An overview of the Islam West Africa Collection

Before I introduce you to the database and show you some of its main features, I would like to give you a brief history of the project. So over the past decade, I have conducted fieldwork and archival research in Francophone West Africa, focusing on Islamic activism in Burkina Faso and Côte d'Ivoire, Muslim minorities in Benin and Togo, and more recently, the history of faith-based student organization on campuses in Benin and Togo. So I am driven by two passions in life, tennis and digitization. ChatGPT explained to me that in tennis, it's about making your opponent run, and in digitization, it's about saving researchers from having to run around libraries. So it's not bad.

So despite the many difficulties that can be encountered in the region archives, I digitized more than 11,000 press cuttings from 39 state and private newspapers on Islam and Muslims in the four countries, published between 1960 and 2022. I also scanned about 1,400 different Islamic newspapers, publication bulletins, and most of them are no longer published. So these documents were collected from various private collections of individual and Islamic association, as well as from nine archival centers and libraries in six different countries, including Germany and the United States. So the idea for such a database project dates back to 2014, when I was in Abidjan, in Côte d'Ivoire. I had realized the untapped potential of the written press for research on Islam and Muslim societies since the 1960s. So above all, I hope that the countless hours I have spent reading, scanning and sorting the newspapers, as well as creating my own personal database, would be of use to other researchers or even to the Muslim communities themselves.

So I had to finish my PhD before I could implement the idea of an open-access digital database. So in 2021, while at the University of Florida in the US, I launched the Islam Burkina Faso Collection, which contained archival documents, newspaper articles, Islamic publications, photographs, audio recordings, and bibliographical references on Islam and Muslim in this country. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Perry Collins of UF Libraries for her help in this project. So in my view, this was only the first step in a larger multi-country database. This is all the more important as the jihadist insurgency in Burkina Faso, Niger, and Mali, and the increasingly frequent attacks in northern Benin and Togo since 2021 have made more and more people interested in Islam and Muslims in West Africa and especially in neighboring countries on the Gulf of Guinea.

So this leads us to the Islam West Africa Collection at ZMO. So here's the database which currently includes among other 5,400 news clippings, 500 Islamic publication and about 75 videos. So the website is bilingual, French-English. So although most of the documents are in French, the metadata is bilingual. So you can search either in English or French. So as you can see, there's a search box in the top corner. You can search the full text of any document that has been indexed. I spent countless hours performing optical character recognition, OCR, so the full text of every article could be indexed in the database. And there's also an advanced search if you want to combine several criteria within the database. So if you are specifically interested in one of the six countries covered by the collection, you can use the browse option here.

So let's try with Benin, for example. So the database offers filtering and sorting to help users narrow down their results when browsing resources. So if we click on newspaper articles, for example, here. So thanks to an agreement with the state newspaper La Nation in Benin, Vincent and I added a thousand news clippings from La Nation from 1970 to 2022. So, in addition to facets, here you see facets, so you can sort by the newspaper, you have date ranges, the language, if you're interested in a specific city in Benin, and you have a full text search box. And here you have the preview with the title, date, and abstract. So let's say we just perform a search, for example. So let's type Moutawakil, which is an interesting imam. I can't do two things at the same time. Moutawakil here. So he's an interesting imam who is well known for expressing his political opinion in various debates in Benin. So if you type his name here, then you have all the articles related to this specific imam.

And then if we open a single item, for example, here. Then on the pages of a single item, you can see the PDF, the scan of the article itself. So if you want to download it or just read it, you can here. And then below, you have extensive metadata that has been assigned to every item. So you have the title, the creator, the publisher, date, subject keywords, page number, copyright holders, language, and the full text of the article. And as you can see, most of the metadata field are hyperlinks. So if you're interested in a specific topic, so let's continue our research with this imam, then you can click on the imam, which is a subject of this article. And then you will get the authority file of this person with a short description. And here you can see the list of all the items that have this specific imam as subject. And then you can really almost browse endlessly by clicking on links. So if we click on the name of this mosque, which is his mosque of this specific imam, then you get the authority file of the mosque. You can see all the linked resources related to this mosque. And in some cases, you can also have the GPS coordinates of this specific location. So I think it could be useful in various ways.

One of the most important part of the project this year has been the inclusion of documents from our colleague Abdoulaye Sounaye personal archive on Islam in Niger and Nigeria. Alexei and Vincent has been working to digitize and catalogue the documents for inclusion in the database. So if we go to Niger, for example, again, you have faceted browse. So you can see there's a collection of Islamic newspapers. Some are in French, some are in Arabic. full metadata has not yet been added, but you have the automatic OCR, so even for those in Arabic, let's say we'll open one here. Then again you have the digitized version of the newspaper here, the metadata, and below you have the OCR of the magazine. So you could even type in Arabic in the search box and you could get results coming from this Islamic newspaper in Niger.

