The Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC), directed and developed by Frédérick Madore, is a collaborative, open-access digital database supported by the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) and funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Science, Health and Care. Building on the success of the award-winning Islam Burkina Faso Collection launched in 2021, this repository features over 12,500 archival documents, newspaper articles (both scanned and online versions archived via the Wayback Machine), diverse Islamic publications, audio and video recordings, and photographs relating to Islam and Muslims in Burkina Faso, Benin, Niger, Nigeria, Togo, and Côte d'Ivoire.
Although the majority of the materials are in French, the Collection also includes items in Hausa, Arabic, Dendi, and English. It indexes more than 850 references—books, articles, chapters, theses, reports and blog posts—and applies optical character recognition (OCR) to each document. This approach, combined with detailed metadata tagging, enables efficient keyword searches and advanced multi-criteria queries. The IWAC also offers a comprehensive index of over 4,000 events, languages, locations, organisations, people, and topics.
By democratising access to essential research materials, IWAC makes these resources available online without financial barriers, offering West African and international scholars an alternative to the challenging conditions often found in regional libraries and archives. The database also supports flexible data export and sophisticated query methods, aspiring to facilitate research on Islam in West Africa and serve as a model for future digital scholarly initiatives.
News and release notes
The website is constantly evolving, with metadata being edited and new documents being added to the collection on a regular basis.
17 April 2024
The Collection is now compliant with the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) standards. This enhancement not only marks a leap forward in our commitment to making the database more accessible and user-friendly, but also underscores our commitment to promoting interoperability among digital repositories. The Universal Viewer allows for more interactive and immersive exploration of digital objects. Users can zoom, pan and explore images in fine detail.
22 January 2024
9 November 2023
The Islam West Africa Collection was officially launched on 9 November in Berlin. Further information.
31 October 2023
To demonstrate the potential of digital humanities to analyse the data in the Islam West Africa Collection, a series of visualisations were created using two corpus of press clippings from Beninese and Burkinabè newspapers. See more here.