum and hand over the screen as it were to him. The balloon gum will speak for about half an hour 40 minutes longer if you like. And we have to our slot after that there is the opportunity for questions please for questions use our Q&A function. And then you can type the questions in the Q&A function please do not use the check because that gets a little bit confusing sometimes. And then, and then we can we can call it and read them out and then have a have an informed discussion. And with that, thank you very much for joining us. The floor is yours. Thank you very, very much. I am very honored to participate in this important event. I hope everyone is fine, despite the difficult situations in which we are. And thanks to Professor Martin Lutz for the introduction and for really framing the debate of today. I just also want to thank Stephanie, Girand and Kumi for helping to make this meeting possible. I am extremely grateful. And I think that Professor Lutz has introduced the topic beautifully by framing it as an issue of decolonizing knowledge. Whose knowledge matters and the perceptions of knowledge production. So I think this is an important topic that deserves attention from not only scholars, but people in applied areas, including education, government, business, and all the professionals who work in Africa. What I want to do is to talk about what I call the Odyssey of Ajimi in Africa. The sources that are written in African languages using the modified Arabic script. What do they contain? What form do they have? What information are we missing when we disregard them in our production of knowledge? So that would be the center of my talk. And as you can see in the two images, these are archives that I have found in Senegalbia. And the person that you see is clearly not illiterate, though in the official statistics he is regarded as illiterate. To begin, I would like just to give some general background about why is Ajimi traditions in general overlooked. I think that's partly because of the over emphasis on oral traditions and colonial archives that have rendered lightly invisible important written materials in Latin scripts, particularly in regions where orality and literacy have been interlaced for centuries. When we tend to present Africa as the continent of orality for excellence, we're actually ignoring the fact that in many areas in Africa, orality and literacy are interlaced. When you have a poem that is written and the poem is chanted, where do you draw the line? Is it written or an oral text? These are not mutually exclusive. And I think that's one of the problems. These written materials in non-Roman scripts and those to be an earth produced by people that Osman Khan refers to as a non-European African intellectuals can significantly enhance teaching and research on African. So I will focus on the Ajami archives that I know better in this talk. First, what is Ajami? The word comes from the Arabic word for non-Arab. And it evolved to refer to the practice of writing all the languages using the modified Arabic script. So it's not a new phenomenon. In Urdu, Persian and other varieties including among the Uyghurs in China, modifying the Arabic script to write their own languages is very common. So what's happening in Africa is not really new. Ajami has played an important role in the spread of Islam across sub-Saharan Africa and indeed around the world. How does it work really? In general, what happened is that the Arabic script is enriched with dots to write consonants and vowels in some cases that do not exist in Arabic but exist in local languages. So I call those powerful dots. Essentially, it's dots that are used for di-critics. In this case, for example, this is an example of wall-off. These consonants do not exist in Arabic. So what the wall-off people did was to use a bar which exists in Arabic and they added three dots on top. So in some cases, the dot may be below. But what matters is that there are three dots that distinguishes the per from the ber. So the same rule is applied for gh. You have three dots. And because it's not standardized, you may find texts with variations. Now, these variations have been emphasized by outsiders as a problem for Ajami users. But in reality, that's not correct because these variations are actually challenges for outsiders but not insiders because insiders are familiar with the local variations in the texts produced by their authors. So if the author is a popular poet in the community, people are familiar with different variations. So these variations have been, I think, one challenge for outsiders but it's not really for insiders. So I call these dots, the powerful dots, that are really used across the world to increase the letters based on the Arabic letters. So in the Hausa tradition, the Mandinka tradition, the Kanuri tradition, they might decide different dots or different di-critics but the letters remain basically the same. So with this system, in the same way it's not different the way it is, it emerged, in the same way the Latin script spread through Christianity. So too, the Arabic script spreads through Islam and was modified to write numerous languages around the world. Of course, as you know, Christianity, the spread of Christianity went along with the spread of the Roman script, so it's not different. Most of these traditions initially emerge as part of the pedagogies to teach Islam to the illiterate masses. And recent evidence indicates that the Arabic autography itself developed following the patterns observed in Ajami traditions. This is interesting because what it shows is that if you look at the traditions that are now using the modified Arabic script to write their languages, whether it's Urdu or Wall of Hausa, the dots that they use to increase the consonants that they have is basically according to Daniel, the same pattern, the same process that was used by early Arabs to write Arabic using modifying the Aramaic script. So if we look at the existing corpus of pre-Islamic Arabic language inscriptions dated from 328 and 568 CE, Daniel knows that they were written in the Nabataean early Arabic script, which was based on Aramaic script. So according to him, the Arabic autography developed from the Nabataean Arabs who modified the Aramaic script with diacritics in the same way Ajami uses today, increasing the using diacritics to be able to write consonants that did not exist in Arabic. So it's a process that continues in Ajami traditions around the world and began probably before the Arabic script was adopted as a major writing system. So I think this is for those who are interested in looking at the long-duray modifications that led to the Arabic script, and that is also continuing to be used to write other languages. So I think this chapter is an important one by Peter Daniels, the type and spread of the Arabic script, which was published in a very good book edited by Michael Munim and Quiz Verdeh. To give you an idea of the scope of Islam and the Arabic script you can see around the world, both Arabic and the Arabic script that is modifications of the Arabic script to write languages of Muslims is widespread. In Africa alone, there are about 80 languages we've written Ajami traditions. The problem of the exclusion of Ajami literacy in official statistics is so interesting because when you look at the statistics in general, official statistics and these are United Nations literacy rates, including local governments literacy rates, which are based on European models of literacy. For example, in 2006, it is said, United Nations literacy rates reports that Senegal had 42%, Niger in 2005, 29%, Guinea, a total of 38% in 2008, but these do not take into account Ajami users. According to CCA in 2003, limited census conducted in Labe in Guinea, Conakry, in Durbel, Matam, Podor in Senegal, and Niger and Nigeria reveals that in the Labe area alone in Guinea, there are over 70% Ajami literates and among them 20 to 25 are women. In Durbel, Matam, Podor in Senegal, there are over 70% Ajami literacy in house areas of Niger and Nigeria, over 80% have Ajami literacy. So African Ajami literates are really misrepresented in official literacy statistics because literacy is defined as the ability to read and write in European languages and the ability to use the Roman script. And I think this is a legacy that African colonial legacy that African governments haven't been able to haven't changed. And that explains why Ajami literates are underrepresented. This narrow colonial understanding of literacy espoused by African government and international organizations continue to exclude millions of Ajami users in Africa. So the problem is when we ignore these, this is what we are missing. This is a list of non-exhaustive themes that I have found in the collections we have at Boston University. We have over 30,000 pages of Ajami and Arabic materials from Africa. Of course, several languages. When I look at the themes, these are the major ones that I found. So the documents that deal with talismanic protective devices, astrology, divination, religious and didactic materials in poetry and prose, elegies, translations of work on Islamic metaphysics, jurisprudence, Sufism, translations of the Quran from Arabic into African languages, secular writings such as commercial and administrative record keeping, family genealogies, records of important local events such as foundations of villages, birth, death, weddings, biographies, political and social satires, advertisements, road signs, public announcements, speeches, personal correspondences, traditional treatment of illnesses, medicinal plants, incantations, history, local customs and ancestral traditions and texts on diplomatic matters, behavioral codes and grammar. So these are some of the themes that we find in our collections. And of course, clearly, by not engaging Ajami sources were missing a lot about African knowledge systems recorded in non-Roman scripts. To come to my book, so it's the recognition of the Ajami traditions and their significance in Africa that led me to investigate the Murid community where Ajami plays a significant role. And where the Ajami, wall of Ajami tradition has been deployed as a mass communication tool to convey the teaching of a particular Sufi leader called Sheikh Ahmad Obama, who founded the Muridia Sufi Order in 1883. So Sheikh Ahmad Obama had been deprived of freedom by the French colonial authorities for 32 years, and yet his movement continued to grow and expanded when scholars have argued that the movement