So there's also an interesting collection on Nigeria. So if you go on Nigeria. There are 45 DVDs of video recordings of sermons, mostly in Hausa by Sheikh Albani Zaria, a prominent Salafi scholar in Nigeria. These recordings total 155 hours. So Aleksei, who is fluent in Hausa, has watched several of these recordings to write a short summary and to add timestamps to mark important parts of the recordings. For example, there's one video where Albani discusses the concept of democracy and how a society should be run according to Islam. So let me just type democracy here. Again, if you click on the item, you will get all the metadata description that Aleksei has prepared. And then you can see the DVD cover. You can watch the video online. I won't start it because I'm not sure about the sound, but you can watch the videos here. You can stream it. And you have also all the abstract summaries and keywords that Aleksei has prepared to really help you to browse the content of these recordings because most of the time it's like five hours or six hours recording. So then I think timestamps are useful to really get to the point that really interests you.

Unfortunately I don't have time to show you everything, but the database also includes photographs with GPS coordinates, YouTube videos of relevant channels, and also even snapshots of online newspapers, snapshots from the Wayback Machine. Because you know, there's a lot of online newspapers in West Africa that at some point they will just disappear or cease publication. And most of the time these websites just completely disappear. So I had also this idea of saving the metadata from the Wayback Machine, which allows you to go back in time and kind of recover this disappeared or deceased website.

There's also an index on the website, on the database. There are over 1,800 events, places, organization, people, topics, and language. So let's say, for example, we could try with organizations here. You can see it by the title, acronym, the date of creation, a specific location. Again, you have facets. So let's say you're interested in Islamic organizations. We could sort them by title. And then let's say you're interested in the Africa Muslim Agency. So if you click on it, then again, you have the authority file of the specific organization with sometime a description. and then with linked resources, you can get all the documents that have this specific association. I think it's also an interesting way if you want to conduct some research on a more transnational scale, then you could really look for a specific topic or Islamic NGO, for example, and then you will get all the documents from all the countries, not just Benin or not just Togo, but all the countries covered in the database. There's also an index with persons if you want to look for specific imams. So there's a lot of possibilities.

I also created some exhibits, digital exhibits. These are coming from the previous Islam Burkina Faso Collection. Basically the idea was there's a lot of documents in the database and it can be overwhelming. I had this idea of selecting, hand-picking some interesting documents and organize them in an interactive timeline. You can see here, there's one on student activism in Burkina Faso. It's basically an interactive timeline and I have selected some relevant documents from the database, provided some context. And then, if you are interested by a specific article, you can just click on it and you we will go directly to the page of the article.

I would like to conclude this overview with the bibliographical references, which I think are a very important feature of the database. So if we go to references here. The database currently indexes more than 800 references on Islam and Muslims in the six countries. So books, book chapters, book reviews, journal articles, reports, blog posts, thesis, and dissertation. And this also includes a master's thesis and PhD dissertation defended in African universities and also articles published in African journals that are often difficult to find. Vincent has done an enormous amount of work on this front, listing and processing 200 references on Niger, but above all, more than 1000 references on Nigeria, which will be uploaded by the end of the year, Inshallah. You can filter the references by country, by the author, the type, if you're looking for book chapters, book reviews, again, the date range, if you want for a specific journal or editor, the language, or you can just type in the search box. So a very popular research topic recently has been jihadism in the region. I could type, for example, jihadism here, and then you will get the references related with this keyword. And if you click on a specific reference, then you get all the metadata like the abstract, journal, the volume, pages, date, and the DOI.

And finally, all these references can also be visualized in various interesting ways. So let me show you an example with Niger. Without going into the technical details, the metadata of all the references in the Collection have been uploaded to Wikidata, which allows to generate visualization of research on Islam and Muslims in Niger, for example, or Togo, Benin. And as you can see here with this on Niger, so you have all the publications per year depending on the type, chapter, doctoral dissertation, report, and so on. You have also all the important authors. As you can see, our colleague Abdoulaye Sounaye featured prominently here. You have also the co-author graph. If you wanted to see who's working with whom or who's publishing with whom. You have also this crazy, this is my favorite one. So those are the co-occurring topics. For example, if you could zoom. We have here democratization, and then you can see what are the topic that are usually covered in a specific article when it's about democratization. So the co-occurrences of topics. So this is really thanks to the work of Vincent. You have also the co-occurring topic map. Whenever it's about Islam and Muslim in Niger, are there other countries or cities covered? You can see on this on this map. And there's also the main journals and edited volume publishing work about Islam in Niger, and also the organizations or universities associated with work about the topic. So there's several way of visualizing the content. I will stop here. I don't want to take too much time.