Beyond African Orality offers the first English translation and interpretation of sixty Wolof Ajami poems (Wolof written with an enriched form of the Arabic script) by Sëriñ Mbay Jaxate (c. 1876-1947), a follower of the Senegalese Muridiyya Sufi order founded by Shaykh Ahmadu Bamba Mbàkke (1853-1927). Sëriñ Mbay Jaxate was one of the greatest Sufi poets of Africa — a wise moralist and an astute social critic, he kept a sharp eye on his compatriots and the unfolding historical, cul...

Muslims beyond the Arab World explores the vibrant tradition of writing African languages using the modified Arabic script ('Ajami) alongside the rise of the Muridiyya Sufi order in Senegal. The book demonstrates how the development of the 'Ajami literary tradition is entwined with the flourishing of the Muridiyya into one of sub-Saharan Africa's most powerful and dynamic Sufi organizations. It offers a close reading of the rich hagiographic and didactic written, recited, and chan...

African Asylum at a Crossroads: Activism, Expert Testimony, and Refugee Rights examines the emerging trend of requests for expert opinions in asylum hearings or refugee status determinations. This is the first book to explore the role of court-based expertise in relation to African asylum cases and the first to establish a rigorous analytical framework for interpreting the effects of this new reliance on expert testimony.Over the past two decades, courts in Western countri...

Like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela, Shaykh Ahmadu Bamba MBacké was a leader of his time, championing non-violence and pioneering decolonization through the Murid project, which was a Sufi religious dimension and a deconstruction of colonial and local (psychic) alienation. Cheikh M. Ndiaye's, Ahmadu Bamba and Decolonization: The Power of Faith and Self-Reliance, examines Bamba's legacy as a man of unshakable faith, a humanist, a socio-cultural reformer,...

African music’s most distinctive feature is the urbatextuality that transpires through its diversity and plural functions and the specific geographical, cultural, religious, linguistic, political, economic, and social contexts from which it evolves. This music and its circum-Atlantic offspring are characterized by wisdom, subtlety, resilience, and creativity. They are cultural texts marked by an openness to other customs and societies since they maintain authenticity that does not foreclos...

This handbook generates new insights that enrich our understanding of the history of Islam in Africa and the diverse experiences and expressions of the faith on the continent. The chapters in the volume cover key themes that reflect the preoccupations and realities of many African Muslims. They provide readers access to a comprehensive treatment of the past and current traditions of Muslims in Africa, offering insights on different forms of Islamization that have taken place in several reg...

This volume brings together insights from distinguished scholars from around the world to address the facts, fiction and creative imaginations in the pervasive portrayals of Africa, its people, societies and cultures in the literature and the media. The fictionalization of Africa and African issues in the media and the popular literature that blends facts and fiction has rendered perceptions of Africa, its cultures, societies, customs, and conflicts often superficial and deficient in the p...