will disappear as soon as he dies, which didn't happen. And I found out that in fact the reason why the movement did not die is that the movement was supported by the use of Ajami as a means of mass communication that was not censored because the colonial system was actually unaware of it. So what I did in the book is therefore to show how murids use the written recited enchanted Ajami texts as a means of an effective mass communication tool in conveying Sheikh Ahmad Obama's poignant story, doctrine and the virtues he cultivated among his followers. And I found that some of the virtues that really made the movement strive and resilient despite the deportations and house arrest that Ahmad Obama was subjected to by the French colonization. The virtues that appear to the masses included self esteem, self reliance, strong faith, work ethic pursuit of excellence, determination and optimism in the face of adversity. In fact, these were the themes that were being written in Ajami and chanted in local villages that completely evaded the French intelligence offices. And I think the reason why the movement succeeded when it was not expected was that they were communicating in a language in a script that was not understood by the French colonial officers who assumed that these were uneducated and ignorant Africans who were probably using traditional pagan songs. Okay, so I think this is an important lesson that we learned by show it be shows the importance of engaging local sources. Because without these local sources I would not have understood that in fact what made the movement resilient and successful even today is it is one of the most powerful economically, culturally and politically. Is because actually that Ajami has been used purposefully as a mass communication strategy, and this was done without the knowledge of the French colonial authorities. So how does it work and how does Ajami literacy email. Ajami literacy is derived from the Quran. So I call it a chronic derived literacies. And as you can see these kids are exposed to the chronic school using these wooden tablets. So you have both girls and boys. And as they read the Quran copies the chapters of the Quran versus the Quran are written on these wooden tablet as they memorize them. They, when they memorize each chapter, a new chapter is written. Okay, and after that phase they learn how to read, how to read and write those chapters. Okay, that's how they first exposed to the Arabic script. Now the Arabic script that is used in these chronic schools across West Africa is based on the wash classical Arabic script. And I think this is important because there are seven recitations of the Quran called the seven carat. And one of the carat is the one from Imam wash. And this variety of classical Arabic, that is the basis of Ajami in West Africa, which means those who speak standard Arabic, based on hafs writing might have problems reading Ajami text, because the basis is wash, not hafs. So as they finished the Quranic school, the first level of the Quranic school which is using the wooden tablets to learn the verses. The second layer of education, the second level of education is that they have to write a copy of the Quran from memory. And this is an example of a 15 year old boy writing his first handwritten copy of the Quran in Senegal. It's a picture I took in 2016. And you can see, this is a page. And once they're done with the verse or the surah, they will now add the vocalizations. Okay, so this is a page without vocalization. I might note that usually no numbers are added, because the first word of the next page is written here, which allows people to know the next page. When students go through this process, they become literate, dual literate, they acquire dual literacy, they acquire literacy in Arabic classical Arabic wash based, but they also acquire the local Ajami tradition that is based on the wash tradition. And in the Mandinka areas, if they haven't dropped out, and they continue to study, say poetry or to study higher levels in higher levels in other areas of Islamic knowledge, including fiqh, jurisprudence or grammar, lua, etc. They might travel and go to a place where a specialist is known to be, and then they might work with that person. So but what's interesting, this is a case, for example, of a copy of a poem that ends with daal, daal, daal, daal, as you can see here. The teacher might ask the student to make a copy of 300 pages of a particular poem in one particular genre. And then the teacher might meet the student and comment on the student's writings. And these comments are important because they could be multilingual. So if the discussion was, for example, if the teacher assumed that he has taught the student one concept in Mandinka, some of the comments may be in Mandinka. If the content was taught, if the content of this word was explained, say in Hausa, you might find that the comments here might be in Hausa. Okay, what you end up having is a text that is multilingual, that reflects multilingualism and multiliteracies. And clearly showing that these people that we're regarding as illiterate, then they are actually not illiterate. They're not only literate, they're multiliterate and multilingual. And I think these texts reflect the complexities and the wealth of knowledge that is found in these Ajaymi traditions that we are yet to really fully grasp. Additionally, these texts may also be transmitted from family to family, which means some family members may add new comments. So you could trace generation, for example, you could see this one is blue, it's clearly added recently. Okay, you can find this one is this comment is blue here and this glossies. So you can track genealogies through these Ajaymi texts. The kind of scholars we have in Ajaymi traditions, I have categorized them in three groups. The first group is a group I call the social scientists. The second group is a group I call the esoteric scholars. And the third group is a group I call ports and singers. So this categorization is by no mean to be a generalization, it is simply intended to reflect the major trends I have observed in the works of these scholars. So the social scientists are those who conduct fieldwork in many, in many ways, like us. So they travel from places to places, they collect data, they analyze the data, and they cite sources. In fact, they said sources. They say, you know, they ground them in the literature, you know, and the esoteric scholars are the ones who are usually invested in metaphysics. They are usually in khatims, in numerology, in astronomy, astronomy and astrology, actually both. And in Ilmul Nujum and all the Islamic sciences that are part of the metaphysical realm. There were ports and singers who usually actually read or chant poems, but also many of the prose texts are also recited and read, so that the dissemination is wide. So, for example, in the murid community, most of the texts that are written, whether they are prose or poetry, okay, have oral versions. So again here, I want to emphasize how the dichotomy between orality and written, you know, literature are not mutually exclusive, they're actually complementary. This is an example of a Mandinka Ajami social scientist. He's an Imam. His name is Imam Manja, and I met him in our last project in Kazamas. And I collected some of the some texts from him. And these are some of the themes in his archives. War and peace in Kazamas and the world. The themes that dealt with dangers of alcoholism, drug use and divorce, pre-colonial and anti-colonial Mandinka leaders in the region. Historical notes on the powerful, once powerful Mandinka Kabul empire from the 15th, 1537 to 1867, whose capital was Kansala. And there were even descriptions of the fortresses, the rulers and the wars they fought and other important military figures. So, we also find some interesting elements in his collection, including notes on the decolonization war in Guinea-Bissau, including the military leaders of the PIEJC, the arrival of the Portuguese in Guinea-Bissau and southern Senegal in the 15th century, and the founding of the Combo Gunju in the Gambia. And also a work song called Joka, which is very interesting and fun to listen to. So, these are these are just examples of themes that we find in the works of social scientists, social scientists like him. Another one is Abibu Rasulusi, whose document I found very interesting. In the cover page, it notes that, and this is again writing about the ancestry of Sheikh Ahmad Bamba, the Mu'id, founder of the Mu'idia. And he wrote somewhere that the grandfather was born in Aykashi and died in Sanyanja in Yurish. Now, for many, for outsiders who do not know this system, and even if they speak Walloff, they might think that this is gibberish. When in reality, these are dates, these are dates using letters. So these are chronograms. So if you were to break this, it's based on the alpha-neumeral system. In this case of the western one, which is shared by West Africa and North Africa, as opposed to the eastern ones, because there's some minor differences. But in this case, the Y equals 10, the Q equals 100, the Shih equals 1,000. And if you convert that in Anum Hizra in the Muslim calendar, it will give you 1,110. And if you take the death date, Yurushi, so it's a continental base, year stands for 10, Reh equals 200, Shih equals 1,000. It brings you to 1210 Anum Hizra. So if you convert these days into the Gregorian calendar, you would get 1,698 and 1,795. So which means that the person being discussed here actually lived to 100 years. So this is interesting because many historians who have studied these societies, assuming that they all, that they only have oral traditions, or even if they have texts, those texts must not be of importance. These documents clearly show the importance that these documents, that these sources of knowledge could have in decolonizing knowledge and actually helping to get better dating of the sources in the region. So clearly these would have, such documents have potential contributions in African historiography that has not yet been exploited. And again, so I just wanted to note that while it's true that many of the Ajami writers are male, there are equally important to women who have also written Ajami texts, either poetry and prose. The most known one is clearly the daughter of Usman Danfugio in Hausa land, Nana Asmao. But we also have, say, in Senegambia among the wall of, for example, Sona Maimuna-Tumbake, or daughter of Shia Amutubamba, the founder of the Muridia