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Introduction and Annotated Bibliography Introduction and Annotated Bibliography Tal Tamari & Dmitry Bondarev The interpretation of the Qur’an, and more generally Arabic books, in the languages of sub-Saharan Africa is currently a widespread practice, and for some languages and in some regions, also an ancient one; yet it has gone largely unstudied and unnoticed. Most of these commentaries have been oral, but in some areas they took the form of marginal or interlinear annotations of the sacred Book; the earliest known example, in Old Kanembu, dates back to the seventeenth century. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a considerable number of commentaries and translations of the meanings of the Qur’an have been written out for publication in printed form; voice and video recordings of Qur’an exegetical sessions have circulated as well. The research presented here leads to a reevaluation of the nature and potentialities of African languages, as well as of the achievements of Islamic scholarship in sub-Saharan Africa, while revealing little-known configurations of bilingualism, multilingualism, and interplay of the oral and the written. There is increasing evidence that Muslim scholars, expressing themselves in several African languages, developed lexical and grammatical structures fully adequate for communicating the concepts and contents of Islamic curricula. This special issue, growing out of a panel at the fourth-biannual conference of the European Council on African Studies held at Uppsala University, Sweden, in June 2011, presents material, as did that panel, on Old Kanembu and its contemporary offshoot, Tarjumo, a language form used exclusively for the explanation of Arabic books; Hausa; Swahili; and Manding (specifically Bamana and Maninka); to which are now added Songhay-Zarma and, indirectly, Fulfulde (inasmuch as commentaries now transmitted in Songhay-Zarma were transmitted in that language; see also the analysis of Fulfulde mystical poetry presented in the context of a book review). Countries featured here include Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Kenya (especially Mombasa and Lamu) and Tanzania (specifically Zanzibar). Chronological scope includes the seventeenth to twentieth centuries (Old Kanembu) and nineteenth century (Hausa), with most contributions concentrating on the twentieth century.1 Two contributions on Journal of Qur’anic Studies 15.3 (2013): 1–55 Edinburgh University Press DOI: 10.3366/jqs.2013.0113 # Centre of Islamic Studies, SOAS www.euppublishing.com/jqs 2 Journal of Qur’anic Studies Qur’anic exegesis in African languages were also presented at a conference on ‘Approaches to the Qur’an in sub-Saharan Africa’ held in Toronto in May 2011.2 Earlier work has concentrated on Hausa, Swahili, Yoruba and Manding; it has privileged written, especially printed, commentaries, though both radio broadcasting and oral commentary in more traditional settings have been addressed.3 The Organisation of the Islamic Conference has launched projects for the systematic study, collection and archiving of oral commentaries, as have, on a more modest scale, various other associations and several African states; the latter may consider that these form a part of their general cultural and linguistic, as well as specifically religious, heritage.4 However, published analyses, including the ones to be presented here, consider only a small fraction of the vernacular exegeses produced in sub-Saharan Africa. In addition to the languages already mentioned, oral tafsīr is documented, through allusions in the literature or the as yet unpublished fieldwork of the present contributors, among the Soninke – surely one of the first African peoples to accept Islam, they are currently represented in Mali, Mauritania and The Gambia; Hassaniya (Moorish) Arabic (Mauritania, Mali and Senegal); Tamasheq (a Berber language; Mali, Mauritania, Niger and the extreme south of Algeria); Wolof (Senegal and The Gambia); Bozo (Mali); the Dogon and Senufo of Mali, and Mossi of Burkina Faso, among whom Islam is currently expanding; Kanuri (Niger and northern Nigeria); Modern Kanembu, Teda and Daza (Niger and Chad); Somali; Zulu and Afrikaans (South Africa); but seems to be more generally characteristic of all the longer-Islamised peoples as well as neighbouring peoples currently converting to that religion. Songhay oral commentaries are documented not only for Niger, as studied here, but also for Mali; oral commentaries in the Manding languages (most of which are mutually comprehensible) are documented in Mali, Guinea, The Gambia and Burkina Faso, but probably exist also in the other countries where these languages are widely spoken (Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone and Liberia).5 Manuscript annotations have been studied in Old Kanembu