GHS Ajami Project (2015-2018)
The Gerda Henkel Foundation Ajami Project (2015-2018)
Between September 2015 to March 2018, under the auspices of a grant from the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Ajami Lab carried out research into Malian and West African manuscripts. This project— conducted primarily by a team of five Malian researchers working under Dr. Dmitry Bondarev—focused on the identification and preliminary analysis of the Ajami manuscripts held in the Bamako collections transferred from Timbuktu, as well as of those held in the libraries of Djenné, Ségou, Ansongo, and Nioro du Sahel.
It resulted in the following:
- A basic handlist to orient future cataloguing and research projects
- A digital catalogue of selected Ajami manuscripts based on the model developed during the identification phase
- Working papers and presentations analyzing the palaeographic, historical and linguistic analysis dynamics of identified Ajami manuscripts
- Methods, tools and a workflow that are the basis of the current work of the Ajami Lab.
African voices in Islamic manuscripts from Mali: A study of African languages written in Arabic-based script (Ajami)
African languages written in Arabic script (Ajami) constitute a neglected field of African studies. Reports about the number of Ajami manuscripts in the Malian libraries range from zero to several thousands. The project “African voices in Islamic manuscripts from Mali: a study of African languages written in Arabic-based script (Ajami)” funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation sets out to assess the volume of the Ajami material and to better understand the roles played by different written African languages in the multicultural environment of Islamic West Africa.