October 22, 2009 — vol. 45, no 11
Boston U professor trains scholars in Ancient Arabic
Boston University professor Fallou Ngom is training scholars in an ancient Arabic writing system that he believes disputes the wide-spread belief that Africans couldn’t read and write before the slave trade. (Photo courtesy of Fallou Ngom)
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Boston University professor Fallou Ngom disputes history’s conclusion that none of the slaves abducted for their strong backs could read and write when they left Africa.
Centuries before Europeans started the slave trade, Ngom says, Africans across a swath of the continent just below the Sahara Desert were writing in their own languages.
As director of BU’s African Language Program, the Senegalese professor is training the first generation of scholars to understand that writing system, known as Ajami. It developed as a modified form of Arabic as early as the 10th century to spread Islam to Africans. The little-known script remains in use today from Senegal in the west to Zanzibar in the east.
Unlocking the mysteries of historic Ajami texts that have been preserved but not translated, Ngom says, would likely yield new information not in the biased accounts of African history and the slave trade recorded in European travelogues, ship captains’ logs and colonial archives.
“What Ajami tells us about Africa is yet to be known,” says Ngom, 38. “Ajami would force people to rewrite many things.”
The Ajami writings of slaves do exist in South America, he says, and others may be archived in the United States and United Kingdom but have been mistaken for unreadable Arabic. The true origins of the old documents may be unrecognized because it has been assumed no slaves could read and write until taught English or other European languages.
“There may be more Ajami documents in colonial archives the U.S. and UK and in the Americas in general than what is generally acknowledged, but the research in this area is quite limited and scanty due to several reasons, among which are Arab and white racism,” says Ngom, who came to BU last year from Western Washington University.
Those documents, he says, could lead to the discovery of new information and African perspectives about the trans-Atlantic slave trade. He cites the example of Omar ibn Said, a slave in the Carolinas, who “wrote — actually in Arabic — as he was old and about to die, ‘Lord, I want to go back and die in Africa.’ ”
Ngom says if Said, who was also known as Prince Omeroh, was literate in Arabic, he likely could have written in whatever was his own language, using Ajami, which is literarlly the Arabic word for stranger. “Theoretically, anyone who wrote in Arabic, could have written more in his own language,” he says.
Ngom was able to absorb Ajami because he is literate in Arabic and several African languages, and also knew how to modify Arabic letters to express sounds that exist in those languages, but not Arabic. He compares the process to how the letter “n” is modified to make the ñ or nyay sound in Spanish.
This year at the African Language Program, about 30 graduate students are learning to read and write Wolof from Senegal, Hausa from Nigeria or Pular from Guinea in Ajami and the Latin script used to write English. In the future, the BU program plans to teach Swahili from East Africa and Amharic from Ethiopia in both scripts.
The students are pursuing graduates degrees in anthropology, health or history. Most have Foreign Language and Area Studies grants from the US Department of Education. Each will spend five years mastering the African languages.
“Undeniably, once we have trained the first generation of Ajami scholars who can read Wolof Ajami, Pular Ajami and all forms of Ajami from Senegal to Tanzania, there will be a lot of aspects of African history, African society, African knowledge that will have to change,” Ngom predicts.
His goal, he adds, is “a more accurate understanding of Africa, and the perception of Africa in the eyes of Africans.”
| Feb 2 10:20am by Robert [64.12.117.68] | |
This is a prejudiced site. It will not allow diversity in thinking to be posted, else you would not have an inferiority complex and publish my last comments. You come to America, instead of going back to teach those animals you call humans. You are pathetic. |
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| Feb 2 10:15am by Robert [64.12.117.68] | |
Here we go again, some one that is trying to re write history so it can be a feel good for black inferiority complex that is rampant. |
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| Oct 22 16:58pm by Alex Zito [128.197.201.225] | |
Please allow me to clarify on this issue as well. `Ajami, the Arabic word for foreign, is the term for using an adapted form of Arabic script to write an African language. Ajami, then, is not a language but a writing system. As Islam spread to peoples south of the Sahara, those peoples have created various traditions of using Arabic script to write their own languages: thus Swahili Ajami in Tanzania, Hausa Ajami in Nigeria, Fulfulde Ajami in Guinea, Wolof Ajami in Senegal. In most cases, these writings in Arabic script were the first written traditions for their languages - although European missionaries created writing systems for African languages with the Latin Alphabet, Ajami writings predate the Latin systems. We have known for some time that there were African slaves brought to America who, like Prince Omeroh, could read and write - in Arabic. We have traditionally thought of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa as strictly an Arabic-language phenomenon, and so limited to the intellectual elite who could learn Arabic in non-Arabophone areas. What we have yet to discover is the extent to which people took their Quranic education and familiarity with the Arabic alphabet and used it to write their own languages, at the same time translating ideas and texts from the Arabo-Islamic world into their local cultural environments. I am currently writing my dissertation on Wolof Ajami literacy traditions among the Muridiyya of Senegal. I know that in the case of Wolof, the Ajami tradition is very important as an example of a "homegrown" local language literature, providing unexplored internal sources that can teach us a lot about what people there think and believe, and how local knowledge has interacted with Arabo-Islamic traditions of knowledge. |
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| Oct 21 18:15pm by Dovi [72.70.69.145] | |
The title of this article may lead to a bit of confusion. Professor Fallou Ngom's research and teachings are about African languages written with an Arabic script called Ajami. This is not "Ancient Arabic" since it is not a precursor to a current or more recent form of Arabic. The situation here is comparable to other languages that are written using foreign scripts, like a Latin-based one. Someone writing in French or Italian uses a Latin script but this person is not writing in Latin. That person cannot be said to be writing in or teaching "Ancient Latin". He/she would be said to be writing in or teaching French or Italian, which are different languages in their own right, beyond their common heritage. The same goes for English, Spanish and a few othere. |
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| Oct 21 14:51pm by Aleya Rouchdy [68.41.84.69] | |
I would like professor Ngom to answer some questions if possible. I am very much interested in her teaching Ajami Arabic, but I am interested in knowing why is it written in Latin script? Wouldn't Arabic script be more appropriate? Or, even easier? How different is Ajami phonology from standard Arabic used in the Arab world? Do you consider Ajama Arabic a dialect of Arabic? Is it an endangered language? Would it be possible to discuss your teaching in my blog? http://www.arabiclanguageinamerica.blogspot.com It will be of interest to some linguist. |
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