Drawing on the case of the Association des Élèves et Étudiants Musulmans de Côte d’Ivoire (AEEMCI), the main Muslim student association in Côte d’Ivoire, we examine how Islamic activism on campus has changed since the 1970s. We pay particular attention to its modernizing agenda, leadership rivalries, ideological differences and the role played by the mosque in Muslim politics on campus. We do so by highlighting different eras or cohorts of actors who have contributed to making Islam such an important part of students’ lives and the academic sphere. The chapter first examines the AEEMCI’s contribution to the emergence of an elite claiming the status of so-called Muslim intellectuals and, above all, to the gradual rise of French as a legitimate language for propagating Islam in Côte d’Ivoire. Second, in the context of the wider spread of Salafism in the 1990s and 2000s, it analyses the appeal of this religious movement among students on campus and the resulting internal divisions. Finally, the third section argues that over the past decade, most Muslim activists on campus have become more interested in the promotion of economic entrepreneurship rather than engaging in acrimonious doctrinal debates.

Timbuktu Institute a procédé ce jeudi 16 juin à la restitution d'une étude régionale sur "Islam et islamisme en Afrique de l'Ouest" en partenariat avec l'Académie Internationale de Lutte contre le terrorisme (AILCT) basée à Abidjan.

Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC), created and maintained by F. Madore, is an open-access database that provides access to press clippings from the mainstream press in West African (Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Benin, Togo, Niger, Nigeria) as well as Islamic publications, and video recordings, all of those documents related to Islam. Complex tools enable discourse analysis and answer various scientific questions through keywords mapping, topic modelling, sentiment analysis and spatial visualization.

This talk explores the transformative impact of AI and machine learning on digital humanities research, with a focus on the Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC). It discusses progress in AI-assisted OCR for improved text searchability, and advanced NLP techniques including named entity recognition, topic modelling, and sentiment analysis. The presentation introduces the IWAC Chat Explorer, an AI-powered tool that searches the database, provides document context, generates responses and delivers citations. This innovation demonstrates how AI is revolutionising access to and interaction with historical collections, making them more discoverable and relevant for researchers and enthusiasts alike.