While digitisation of Islamic heritage in Africa has often prioritised manuscripts, the rich print culture of contemporary West Africa remains undervalued and at risk. The Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC) addresses this gap by preserving newspapers and Islamic publications: essential sources for understanding how Muslim communities have shaped—and been shaped by—the region's modern history.
Directed and developed by Frédérick Madore and hosted by the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), IWAC is a collaborative, open-access digital database. Building on the award-winning Islam Burkina Faso Collection launched in 2021, the repository now brings together over 14,700 items: archival documents, newspaper articles (both scanned and online versions archived via the Wayback Machine), Islamic publications, audiovisual recordings, and photographs relating to Islam and Muslims in Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Niger, Nigeria, and Togo.
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 AI metadata enrichment and tagging, powers a fast, faceted search with instant suggestions as you type. IWAC also offers a comprehensive index of over 4,600 events, languages, locations, organisations, people, and topics.
The collection can also be explored visually. A dedicated visualisations page gathers interactive dashboards that chart the collection's growth, languages, and geographical spread, trace themes over time, and map the networks connecting actors across the region. These tools also extend to individual records: open any person, place, or organisation and its own dashboard maps where it appears and shows how it connects to others—the people, events, and institutions it is mentioned alongside.
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 difficult access conditions often found in regional libraries and archives. The database also supports flexible data export and reuse, and aims to advance research on Islam in West Africa and to provide a model for future digital scholarly initiatives.
Collection Overview
Period covered: 1961 – 2025