Sufi Order, who also wrote some Ajami poetry. And she is remembered in her community as a loving mother, a teacher, poetess, and a moral exemplar. So between 1974 and 1975, she wrote a popular Ajami poem, which is still recited by young kids who attend chronic schools, in which he presents her condolences to her husband and family for her own daughter they lost at a young age. That's a very poignant poem. So it's a very moving poem, regularly read and recited, enchanted in Senegalese communities, particularly in the Murid areas. Another area where Ajami might help to decolonize knowledge and to enhance our understanding of African knowledge systems and African societies is this text where it's clear that the genealogy that we have here highlights the importance of kinship, but also the elasticity of ethnicity. So in general, we are very familiar with areas in Africa where ethnicity has led to many conflicts, right? But there are also areas where ethnicity is actually very flexible and that ethnic mixing is the no. And this is the case because this document shows us that the family of Sheikh Ahmad Bamba from the 17th to the 20th century, the ethnic transformation, the incorporation from one ethnic group to the dominant ethnic groups in Senegal, which is the wall of, from a maternal, the maternal and paternal lineages of Ahmad Bamba. So document traces the full on the roots of the family to its full wall ofization, including the first person in the family who became fully wall of eyes and spoke only wall of. Another area that is important in Ajami sources that cuts across the Ajami materials in West Africa are text dealing with local medicine. So this is an excerpt of a table of content from wall of Ajami tradition. And clearly Louis fights a chant, what heals very seller and you have many other healing any type of eye pain, healing rheumatism, healing stomach ache, healing headache, healing so through healing to fake healing someone who cannot urinate. Benefits of the pirate stung for healing children with speech disorder. So you have many, many, many issues like that being treated. So, another area that I think these understanding and studying this Ajami document might be helpful is in reconstructing pre colonial diplomacy. For example, this document I found in the archives in France in exam Provence is achieved colonial. It shows this is a deal between King Louis the 18 of France and King of bar of the Gambia. Okay, so basically what happened is that King of France came to West Africa, particularly in the Gambian region, and was looking for opportunities for trade. And he was invited by King of bar and King of bar asked him to make his proposition and the King of France dictated his proposition to his tribe, which is represented here. And the King of bar responded, asked his tribe to respond to his pro to the proposition of the other monarch, which is, which is this part. So you can see, when the balance of power between this European and this African ruler, who were the same, Ajami was clearly recognized as a diplomatic means of communication. Right, but as soon as the balance of power shifted in favor of Europeans, all the descendents descendants of Ajami of King bar who using Ajami I regard it today as illiterate, which means the literacy is also about power. And which is, and I might note here, which is this has this formula has often also misled many scholars. Because of course, of course, when Muslims right, they always write with Bismillah begin with Bismillahirrahmanirrahim, which is the formula of doxology, which is commonly used by Muslims whenever they write, but the rest is wall of everything else is wall of. And these scholars have been able to read this, you know, but they can't read the rest, and they assume that the rest is gibberish, and in some cases they call them incorrectly, unreadable Arabic, and decipherable Arabic, when in reality, it's wall of a house or another language. But Ajami traditions are not dead, even if they're not recognized by many of these governments, because people continue to use Ajami to run their businesses. Okay, and there are extensive literature bureaucratic literature that shows the institutions how they work. Okay, and these are two examples that I find from the community. This is written by a woman who is a descendant of Shah Ibrahim, an important murid leader, known as the Apostle of Hard Work, and in this text where she is calling the community to help her build a home in a land that was given to her. Okay, and usually these calls are read in public in the radio or sometimes distributed copies are made in distributed and murids respond to these very quickly. This is another similar document that reflect the reception of funds that were given to one particular leader, and this is a letter generated by the leader to acknowledge the reception of the funds. So that brings me to another domain that we have also overlooked as we think about knowledge production and acquisition of literacy in Africa. As I said, the understanding of literacy as only being driven through the eye is true, but it may not account for the multiple ways in which literacy is acquired in Africa. Okay, and that orality that necessarily exclude the written tradition. In this case, for example, this is the poem, the cover of a poem, a very popular poem that is dedicated on Seren Salih Umbaki who was a former murid leader. Okay, you can see the poem, the copy of the poem and the chanted version was on a CD. Okay, which means that some people will be listening to the songs before they read the text. And it's it's like if for some people, it will be the reasoning of the poems that memo the memorization of the poem that would lead them to desire to learn the script and therefore learn the script. Okay, so this form of literacy clearly is what I call music derived literacy because the literacy is acquired primarily is driven primarily from the songs, the beautiful poems they hear. And these poems are usually very beautiful. They have local metaphors, local maxims and they talk to the people so they can resonate with people. So let's listen for one minute just to give you a sense. Okay, so through these poems, I got me literacy has expanded. Okay, but this was the traditional way of expanding I got me literature through these poems that were chanted in rural villages, and then later moved into cassettes and then DVD and CDs now has moved to the digital space. So what do you have now the same poems are now being shared online. As you can see here, over 78,576 have viewed this poem, and they can, they can listen to it and read. And in so doing, they're acquiring literacy without necessarily attending the chronic school. And this is only true. This is true, not only true for agenda, but it's also true for Arabic. Okay, because they're also Arabic poems in the community are being read and treated this way. So these are important areas of new investigation that I think would be useful for students of Africa to begin to understand the multiple modes that are used to produce literacy that has evaded scholars for centuries. And to conclude, we also have, you know, very practical, short day to day uses of agenda, like advertisement. In this case, you have someone who is not very popular and who is looking for customers and writes this serene low down is a healer and a fortune teller. Anything you want is available at this location. Your problem will be solved. God willing, serene law is very knowledgeable. He is not well known, but now he's doing well. The distance to his place is 500 meters with peace. Clearly, this is an advertisement, and the person clearly sees that the best way to reach the community is through writing in Ajami. Interestingly, cell phone companies like the French cell phone company is very is investing in Ajami these days for clearly financial reasons, they understand that to reach out to the murid community where Ajami dominates, they have to use Ajami. So in this case, business people are actually a head of government office officials who continue to treat these people as illiterate. So this advertisement say water to call message, message, internet, internet. And then this says if you want to call you have a reduction, you know, you have a deal through Illinix. In Nigeria, politicians are also very interesting, while they might in public and then when it comes to policies, not promote Ajami, but in the political campaigns that might actually deploy Ajami to reach the masses. And this is the case of a collection campaign in Nigeria in a new pay Ajami collection. But more generally in the public space you find writings on walls like this one clearly in this Ajami in this on this image Ajami is deployed as a mass communication tool. And it says, then you tell it could be south is a wall of warning urinating prohibited at this place. Clearly, it's likely that the person understood that if he had wrote if he had written French or another language, the message would not get through because the dominant space is dominated by Ajami users. We also have Ajami being used to teach foreign languages, just like English could be used to teach French or French to teach English. Okay. In this case you have a survival text. Bonjour. And then you have to pull out equivalence to now entirely. Okay, so clearly, this person has identified the need to teach French and his primary written means of communication is Ajami, and he's using Ajami to teach French. Okay, and finally, I cannot end without reading this poem. This poem is very important. This poem I discovered in Kazamas, and it's a poem cursing era of Hitler. Okay, because the war was affecting the community of this leader. And in this community, leaders who spiritual leaders who's who's Sufi and whose hearts are cleaned have power, their words have binary power, power that can kill. And but power also that can bless. So in this case, his community was being affected because people were being drafted by the French to go to the war and many of them were coming wounded. So, his best weapon was to deploy the power of his words. And this is what he said through cursing. And he called Adolf Hitler, Ikyler. Of course, as always, the first sentence, the first verse is in good Arabic in the name, Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. Okay, and the rest is in Mandinka. So he said, Ikyler the German has brought evil to the world. May God take away all his evil. If he is assisted by powerful demons, may those demons be destroyed. If he is helped by his political skills, may