Ep. 10 | Islamic Scholarship in Africa | Ousmane Kane and Ebrima Sall

Harvard Islamica Podcast

In this episode, we discuss the new edited volume, Islamic Scholarship in Africa: New Directions and Global Contexts, with its editor, Professor Ousmane Kane, and his colleague, Dr. Ebrima Sall, who wrote the conclusion. This volume is the product of two conferences convened at Harvard by Professor Kane in 2017 on "Texts, Knowledge, and Practice: The Meaning of Scholarship in Muslim Africa" and "New Directions in the Study of Islamic Scholarship in Africa" that brought together scholars of diverse disciplines from around the world to explore the understudied tradition of Arabo-Islamic scholarship in Africa. Professor Kane and Dr. Sall talk about what led them to want to bridge the divides between different knowledge traditions and comment on the contributions of 19 scholars to this volume on themes that include Islamic scholarly networks, textuality and orality in Islamic scholarship, the transformation of Islamic education in Africa, and the role of 'Ajami and Sufism in the transmission of Islamic knowledge in the region.

Ousmane Kane is Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Professor of Islamic Religion and Society at Harvard Divinity School and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

Ebrima Sall is the executive director of Trust Africa and former executive secretary of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA).

Credits and transcript: islamicstudies.harvard.edu/ep-10-islamic-scholarship-africa-ousmane-kane-and-ebrima-sall