Maktaba project introduced at ASA roundtable
Scholars involved in the Maktaba project reflected on their experiences during a roundtable presentation at the Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association in December 2024. Maktaba is an open-access digital collection of translated and contextualized Arabic manuscripts from Muslim West Africa. A collaborative effort between Northwestern University (ISITA and NU Libraries) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Maktaba is dedicated to making portions of the African manuscript collections from these universities’ libraries accessible to a wide variety of users for learning, teaching, and research.
A planning grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities has funded the development of a pilot website with a sample set of thirty-three digitized manuscripts (twenty-four from the NU collection and nine from the UIUC collection), each accompanied by an English translation, transcription into typescript Arabic, and an essay providing historical and cultural context for the text. The roundtable included a demonstration of the Maktaba website, which is still in a pre-release phase. The site will be formally launched in summer, 2025.
Mauro Nobili, project lead at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, opened the roundtable by locating the project’s origins in the “battle for sources” in the field of African history. Historians’ focus on the colonial library, he explained, has obscured the so-called “Islamic library,” produced by Africans in Arabic and ‘Ajami (African languages written in an enhanced Arabic alphabet). The Maktaba project endeavors to open that Islamic library to non-specialist audiences. Rebecca Shereikis (ISITA associate director), project lead at Northwestern, demonstrated the website, designed and built by NU Library’s Digital Projects and Data Curation Department. She also reflected on the process of curating content for the site, especially the challenges of contextualizing the manuscripts’ contents for non-specialist audiences.
Paul Naylor (cataloger of West African manuscripts at Hill Museum and Manuscript Library), one of a group of international scholars producing translations for Maktaba, explained his process of translating fāʼidas—a genre of texts offering specific recipes, ritual practices, or physical actions that promise to afford the user assistance in times of need (e.g., in health, finance, relationship, etc.). Fāʼidas, Naylor explained, are important socio-cultural documents that are prevalent in West African collections and provide a non-elite perspective on the struggles and concerns of daily life. Ragy Mikhaeel (associate professor of instruction, MENA languages, Northwestern) discussed his involvement in the project as a teacher of Arabic language. He described the challenges of producing a fluent translation for Maktaba of “Ḥuqqa al-Bukāʾu” –a poem by Ahmadu Bamba Mbacké (d. 1927), founder of the Murīdiyya Sufi order. Mikhaeel has developed an entire course, titled “Reading Arabic Manuscripts,” that uses Arabic manuscripts, including the “Ḥuqqa al-Bukāʾu,” to teach grammar, rhetoric, paleography, and more.
The project was enthusiastically received by the roomful of scholars, librarians, and educators in attendance, many of whom expressed interest in using the materials for teaching.