those skills be lost for good. May God bring evil on him so that he may fear himself and his deeds. May God throw thunder on him to destroy his curl and flesh. May he be betrayed by his own doctor. May he make him drink poison until he's unconscious. May the great angels destroy his plans and make them catch fire in the air and fall. No young man is here now. So it's really coming home here resonating with what's happening in the community. You cause our people and our guests to run away. The first to run away were Al-Fanjameh, Kamara, Maroon and many others. As for Danfa, he's worried for his wife is pregnant and his children can't walk Ikyler. As for Kanjameh, he wept so hard until I felt sad for him. Evil is not good Ikyler. Ikyler may God destroy you inside your protected building. Ikyler may you have the sickness of swelling belly and swelling genital. It's interesting with these causes we can see the public health issues that were important in this period. May you feel the agony and cry and die. I mean, I mean, may God fulfill our prayers. May the human race be saved from Ikyler's evil. You can see that this person's concern actually transcends his community. And then he concludes again in Arabic in the name of the Prophet and Sher Sadibu whose curse is most feared. So poems like this, where do you place them? These are meant to be chanted and it's written. All of this is written in Mandinka and only the beginning and the end are written in Arabic. Are these written texts, oral texts? Are these religious or non-religious texts? These are interlaced in these knowledge productions. In this knowledge system, these are not mutually exclusive. In conclusion, the bulk of the Ajami materials remain unstudied. Africanists across the humanities and social sciences have a lot of work to do. And I look forward to working with Professor Lutz on the Ajami collections at the British Library and so on Swahili. So some of the recently collected materials we have include translation of the Quran in one of the Bible in Hausa Ajami by missionaries. Qaddafi's green book in Hausa Ajami and Fula and Mandinka materials that bears striking similarities with some of those produced by enslaved Africans in the diaspora, in the Americas, in Brazil, in Jamaica. I think this is an area that would be really important to connect Africans in Africa today and literacy and the writings of Africans displaced outside of Africa during the transatlantic slavery. These materials, when seriously studied, will enhance our understanding of various aspects of Islam in Africa, but also of pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial Africa. Thank you very much for your attention. I would be happy to answer your questions. Ah, I think I'm online. I'm afraid we can't clap, but let me clap at least symbolically. Thank you. Wonderful presentation. There was comments in the chat and question answer. People really loved it and it's really quite mind-blowing. I will open the floor just now for questions, but maybe let me comment a little bit. I think what is fascinating about that there are some discoveries when people find things out which take the field forward. Really truly big discoveries are those where we all go, well, yes, of course, it's obvious. Why didn't we see that before? So when you said that all the vibrancy of the materials, the practices, the people involved, this is not like a sort of hidden thing which you have to dig into. No, it's not. But then, as you said, and you talked to this for a century, this has been completely eluded scholarship. So can you comment a little bit on that because that's quite curious in its own right? No, I agree. I think the first shock for me was, these are invisible to scholars because of the tradition through which they go in the educational system. So I was as blind to these materials as I was growing up. In fact, I only realized that they're important after I moved to the United States and became a professor. And my dad died. And he had written Ajami documents, including debts, and he had a journal in which I was a character. So I collected those materials and I brought him to my office when I was teaching at Western Washington University. And one day I just stumbled on these materials again, and I studied Arabic as a second language. But I was reading it and it was sounding walloff. I said, this is interesting. Okay, so I checked and I understood what he was saying. And one of them was actually a debt that he had contracted. He just called my brother and said, okay, just check if Ibrahim Masuri Jalo is there and if actually my dad owed him money, right? So he checked and it's actually is true. That man also had a notebook business record where he kept his debt. He was a shopkeeper. Now, if you know West Africa, you will know that the Fulani from Guinea, they run the small shops. And they keep their records in the pool in Fulani. So he said to say, yeah, he did owe me money. So I just began to say, okay, how could I be his son and I just didn't I thought he is illiterate. Okay, because we were told that anyone who can who can't read in French is illiterate. And so, so, and I decided to apply for a small grant from water, which is now at Boston University, interestingly, and it allowed me to go and then to just to check the shopkeepers, but whatever I asked actually was there. You know, so I think, I think it's primarily because of the educational systems in which we are put. And in fact, we call in Walloff, dangle, means he didn't he's he's an educated, we call them dangle. All right. And that means the more educated you are in the Western mode, the less aware you are of these traditions. And I think that's really the challenge. And I think that, but it's not hidden. In fact, they have their own. I mean, I have here whole library, you can buy them in local markets. They have market copies. And but they have stand and I they have developed their own infrastructure. That's what's interesting. Different to say to, for example, in the movies they have invested in public presses in make their copies and the market is actually a very lucrative market, they have scribes who specialize in writing letters. And if you're illiterate, and you want to write to your family in the village, you come and you pay them 50 cents and they write a letter for you to say what you want and then they write for you. Okay. And if you have, if you want to make an advertisement, you want to make 1000 copies of one letter, for example, one announcement for an event, you pay them they write beautiful and then you can so it's a whole business and the whole world I had no idea existed. It's really fascinating and you know there's a small note I made when you showed the CD I noticed that there was an address in Johannesburg so that's right. International dimension. Yes, it's very nice. Can I ask one more question before I then sorry come. I was wondering, you know, with earthquakes people have to assess the severity of the earthquake and scales. So I'm wondering how big is that I mean, this is what you ended up with the work which standard you showed certain avenues. But for our, you know, both for academic understanding, you know, all these areas that talked about anthropology, the sociology, the history. And, but also for, for, for current practices in terms of, you know, where, where, you know, where are the communities going how much can you know is this being used or should be used for for moving into more formal education. That's something, you know, you have a project but you use a jamie for the house of we have we have so as we work with kind of university by your university kind of on a similar thing saying it's all nice and well to have these all these training manuals, which then people can't read why don't we do a jamie so so there's this element as well can you talk a little bit about that. Yeah, that's that's a good question. In fact, they were in the 1980s. There was an effort by it's a school, which is the equivalent of the UNESCO for the Muslim world, which is based in Morocco. So they tried out here to standardize all these forms of I do me. So they couldn't use it to develop educational materials and include them in the public school. But the effort didn't work out because it would use a top down approach. So rather than using from the pool of the letters that already exists that are being used and to standardize it from the bottom, they borrowed letters from Urdu and Parsi and Persian. So they try to teach foreign letters to these users. Well, what happened is that in the workshop they gave them, they gave them resources. Once the resources were over, they fell back to the tradition. But I think that there are now more interest, little, especially in Franco-African as health issues arise. Like, for example, we've recovered now. I saw some advertisement by the Ministry of Public Health actually using a jamie in rural areas. I think this is a great development. So they're now using, for example, they just had one of the biggest gathering celebrations in Senegal, which is called the Magal, which is second to after the pilgrimage to Mecca, which brings about 2 million people together. So Senegal has one of the lowest rates of COVID, well controlled in Senegal. But part of the reason is that they're using actually in this community they're using a jamie to reach the masses. So social distancing, you know, places to wash your hand and all of those things. So I think there is now growing recognition of the need to find ways to incorporate, you know, these forms of grassroots literacy into the public domain. The challenge is, is this will, political will enduring? I don't know. So that's those are political issues. But there are clearly, and the diaspora dimension is important. So the financial transactions that are done within the diaspora that actually evade the formal system is done through the system. So, so I think I think there is that there's a lot of potentials. And I think that maybe with this new health issues and the realization of the need to reach to the masses. This may expand the use of Ajimi and maybe leading the government to take it seriously. But I wanted to add one thing before I finish on this point for linguists like you and I. These texts are mine from a link from a diacronic point of view. I mean, I can see, I can see how wall of evolved from from the text that will produce say in the 18th century 19th century 20th century. You can see you can see how the phonology is actually changing the rules that existed, you