and Hausa (as discussed in this volume) and reported for Tamasheq, Wolof, Fulfulde, Songhay and Swahili; they are also likely in several other languages.6 Several complete Qur’an commentaries have been printed in each of the following languages: Hausa, Yoruba and Swahili;7 one each in Maninka and Bamana;8 and one in Fulfulde – which, however, seems to be based on French translations and commentaries as much as on earlier, oral Fulfulde exegesis.9 Partial commentaries have been published in each of the above languages, as well as in Wolof,10 Soninke, Kanuri11 and Somali (Somalia);12 and partial or complete commentaries in Amharic (Ethiopia), Kikuyu (Kenya), Luganda (Uganda), Zulu Introduction 3 and Afrikaans (South Africa)13 – all spoken by groups among whom Islam is a recent and/or minority phenomenon. One commentary, printed in French in Guinea, seems to be at least partially based on Qur’an exegesis traditionally transmitted in Maninka.14 It may be expected that the number of tafsīr printed in African languages will continue to grow exponentially – in terms both of the languages on offer, and of commentaries per language. Unlike the older manuscript annotations, which glossed only certain grammatical categories, words, phrases, clauses/sentences or topics depending on the scribes’ points of interest, twentieth- and twenty-first-century printed commentaries are full-text, that is, they are continuous compositions.15 The degree of continuity, in terms of linguistic expression and content, between the older oral and manuscript commentaries and more recent, printed ones, is a major question, discussed in one of the contributions to the present volume (Dobronravin, with respect to Hausa; and by implication, van de Bruinhorst, with respect to Swahili). While manuscript glosses were naturally written in the Arabic alphabet (sometimes with the addition of modified characters, to show sounds not encountered in Arabic),16 nearly all recent printed works employ Latin characters, with the notable exception of those printed in nko (an alphabet initially devised for the Maninka of Guinea, but also employed for other West African languages).17 The Latin-based scripts often also include additional characters to indicate the distinctive sounds of different languages. Many African countries have created official Latin script-based orthographies for one or more of their languages (often with reference to the International Phonetic Alphabet). Since its inception in 1979, the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (ISESCO), a Rabat (Morocco) based subdivision of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, has been developing Arabic-derived scripts for writing the languages of sub-Saharan Africa and providing local training programmes. One of us was able to examine, in The Gambia in 2004, handwritten Mandenka renderings of the Qur’an and several other texts, produced some years earlier by an elderly rural scholar trained by ISESCO; he was hoping to reproduce them for general diffusion. The Qur’anic text is generally placed to the right, facing the commentary (in nko or Latin characters) printed to the left. Some of the Latin-script renderings may also be accompanied by a transliteration of the Qur’anic text, to assure that it is pronounced correctly. Although this volume focuses on exegeses in African languages, sub- Saharan scholars have also produced written (very exceptionally, oral) exegeses formulated in classical Arabic (al-ʿArabiyya; al-lugha al-fuṣḥā), and these, too, are considered below. Tafsīr, cited just once in the Qur’an (Q. 25:33), is the term (derived from the Arabic root f-s-r, to comment or explain; pl. tafāsīr) most usually employed in the Islamic world, since the late ninth century CE (third Hijri century) at least, to designate general, or sometimes more specifically exoteric, exegesis of the Qur’an. With 4 Journal of Qur’anic Studies African as with other Muslim scholars, it may cover topics such as: the historical circumstances of Revelation (asbāb al-nuzūl) and variant readings of the Qur’anic text; the historical context of various events and persons alluded to in the Qur’an (e.g., the pre-Islamic prophets and the peoples of antiquity; the Prophet’s life and actions, and the development of the early Muslim community); grammatical, semantic, etymological and rhetorical analysis of the Qur’anic text; and theological, legal and ethical interpretation. Taʾwīl, a term that occurs seventeen times in the Qur’an, most usually in the general sense of ‘interpretation’,18 has come to designate certain kinds of analogical, esoteric or mystical interpretations of the Qur’an. However, some authors treat the two terms as synonymous/analogous.19 Tarjamat al-maʿānī, literally ‘translation (or interpretation) of the meanings’, is the term generally
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