Evidence of West African Islamic written culture in European sources: cases from the Greater Senegambia (15th to 17th century CE)

This communication aims to present new possibilities to achieve Islamic intellectual and written culture from West Africa – the Greater Senegambia region – through an indirect method based on European sources from the 15th to the 17th century. Challenged by the absence of a major corpus of West African written Islamic sources regarding the period ranging from the 11th to the 17th century CE, my scholarship has sought evidence of African Islamic thought in texts produced by European travelers, missionaries, traders, and others. Despite being cast as outsiders, these people kept African voices in their writings. They described the material culture concerning Islamic knowledge across the region stretching from the Senegal River valley to the north of nowadays Sierra Leone – the region known as Greater Senegambia. Largely based on local African oralities, these sources are as European as African, once they showcase local perspectives on African societies and their ancient history as secured by oral knowledge. Moreover, these documents open a new window to the study of Islamic intellectual history in West Africa considering the social approach to Islam and its institutions. Through descriptions of how Qur'anic schools worked, public readings of passages from the Holy Book, the social context in which excerpts of Mohammed's Sunna were debated and its application in Sharia, European sources offer a new avenue to understand how Islam integrated African daily lives. Thus, this communication will debate strategies to be applied to European sources to overcome their remarked ethnocentrism towards new knowledge about African Islamic history.