know, in the 19th century from rules that existed now as a result of borrowings. But you can see, if you wanted to reconstruct proto wall of, I mean, these texts are mine, but they also capture the ecology, the changing ecology. I didn't know that there were lines in the Sahelian region of Senegal, particularly in the Durbel area. But if you read some of these documents, some of them pray pray for God and the bomber to protect them from this particular type of line. And they give the name of that kind of line. So there were different types of lines, clearly that existed in the area, and that was threat to them. So it allows you really to capture both linguistic evolution, but also social cultural ecological changes that took place in this area. So it's really a mine of knowledge that we're, you know, we're beginning to open up. So it seems the impact is big. Yes, definitely. Excellent. Thank you. I'm going to have a look at the Q&A. We have a number of questions. I'm taking maybe the first couple together. There's a question. It's amazing presentation. Thank you. So there's very positive, positive notes in Q&A. The first question is whether it's possible to translate into Ajami and I, you know, I'm actually, yeah, I'll just leave it to you. I think it's an interesting question. Yeah. Just linking back to, you know, the de-centering of knowledge and the decolonial discussion we started. And there's another question, which is, it's again about, you know, it's about the technicalities, if you like. And I want to ask whether Ajami text in Wolof is for, sorry, for net-assized. Yeah. Okay. So that, you know, yeah, the sound, sound, graphene. And another question is about Hausa Islamic script. I have seen some Hausa Islamic script, which is more square and predominately in red, which was explained as anonymally, anonymally, by a museum. Could this have been Ajami? Okay. So I'll leave these three questions if you could speak to them and have more coming up. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, no, this is a great question. On the first one, translation into Ajami. Yes. In fact, again, as I said, this is so interesting. And that relates to the question you asked earlier. There are growing recognition by the government that these Ajami use are actually some important constituencies. And you will be shocked. They're not the poorest. They're actually very successful because they control the informal economy. They are the shopkeepers. They are market merchants. Okay. And, and, and they also occupy large areas where chronic schools are the basic institutions of education. So, in elections, in the past elections, the government for the party, the ruling party wanted to make changes in the constitution. They wanted to make changes in those areas. Well, they drafted those, they found ways, they probably hired some of those scribes, and they translated from French, the changes into the constitution into Ajami. And this says they did not use the imported letters. They actually use the local, local letters. And the 15 points were actually conveyed through Ajami in the German area. Unfortunately, they didn't pass. Those points didn't pass because they were opposed to it. Okay. So I think the point is translation is actually possible. And because now people are realizing that basically it's language to language, from English to French, or just like it could be from English to French, it could be from French to all of Ajami. Okay, so that's not a problem there. Public health materials are actually translated, as I said. So wash your hands, you know, social distancing, all of those are translated and you can find science, actually, you know, which are translated from public health materials. Phoneticize, this is so interesting. In fact, Ajami writings are phoneticize. They're based on phonetics. So the trade-offs that you see are actually marking voicing or devoicing. For example, the bar in this case is voiced, right? To show devoicing, you're using three dots. In the Wall of Community, you use three dots to show this is the devoicing. Okay. And you would see that, in fact, it's actually closer to the phonetic rendering than general orthography. Right? Because as we know, orthography, philosophy can be written with pH, but fall can be written with an F. Okay, that variation is actually very, very rare to see that in Ajami texts. They're closer to the phonetic rendering, because again, people are writing as they're speaking, as they're hearing. And the variations become, because it's not standardized, everybody within the community have their own understanding of how to represent one particular phoneme. Okay. So that's why when standardization were to happen, it would actually be easy if you draw it from the bottom up. Say, look at all the ways they use to write. If you're using two dots or three dots, ask them to pick what and standardize from there, rather than teaching them on urrupa, which is different, which is different. Okay. So I think, I think, and let me add another point, this is also linguistically very interesting. The representation of words of a morpheme of a lexical item is very different from the way they segment their structures. The structure seems to be segmented based on thoughts, units of thought. That means a verb phrase could be one could be transcribed as one. Okay. I am hungry, could be written as one chunk. Or, or, or I am at home, they at home could be written as one chunk, because they're not think they're not writing in isolating these structures as in an isolating language, they're writing it expressing units of thoughts. Okay. So that's why, in fact, you have to understand that logic. Because if you understand that logic, then you can actually break the structures. Okay. So, another, the other question is about, yes, this is interesting. This is a variation of the square writings. This is a variation of style. So there are different styles that a text that could be used to write a text. These are not these are styles is a mug what what the person is asking about is actually referred to the Maghribi writing style. Right. So the Maghribi writing style is one of the many writing style that exists in the West Africa region, the Maghribi that writing style is the most dominant. Because it's derived from the old Quranic copies that were marketed in the region. Right. So you will find them among the wall of your finding on the house, but they can be used in Arabic texts, as well as in Ajemi texts, because it's just styles of writing. It's like, when you were writing English with a calligraphic form. Okay. Or you're writing in cursive, you know, so these are forms. So there are several ones. But even in some communities you have local invented writing forms that vary from the Maghribi like in Kano, you have the Kanawi writing system. In Borno, you have the Barnawi writing system among the Sahara, say among the Mauritanians, you have the Saharawi, which is very thin, very thin and light. Okay. So these are these are different styles of writing that are found both in Arabic and Ajemi texts, and they're not necessarily only for one or the other. Okay. So these are just part of the writing systems that exist, you know, and calligraphy, I need to note, is very, very important in the Islamic tradition. Some of the images are shown earlier when that kid was writing a copy of the Quran. The second phase after he finished copying the verses is to add artistic dimensions. So calligraphy becomes very, very important in Islam because we Muslim do not represent visual representation of the prophet or God. So calligraphy has become the default Islamic art. And because it begins from the Quranic writing, it also expands. Many of these are actually great, great artists. Many of these Ajemi users are actually great, you will find drawings and beautiful maps sometimes flowers. And this is another element that is also very interesting. Many of these artistic creation also localized. So they will be painting or writing things that draw from Islamic tradition, but also reflects local ecologies. And I think it just shows multiple ways in which Islam is finding is adjusting to local ecologies, whether it's the, you know, architecture, but also where they see writing, or even how to make to make bookshelves leather bookshelves. You can see leather bookshelves in Senegal are influenced by local environment. So you can see the colors of the local environment, you know, you could see the local skills, and it's the same way in Nigeria and other places. So, so I would respond there that the square writing form is just one of the many styles of writing that exists in the region. Thank you very much. And we are moving on a little bit now to the to the sociology of your talk on the Ajemi writing. It's a question from Anakin Newman. I want to read that out. It's a bit longer but bear with me. First of all, your presentation is blowing my mind so we have lots of very, very positive comments here throughout the current day. I did my PhD in education strategies in footer Toro Senegal. And I first saw Ajami, and when a 20 year old Quranic school student asked me to teach him French, and he used Arabic script to write down the vocabulary. And the question is not in footer Toro, the help pull out Toro be the cleric cleric lineages deliberately deliberately restricted the teaching of Ajami, knowing the power of this knowledge. Other families like the Dalunke slaves have embraced literacy, literacy classes in Pula since the 1990s and French too, of course. Could you speak to this dynamic and how West African Muslim elites have deliberately restricted access to Ajami literacy, both historically and in the present day, if relevant, and it is the opposite to the examples you are giving, and all the democratization of widespread use of that's a great question. That's a great, great question. And I was grateful because footer Toro is very unique. And this question touches to that central issue. So, first, as she's correct, that the footer Toro has restricted Ajami use. And that goes back to the founder footer Toro itself. So, although the footer, the full day in footer Toro, a full day just like the footer Jalon and the full akunda and the full full day northern Nigeria. Omar Tyler, who is the founder, one of the most important jihadist movement, who created a one of the largest Islamic state in West Africa, discourage purposefully. His community, not to use Ajami because of the fear that it will put in danger Arabic. So that positioning, that political positioning is