Islam in West Africa is deeply transnational. Religious, intellectual, commercial and migratory ties connect communities to both the wider Islamic world and dense intra-regional networks. Sufi orders, the Hajj and scholarly travel first sustained these connections, but post-colonial transformations, air travel, broadcast media, the circulation of cassettes and digital media, and state-sponsored religious diplomacy have intensified them. African Muslim agency sits at the centre: individuals carry, adapt and produce knowledge, negotiate external pressures, and innovate organisational forms.
What IWAC reveals
Beyond national boundaries, IWAC documents these networks. Press reports and community publications trace diplomatic itineraries, NGO projects, funding streams, educational pathways, and preachers' tours, allowing linkages to be followed across time and space.
Actors and channels
Multiple actors sustain these ties. Islamic NGOs, such as the Africa Muslims Agency (AMA), the Muslim World League and World Assembly of Muslim Youth, channel resources into education, healthcare, water infrastructure, and social welfare. Many prioritise orphan care and programmes for women, and they coordinate requests while standardising support for local intermediaries. States also shape the field: Saudi Arabia supports Hajj administration, scholarships, and infrastructure; Kuwait-based charities contribute to social projects; Morocco pursues clerical diplomacy through the Mohammed VI Foundation of African Ulama; Egypt maintains long-standing ties centred on al-Azhar University; since the 1980s, Iran has expanded cultural and educational outreach. Under Muammar Gaddafi, Libya financed mosques, Islamic centres and schools, often through the World Islamic Call Society, alongside political and economic initiatives. Together, these channels have strengthened the material capacity, organisational expertise and sense of belonging to the wider umma of Islamic associations. They have also sparked debates over laïcité and doctrinal orientation, which are documented by IWAC.
An "Islamic Francophonie"
IWAC also reveals a dense Francophone sphere—an "Islamic Francophonie" (Miran & Oyewolé 2015)—through which French-language conferences, training seminars, and association networks circulated ideas, people, and organisational models. Abidjan became a key node when, from 1991, the Communauté Musulmane de la Riviera hosted the Séminaire International de Formation des Responsables d'Associations Musulmanes (SIFRAM). Swiss public intellectual Tariq Ramadan helped establish and chair the Colloque International des Musulmans de l'Espace Francophone (CIMEF), held biennially in West African capitals. Debates addressed contemporary understandings of Islam, the place of Francophone Muslims within the global umma, and relations with "the West". These forums fostered a distinctive Francophone Muslim identity with shared vocabulary, networks, and organisational templates that crossed borders.
Why translocality?
"Translocality" offers a sharper lens than globalisation or transnationalism for analysing how connections reshape social life. It denotes both the movement of people, goods, ideas, and symbols across boundaries and an analytical stance attentive to uneven effects—blockages and re-localisations—that expose tensions between mobility and order and challenge linear, teleological accounts of "the global". Methodologically, it privileges multi-sited or mobile fieldwork; a jeu d'échelles linking local, regional, and global scales; and qualitative, metaphorical network analysis (Freitag & von Oppen 2010). Designed for this approach, IWAC's date-stamped, location-specific press reports and association publications enable users to reconstruct itineraries, funding streams, educational pathways, and preaching circuits across Francophone West Africa. Event-level detail (precise dates, named individuals, places) pairs with metadata suited to computational analysis. In short, IWAC is both an archive of movement and a record of situatedness—the evidentiary basis for translocal analysis that links event-rich microhistories to regional patterns.
About the visualisation: IWAC Spatial Overview
What it is
The IWAC Spatial Overview is an interactive web tool for exploring the Collection's spatial and relational dimensions. As the gateway to over 11,500 newspaper articles, it converts rich text into a searchable cartographic interface. With faceted filters and contextual controls, users can examine the corpus in real time, identify patterns, and formulate hypotheses.
How it works
At its core sits an interactive Leaflet.js map that plots locations mentioned in the articles to show geographic reach and density. Two complementary views support analysis at different scales:
-
Bubble clusters at precise coordinates, where bubble size scales with the number of documents to highlight urban and regional hubs;
-
Choropleth aggregates at national level, where countries are coloured by article density to provide a macro, diachronic perspective.
Users can pan, zoom, and click on any point or region to view metadata and filter the corpus.
Entity-centred exploration
Named entities—persons, organisations, events, topics and locations—are extracted for faceted exploration. Selecting one instantly filters the dataset, updating the map and article list to reveal the spatial footprint and textual context. A network view illustrates the co-occurrence of entities within articles (i.e., entities appearing together). Frequency-weighted edges, centrality measures, and community detection highlight influential actors, hubs, and corridors of interaction over time. Used alongside spatial metadata, the visualisation supports evidence-based exploration: start with the map, follow entities of interest, then open the sources. It does not invent links; rather, it renders documented regional and transnational relations legible and traceable.
What remains out of focus: exclusions and biases
Language and field coverage
Because the dashboard currently draws only on French-language newspaper articles, it foregrounds Western-educated, francophone Muslims and under-represents graduates of madrasas and major Islamic universities (Arabisants), many of whom communicate in Arabic or national languages and may not speak French. This francophone weighting both enables and limits analysis: it illuminates an emerging "Islamic Francophonie" while obscuring non-French-speaking communities shaping Muslim life in Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, and Togo.
Visibility ≠ value
Searchability and article counts proxy coverage, not importance. Editorial priorities, political pressure, newsroom capacity, and press geography shape what appears. Expect an urban, Francophone bias: regions outside capital cities—where most outlets are based—may look inactive despite intense activity.
Co-mention ≠ connection
Entities appearing in the same article may suggest ties but do not confirm them. For instance, a report of a president receiving several delegations, including Muslim leaders, does not imply relationships among all individuals or places named. In these networks, edges are prompts, not facts: treat them as hypotheses and verify visual claims against the source documents.
Method matters
The step from textual co-occurrence to historical connection is inferential. Choices about windowing (article level), filtering, layout, and community detection can create spurious clusters or exaggerate centrality. In line with the translocal approach above, IWAC treats networks as starting points. Every visual claim links back to documents, and the interface highlights provenance so readers can scrutinise the textual basis of apparent associations.
Why it matters
The IWAC Spatial Overview widens participation while keeping sources visible. It complements—rather than replaces—close reading by offering a scalable way to explore connections between Francophone West Africa and the wider Islamic world. By pairing discovery with disclosure—archives with algorithms, interfaces with accountability—IWAC invites readers to treat visibility as a question to debate, not a fact to accept.