The writings of Mauritania and the western Sahara, compiled by Charles C. Stewart with Sidi Ahmed Wuld Ahmed Salim

Abstract

This was worth the wait. It is like a vast and deep sea of scholars and texts holding a dynamic history of learned discourse and disputation over a 350-year period. It is a tradition of scholarship that continues and the two parts that make up this work have entries on scholars who wrote in the early seventeenth century through to scholars who wrote well into the twentieth century, and even a few in the present century. The Arabic Literature of Africa (ALA) series gave us its first volume in 1994, on eastern Sudanic Africa. The ALA volume 4 which appeared in 2003, on western Sudanic Africa, covers a space adjoining the area covered here. The two volumes together provide an impressive perspective on Islamic scholarship on a vast swath of West African geography and history. There are points of connection and ‘conversation,’ so to speak, between ALA 4 and this ALA 5. However, these two volumes (the work is divided into two parts and totals a staggering two thousand pages) have benefitted from arriving later because they have improved upon the earlier ones in the series, as a research tool. For instance, the indices are over three hundred pages long, giving the researcher an Index of Authors of Derivative Works, Authors, Subjects, and finally a General Index. The index of “Authors of Derivative Works” is the first of its kind for the region; it is an important indicator of the place of the classical works of Islamic learning within the scholarship of the western Sahara. It is a tremendously useful way to sample those classical texts which the writers of the region were reading and commenting on. For classical ‘Islamic studies’ philologists, it is also a valuable resource for it points to which works travelled into the Sahara and were closely studied and commented upon. Other features also distinguish it from the earlier works in the series. In its own terms, it is simply outstanding and an excellent instrument for advanced research. Teaching students about the region’s intellectual history and practices is helped immeasurably by the appearance of this work.