very, very important because he even had confrontations with another pro Ajami scholar in footer Jalon called Cherno Mombaya. So, when when Elijah Omar met Cherno Mombaya and found Cherno Mombaya was writing this beautiful poem in Ajami called Ogir de Malal, veins of eternal happiness. Elijah Omar told him you should stop refrain from writing in the local language when you talk about Islam. Because you were putting in danger the language of the Quran and the language of Prophet Muhammad. Well, because at that point Elijah Omar was a was a clinical warrior. If he wants you, you better listen. So, Mombaya was forced to respond to that accusation by giving the argument that I'm talking to farmers and herders. How will I teach them the beauty of the Quran and Prophet Muhammad if I don't use the term. Because of that tradition footer Jalon in footer Jalon Ajami has flourished. While in footer Toro when this person is talking about Ajami has not flourished. Okay. And I think that's because of these two opposing ideologies of language, one that I call the monoglossic ideology of language. That God is monolingual. And that the Quran and Islam must only be conveyed through Arabic. And they are the group that thinks the polyglossic ideology of language that God is multilingual and that he can understand all the languages. And these two groups are very, in fact, they exchange fire very commonly in Ajami literature. So, so that that makes very that makes sense. And the fact that the person who asked the question realized that they were actually Ajami literacy there because these people were able to write French in Arabic script which is French. It's not surprising because the Quranic schools are there, but but institutional support and the leadership support that made it successful in the wall off in the house in the full full day in the footer Jalon was not there in the case of footer Toro. And I think I think finally this is this brings me to another important dimension is related in bring in Jamaica. And one of the slaves who was brought there called Abu Bakr as Siddiqi. When his master realized that he was more educated than he was. He asked him to keep record of the plantation in English. Well, by the time Abu Bakr only know English and needed to keep the record in English and he did just like these guys did to write French with the Arabic script. He kept the records of the plantations in in English using Ajami. So English has been written also with Ajami script. No, this is great question. And so I completely agree that the restricted forms of literacy in footer Toro contrast very sharply say we footer Jalon and a fuller. And that's because of according to scholars, the monographic ideology that Elijah Omar took that so Ajami the growth of Ajami as in danger in the Quran and Arabic and others took a different view. That's a great question. And thank you. Yeah, and also wonderful answer really shows very, very nicely how, how political context historic context, you know, you have to understand in which context language operate in order to see what functions fulfill. Very, very nice example. And let us stay with with you such a cost different groups there's a question from a former colleague of ours actually Elena Retova welcome Elena. Thank you for this wonderful lecture. I've really enjoyed it. You mentioned that Ajami was particularly common in the movie dear. How is it in the other Sufi orders. Good. Most poets use Ajami to compose poems, or do the old series Roman script. I'm thinking of the collections of a poem a Ponce philosophic wall of edited by a sunny sealer, which brings together poems and wall of from all of the four orders. So originally, would these have originally been written Ajami or Roman script. That's great question. That's great question. So first, why the muridia have used Ajami. We were just talking about how ideology and politics is important. Right. So, remember the muridia was born as a rapture from the Tizania and the hadria. The muridia was was was first born. It was stigmatized as the order of the uneducated. So I'm going to remember was regarded as a heretic, because he did not follow the, the continual teaching of the Quranic school system and the framework that he found in fact he came to reform the Quranic school system. And so the muridia was stigmatized as by the Tizania and the hadria as the variety of Islam of the masses, the uneducated one. And they were even saying that to have a child who become to be an orphan doesn't mean to lose your child to be an orphan means to lose your child to the muridia. Right. And so, therefore, Bamba had in his hands, a lot of people who are uneducated and who are adults. You can send these people to the Quranic schools. He had to invent a new way of teaching them. And that's why the founding days of the muridia were very difficult. And it was really like a boot camp. That's what he had where he would teach them. And the best way to teach these people were through their languages. And he had, he had scholars who are actually writing and who are great poets, writing Arabic poets by Jahate, Musaka, Samba Jarambay. He told them, No, you should convert my through my ethos into wall of so these masses can understand. Let me continue to write in Arabic and engage the Muslim intelligence here. But you, your responsibility as my disciples is to convey my own thoughts to the masses. So, so you can see, this is the reason why, among the muridia, Ajami has expanded, exploded, and it has been used as a key means of mass communication. Okay. In the other Sufi orders, you have Arabic dominating, you have, you still have Ajami. But remember, these are elite. Now, they trace their education to phase Morocco for the Tijaniya, where Sheikh Ahmed Tijani is buried. The Abduhad, the for the Khadriya, they have connections with murid tenure. Okay, where Arabic is spoken. Okay, so the liturgical texts are mostly in Arabic. Right. So they do have Ajami, but they don't use Ajami with the same mass communication strategy that the murids have done. So that's the reason why, you know, you can see even today, all the local presses that produce Ajami documents are owned by murids. Even all the communities, if they want to print their material, they go to murid businesses, murid businesses, because of the long traditions of murids using Ajami as the badge of their identity. Okay. So that's important. On the poems that you mentioned with the Asansila, it's interesting that Asansila actually did some good work among the lions, collecting some poems, some Ajami poems among the lions. The lions are a little studied compared to the Khadriya, the Tijaniya and the murids. But yeah, the lions also have produced some important Ajami poems. In fact, I have one collection here. So, some of the poems that are written in, in, in with the Latin script, you write, some of them are translated from Ajami. In fact, some of the most important, very popular poems called Jajari Borom Tuva. No, excuse me. Jezau Shakur Buyoru Geji and Jezau Shakur Buyoru Geji. And these are two masterpieces by Mbai Jahate, you know, Musaka, that documents the Sufi life of Sheikh Ahmad Obama with the deportations in Gabon, in Murtenia, have been regularly translated into fresh. Okay. And it's also very interesting to note that many of the singers, local musicians, whether they know it or not have been influenced by the power of the voices that they have heard in these Ajami texts, because these are chanted, and they have blended with the local popular consciousness. Okay. So you will find some phrases in some songs. If you know the text, I could, you could just pull it out because they came here. They may not know. Because for history for a long time, these chantings, these poems, these teachings have blended with the popular, popular consciousness. Okay, so you have the texts, some, some Ajami texts that are translated, transcribed. But you also have, and I will end there, texts in Roman script that are more recent and that are not translated in Ajami. Okay, so many of the writing, writings by non by your phone scholars, and I mean the scholars who come from the French colonial system that is inherited by Senegal, they're unaware of the Ajami traditions. Okay, I think now they're knowing they're learning about it, little by little, and many of them write in French. Okay, but Assam Cilla is important that you noted him. He actually was aware of it, and he has actually collected some texts from the lion community, some Ajami texts that he studied. This is a great question. Thank you. Thank you. You just mentioned education as being really important. So I want to now come to two questions referring to that. There's a question by Abel Gaia. Could you please elaborate on the politics of integrating Ajami based or Arabic based basic secondary and tertiary education in West Africa, as well as connections with such formal education in North Africa, and indeed Saudi Arabia. And there's a related question by Francis, is Ajami taught in schools and used as one of the languages and government institutions. And so that refers to schools education. Okay. Yep, so both questions touch on the use of Ajami in public education. The challenge with these Ajami traditions is that there are two areas I think that are worth discussing here. The Francophone world is completely different from the Anglophone world. As you all know, the colonial models are different, right. So the general direct assimilation rule and the general indirect assimilation rule used by the British and the French have implications on local languages. That's number one. The promotion of all the local languages beside French in Francophone in the Francophone world is very challenging. That's to begin with. Okay, let alone using another script that is not a Roman script. So the challenges are double there. So which means there will be more work. Okay, if one were to include Ajami wall of Ajami house or Ajami fuller in the curriculum in Francophone in French speaking Africa, then say in Anglophone Africa where actually some of these languages are already being like Swahili for example are already being like elementary and Kenya and all the places. So there are these two historical elements, but a practical element, but a practical element. I think that there have been some pilot studies in Senegal, for example, particularly in Senegal, where some schools are called pilot schools, where they began to train students to use wall of, which is a dominant language to teach elementary and middle school