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Title
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Concluding and comparative remarks
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Abstract
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fr
Intervention de Kai Kresse lors du lancement officiel de la Collection Islam Afrique de l'Ouest
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en
Presentation by Kai Kresse at the official launch of the Islam West Africa Collection
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Date
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November 9, 2023
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Extent
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7 minutes, 23 seconds
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Identifier
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iwac-reference-0000848
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content
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Good evening, everyone, online and here in the room. It's a pleasure to be here. And my role is basically to round up and give a few comparative remarks. Congratulations, Frédérick, and your team for this really fascinating project. And thanks for the Senate of Berlin for funding it. I have to say, when I started clicking on your website, I didn't then sleep and drink and eat for three days. And this is perhaps one of the dangers that one should also point out explicitly when one speaks about these projects. But no, I mean, it's not quite true, but I think really what you also showed us in the beginning and now in these last aspects is really fascinating. It shows us how really such a multiplicity and diversity of entry points, criteria, qualifications, and in a way levels of analysis or of sort of entry points provide really, I think really a fascinating spectrum here, both for the researcher and the wider interested audience and public. And this is what I think resources such as these are all about, the accessibility, and then the possibility of freely working with these resources. So really, congratulations on that.
I'm concurring with some of the previous speakers and wanted to point maybe to some aspects of possibilities of complementarization, if that's a good word. But what was of course already pointed out that. Maybe I should start with a different sentence. What we've seen in this past year really is an amazing growth also of the kind of collection that you started off with your own, you increase that. What we have seen is now the starting, right, to work with Abdoulaye Sounaye's resources, who's actually also in the room here for our online listeners, might want to add something from his side. And I'm so fascinated because I think even if the, if overall, you know, overall speaking in comparison to the whole continent, right, we are still speaking about quite really a limited area and a limited piece of resources, but the vastness of possibilities to work with and the wealth of, you know, questions and aspects to be covered that you've shown to us is really amazing.
And you've barely started to work with African languages so this is one of my points here. Also not so much yet with Arabic and so I think the ways in which here this particular resource can continue to grow and will grow and could include manuscripts and could include more sort of researchers cassette collections that would be digitized and these kind of things. But also in that sense, they link up and collaborate and cooperate with other collections and I think this is a point that Mauro made very strongly. I think for researchers in the field and also the scholars and the custodians of these archives in Africa itself and researchers there, there's a strong need and there's also a reality already of teaming up, of working together. So I think this need to collaborate in the way that you might want to, or that you can let this archive grow, that would be, I think, a major point to kind of see how, especially with a view to local archives, the libraries there, and also existing projects already in different parts of the world, that we, in a way, continue to encourage different kinds of linking up, of collaborating, and thus increasing this accessibility and the possibility of working with these, both as researchers or for researchers and also, you know, growing junior researchers as well as an interested public across the world.
And maybe just a very few words on the East African side, and I actually realize I could have showed some pictures as well, but first of all, I wanted to mention a few digitization projects that have been important and have already been happening, for example with the Riyadha Mosque in Lamu where Anne Bang with funding from Norway and then also the British Library did some very important work, also collaborating with Scott Reese in that. We have a digitization projects of the same people, also with Mualim Idriss and his library in Zanzibar, also a local scholar who has been a highly important reference point and collaborative partner for researchers. And we've had a recent and ongoing project of digitization that has been funded from Leiden in the Netherlands on the poet and imam, Ustadh Mahmoud Mau, whom I also know quite well and work with by Annachiara Raia in Leiden.
And so these are just sort of three of a whole number of further projects to possibly be linked into. And I'm thinking, of course, also of the personal libraries of elderly scholars or recently deceased scholars and the kind of family and custodians, where I have examples of my own research of Sheikh Abdallah Nassir and others where the family or where family members and individuals are engaged in digitization, in posting things on YouTube. And that is a very important work that has been done. And so I think these, all of this could be sort of interlinked and taken on board and kind of kept in view. So I think the linking up of things, the making accessible and translation was also highlighted, I think by you and also by Mauro. I think this is another way of making these texts accessible beyond the realm of modern speakers or of experts, a way that is incredibly important to invest also in translation projects.
And so I think I would like to close with another word of thanks and encouragement. And for the future, maybe I'd like to see East Africa on the heat map sort of featuring very highly and in dark orange, and we'll also see South Africa and other places. But yeah, thank you for giving me the opportunity to say something. And congratulations on your work. And I think now you're probably open for questions and comments. Thank you.
Kai Kresse