subject, and to compare the success rate, compared to those who are in full French based system. It was clear that the outcome that the students learn much better when they're taught in their own languages, but there was no political effort to sustain that that effort, because it would require what it would require training new teachers, who would be capable of teaching in wall of mathematics, right, geography, producing new didactic instructional materials. And if you add to that Ajami, teaching them Ajami those who literate becomes illiterate now. And I think those all of those efforts that require financial investments, and also political and ideological will, and I don't think that the Francophone governments are quite there yet. I think they're moving little by little because local circumstances are forcing them, say the Ebola crisis and the current COVID, and then some political decisions when they need to convey some messages in particular communities. They can see the relevance of these, you know, the system, but as a way to make it an official system, which I think would be the best approach. I don't think they quite yet. I think that it might be much easier in Anglophone Africa. And because of the history, but there too I don't know how willing other politicians will the petition be. And finally, I asked the same question to the former Minister of Foreign Affairs, who was who came to be you for a talk called guy. So I told him, so, Mr. Why don't you include Ajami in your educational system? Because it looks like it is so bizarre that these things only happen in Africa. You have a mass who speaks and uses one system and you have an elite who doesn't communicate with the masses because they live in France. When they in Seneca, how can you address gap? He told me, you know, mon frère, if we acknowledge Ajami and we put it in the system as an official system, we will all become illiterate, which is partly true, you know, so I think that he was honest to say that to highlight that it requires completely changing and investments that I don't I do not think that the governments are there yet, because the educational system is grounded into the French model, which is likely supported by France by by France, you know, institutions. A real political will like the will demonstrated by Rwanda, which is political will to shift from French to English. It's a similar will that will do it and I don't think we're there yet in the francophone. It's a challenging one. I think it would be ideal. I think it would be would be ideal. There's one university in one university that is being born in a two by area built by the murids, and they plan to include Ajami. So we see. It's really interesting. Thank you. Puts a really great context also to the one slide you had where you said that the the orange the mobile phone companies ahead of. Yes, yes. That's that dynamics. Thank you. And let me look at some other questions. There is a question from Yesha. Can you elaborate on the point you made about finding elements of Ajami across Africa, Africa and aspera and the Americas including Caribbean. So that's the international dimension. That's great. Yeah, well, that's that's that's interesting because recent studies have shown that some of the early slaves who were brought to the Americas, about between 16 to 20% were Muslim from West Africa. And Islam has been in the area for centuries before they were enslaved. The most common story that is known is the story of Omar Ibn Said was captured in a Senegal via and shipped to the Americas. He was a fuller. Literate, it do a literacy just as I shown went through the Korean schools just like those kids went to the highest level was able to read and write in those multilingual languages and script and was captured during war and shipped to the Americas. So he ended up writing his biography. He lived in the Carolinas, and his literacy actually enabled him to be freed later on his old age and died with respect. There are many of them. There's another one Suleiman Jallow. There's another one I just talked about Abu Bakr Siddiqi, and there are more cases in Brazil. The Malay revolt in Salvador de Bahia. They found in the pockets of many of these slaves who revolted bilingual Arabic and a German documents. Some of those languages can be deciphered now because we haven't studied them because they're not they're not Arabic. Which means that the, the, the traditions, the African traditions of IDM has been brought to the diaspora centuries before. In Brazil, for example, what what's interesting is after the slave revolt, the Portuguese government criminalized Arabic and anything that looks like Arabic. Because they had believed that these rebels were using this script, this system to communicate and convey messages, which led later to the, to the falling of the use of Arabic and, and, and the Arabic script. But in other places, in fact, people have continued to read and write and produce letters. There is a new book by Oxford University Press by a colleague. And it's beautiful. There's even, I think, an online conversation with the author. Even the President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson was was was struggling with these theological and ideological and epistemological issues. He had they found in his letters, actually, letters written by slaves that puzzled him. How can we keep these people in slaves. When they can read and write in the language I who has traveled around the world, one of the most educated country, and that posed to him really moral challenges. So there are those documents, but the problem is many of them are misclassified as unreadable Arabic or bad Arabic. Because, because people remember they can read the Bismillahirrahmanirrahim, which is in good Arabic, like in that contract, but the rest could be a curse against Adolf Hitler. It could be, it could be, it could be a contract. Okay, and I think that means, you know, there are works to be done to collect some of these texts and to study them. But that's the historical dimension. When I was in Senegal, about two years ago. I found a document that has a copy, a similar copy at the Harvard stacks, dated in the 1700. That document that I found at the Harvard stacks library. I found a copy in the field being used. And the document is is an incantation when you in when you in distress. How do you use the supernatural powers to to to diffuse the tension and to protect yourself. The text of the written in the 1700s, I found a copy a similar copy being used today in Senegal. Clearly, which tells you they draw him from the same knowledge, and that knowledge is still there. And it's a connection that I think this text allows to perform to do, which were not possible before. And finally, you know that the international dimension. It's a migration. I have a student who is now in Brazil, doing his PhD following the murids immigrants in Brazil. They're producing a jammy text as they keep records of their businesses just like the ones I have shown. They are probably producing Portuguese, I mean, right, because they're living in Brazil. They have also moved into the digital space. Right. So they're posting bilingual, I do me and Arabic text that that that relate to that break the patient. So I think this is a complete new area that deserves investigation. I think it would be great to have a PhD student who would be interested in making these connections in more tangible ways, using these Arabic bilingual Arabic texts. This is a great question. Thank you. Thank you. We remain international. I think there's a number of questions I have one on the treaty with the King of France. And then after that we're moving to East Africa, which you mentioned a couple of times. But let us go to Malik's question. If I may follow up, please, Professor and go and taking the sample of the agreement between the King of Barra and France. Now I'm assuming the message and French and Ajami Maninka. Where does the two meet and how both understand each other. Okay, by the way, I'm from Gambia Senegambia. That's good. Yeah, yeah, that's great. Well, actually that's the text was actually one of not Mandinka. Interesting. So what's interesting, let me, let me talk about that first and I'll go to the historical issue. So this was the, this was the oldest text that I found written in wall of Ajami. Because the ones that I have that have been produced by the movies go as far back the 1890s. Okay. So this text was actually remember the wall of the latest to be Islamized so Islamization of the wall of is very recent compared to the full bed and Mandinka and all this. Okay. So, which means that before the colonial division between Senegal, Francophone and Gambia Anglophone, these were part of the same politics. And the king of bar lived in Albreda. I'm sure you know where is Albreda, which is few miles from Jufre. Okay. And if you go online, you will actually see, if you go to Wikipedia, you will see the, the, the ruins of the trading posts they were talking about, they were talking about. So, what's interesting in this is that, in fact, the king of bar was behaving as a monarch, as a respectable king and in this case, actually, the balance of power was in favor of King of Bar, because the king of France was just crowned and was looking for opportunities for trade. When he came around there for my Gambian brother. It's the new Minka, the new Minka who operated as a naval force of King of Bar. The new Minka now unknown to be fishermen, said a fisherman, but they once served as the people responsible for the navigation or on the Gambian river. So they asked him, so what are you doing here in our land. And he said, well, I'm here for peace. I hear, I hear, I'm here to look for opportunity to do business and say, well, if that's the case, we have to bring you to our king. So you can talk to our king. And that's how King Louis 18 was brought to King of Bar. And when he arrived and the king welcome him as a guest on honor. Okay, since you are for peace, tell us what you're interested in. And then he said what he wanted. And they translated to the local monarch King of Bar he understood. But of course, as as a, you know, as a monarch used to bureaucracy, he said, let's let's have this in writing. And then he asked, you know, the King of France to have his proposition in writing, the King of France, clearly had his scribes asked his scribe to write down his proposition, and the King of Bar also responded to the proposition asking his scribe to do the same. This became a joint agreement. So, the point here is again, you can see that it reflects balance of power. It is so interesting that the King of Bar is descendants, and the Mandinkas and all the people who use a me from that time to now are now disregarded in official literacy statistics. Okay, so, so that's why I'm interested. In fact, maybe we should exchange notes because I'm planning to go to the Gambia. So, if COVID allows to look at all the adhyam resources documents produced in that area. It seems that some of the oldest forms of wall of adhyam document are produced in this area. I suspect you will you will also have Mandinka old Mandinka documents, especially in the jar of Barakunda Barakunda area, where you have old and long established traditions and the combo especially in the Angkor area. So, so I think that is just one of the many puzzles and a drop in the ocean of adhyami materials that forces to reconsider and to understand. There's one document that I found that is also very, very interesting. That shows in fact the internal cosmopolitanism in the region. It moves, say from wall of land to be genie in Guinea Bissau. It's so interesting that when you read the literature, the French based literature or drawing from colonial sources. It looks like wall of the wall of people have been regarded as a center. But actually these documents show us that they are all the centers. One of them was the Mandinka centers of combo and be genie. And there's a document that actually traces the migration of wall of leaders and wall of learning families from there to be genie. And the wall of independence that displaced, you know, of the world of independence in Guinea Bissau that displaced many of them now in southern Senegal in Kazama. There's just information here to reconnect that by reading and accessing these texts, we might be able to reconstruct in a more plausible way, the historical movement of people in the region. It's a wonderful resource. It's really fascinating. And I'm moving, I think probably the last two questions I'm taking them together because they move us to East Africa. And one is from our own colleague Angelica Basquera here at source. And thank you so much for this amazing presentation. I work a bit on Swahili manuscripts and I fully appreciate your research. Thank you Angelica. In the Swahili context, there are hierarchies of power linked to the knowledge of the Ajami. Also the link to slavery and the Arab conquest of the Swahili coast. How could how to reconcile that history today so there's a big discussion on the coast on that so that's really interesting and then I put the second question next to it. Thank you. African knowledge is vastly underestimated. Sorry, that is from Rubina. African knowledge is vastly underestimated and it's a delight to see wonderful emerging surprises. Are you aware of languages in East Africa, similarly derived from Arabic, as you know there was substantial cultural, religious and linguistic Arab influence on the East African coast. Swahili adopts Arabic vocabulary but it is written in the Roman script. Why the difference and how Arabic involved in East and West coasts. That's a great question. I'm not first I should say I'm not an expert of East Africa. So what I know from East Africa is based on my research and bits of pieces of information. One thing that I clearly see patterns. I published not long ago an edited volume in Islamic Africa called agonization of Islam in Africa. And in that volume there were several important articles that dealt with East Africa. So what's clear is that the patterns are very similar. The only difference is the script. I noted earlier that we use the Warsh based writing system, which is derived from the writing of Imam Warsh, who had a particular dialect. So, for example, our phuh in the Warsh system is a phah with one dot under. In the Warsh system, the phah is one dot above. So there are variations. So our Ajami tradition are based on the Warsh. So in East Africa, all the texts that I have seen are based on the hafs, of course, because they're closer to Arabia. But the themes, the forms of the documents, you can take it much the same. And so one document, in fact, one work that has really caught my attention is the use of Swahili Ajami in trade and diplomacy. Just like the document of King Barr and King Louis XVIII, there is a work, a master's thesis, a wonderful master's thesis by someone called Mitua, who did a master's thesis showing how Swahili merchants who traveled and did business around the coast up to northern Mozambique used contract in Swahili Ajami. With local rulers, including Portuguese rulers. And that thesis has extensive copies of some of these diplomatic documents in Swahili at the end. So it seems, based on that, that the writing of contract, the writing of diplomatic agreements was a common practice as it is in West Africa and East Africa. So the hierarchies of knowledge and the fact that Swahili is now written with the Roman script. I think the writing of Swahili with the Roman script clearly is very recent compared to the long history of Swahili in Ajami. But Swahili in Roman script also played an important national and ideological value because it allowed during the colonial struggle to unify people who are not necessarily Muslim but who are also Swahili speakers. So I think for issues of nationhood, issues of creating, say, the Ujama, the nationhood bringing people together beyond religious differences might have been an ideological underpinning of why the Latin script might have been used as important. But in terms of hierarchies of knowledge, and I think this is again another similarities we've touched on earlier. So you see, for example, the Ajami in northern Nigeria, the full full day Ajami was second to Arabic in terms of prestige. Well, of course, because the teachers were full full full full full full full full full day. And then Hausa Ajami came later. Okay, so in the times of Usman Danfrujo, clearly, if you spoke full full day, it's like you know some Latin today, you know, because you will be you will be marking yourself as an erudite. Okay, the more you speak Arabic, you will be putting yourself as and I think that structure still exists in many Muslim communities. And that's where I think the difference is we've say the Mooridea. In the Mooridea, Ajami has been embraced as a bunch of identity of the movement, because this movement was stigmatized as the movement of the uneducated. So they adopted Ajami as a bunch of their membership. And that's and then and then they, they added to that financial support, you know, they invested in that so they invested the history of the I looked at in my book I looked at the history of the publishing presses of the Moorides. They started back to 1930s. Around the 90s, they've already begun to shift from copying and Henry handwriting to buying Gutenberg presses and making multiple copies that they're selling. So these are individual Moorides who invested in that. And then the leadership also supported that movement by beginning to generate bureaucratic documents with let the heads, etc. Right. So that kind of democratization of Ajami among the Moorides is what is different from the other tradition. But they all have Arabic. Okay, but the way Ajami has been supported, I think it's what's slightly different. But I agree that the hierarchy of powers is often reflected in the hierarchy of language. In the political community, that hierarchy is less, less, less static. Okay, and Ajami seems to be empowered for ideological reasons, and compared to house a tradition this is very interesting for, for the Swahili for the house a tradition and in northern Nigeria, he also deployed house Ajami as a strategy for his military jihad. Right, to recruit the masses, he had to convey to them, the rationale, you know, he had to governize them for practical reasons. So he produced Ajami documents in Hausa and his daughter, clearly Nana Asma also wrote in multiple languages as an effort to engage the masses. The community is similar, but it's more expensive, extensive. It's both to teach to the masses, but it's also for the masses to say, we are very proud wall of Muslims were not air. And that's very important among the Moorides. The Moorides pride themselves of defining themselves as Muslim Africans in the same way the Persians had presented themselves as Muslim Persians, which in the same way all who in the same way also use Ajami to write Persian. So I think the patterns are there. And these similarities, I say they actually cross original, you know, and they just show how Islam has adapted in different areas, and the issues are very similar in some in many ways they're very, very, very similar. So thank you. It's a great, great, great questions. Thank you. Well, thank you very much indeed. And that was most wonderful to reach the end of the of our two hours. And we reached the end of the questions I should say again there's lots and lots of praise for your presentation and the, the, you know, the insights you have shared with us in the in the Q&A in the chat chat. I fully agree. I think was a fascinating lecture. It was really very fitting as the also the first keynote lecture for our festival of ideas, and looking at knowledge and, you know, how, how, you know, you're what you found changes the perspective on so many different things and that's really that's so important. So thank you very, very much indeed. I should have normally we would of course invite everybody to a reception in the building but unfortunately not do that. But, you know, I hope we can reconvene that some physically, and I should also point out that of course the festival continues. And so stay with us we have tomorrow morning. I think we are starting at 10 a.m. and with the soul mama journey breaking the cycle and healing the mother wound and with the Honda Truscott read who is a holistic wellness coach and founder of the soul mama journey which supports women throughout the sacred transition from the realm of motherhood from conscious conception and spiritual pregnancy to mindful motherhood. And so that's tomorrow morning 10 a.m. It is an online virtual like all our events. Stay with us look at the program. Thank you very much for coming. Thank you very much for a wonderful wonderful lecture. I think we generated lots of ideas and energy. And so I hope to be continued and continue also with the West Africa East Africa discussion is more as well that would be great. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you and good night in London and goodbye.