Muslim Mosaic
What seems monolithic at first glance, rarely remains so on closer viewing. So too the art, literature, and languages of the Islamic world reflect the diversity of the times and places in which they were produced. In explorations of manuscripts and mosques, paintings and plays, three researchers at Boston University—from the departments of anthropology, art history, and comparative literature, all of whom are associated faculty of the BU Institute for the Study of Muslim Societies & Civilizations—are offering new ways to see and understand Islamic cultures, from the 10th century through today
Found in Translation
Fallou Ngom hopes to build an Ajami center at BU—which already offers instruction in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and African languages—to teach the complex writing system to anthropologists, historians, and researchers.
Every year, estimates of sub-Saharan literacy rates by the United Nations invariably discourage Western-trained educators. In 2005, UNESCO put the literacy rate in Niger at 18.7 percent, Senegal at 42.1 percent, and Guinea at 41.1 percent. But curiously, rural villagers in these countries are untroubled by these numbers—they know that nearly all of their neighbors are pretty good readers, albeit of a language that happens not to be the official tongue, French. Instead, the people there use a centuries-old writing system that applies modified Arabic script to a phonetic rendering of their language, be it Hausa, Wolof, Pular, Swahili, Amharic, Tigrigna, or Berber.
This system, called Ajami and virtually unknown to Westerners, has been in continuous use in written communications across a swath of Islam-influenced African countries for nearly a millennium. It was initially created by Islamic teachers who wanted to disseminate their religion among subliterate populations in Africa and later became the chosen language of anticolonial nationalist resistance in the 20th century. Today, says Senegal native Fallou Ngom, an associate professor of anthropology and director of BU’s African Language Program, Ajami is a key that can unlock the African perspective on centuries of history, as well as literature, religion, and even medicine.
Translating Ajami texts and more importantly, equipping a rising generation of scholars with the skills to continue to do so in the future, are two goals that Ngom has set for the African Language Program, which is the first language program in the country to incorporate Ajami into its curriculum.
“This is a form of writing whose documents are as varied as all knowledge,” says Ngom. “There are poems that deal with religion and try to teach us how to be a good person. And there are poems that are more secular, like thoughts about a beautiful woman. You have historical documents, and [fictional] tales and stories, and even texts on pharmacopoeia—what to do if you are bitten by a snake or how to heal children with a speech disorder or stomachache. The amazing thing is, we don’t even know what’s in most of these texts, because they have never been translated.”
Take the history of Timbuktu, for example. Everything that’s known about the Malian city is written in Arabic—or so it was thought until 1999, when a cache of Ajami documents dating from the 10th through the 16th centuries surfaced in a private library in the great desert city. Altogether the documents total more than 500 pages, and may contain vast amounts of information about daily life in Timbuktu that elite writers of Arabic would have considered too quotidian or unimportant to record. But a dearth of scholars able to read Ajami means that a decade later, only a handful of these documents have been translated into more accessible languages.
Because Ajami requires the reader to know, at a minimum, both Arabic script and the spoken language of a particular African culture, it can be difficult and time-consuming to learn. Moreover, the tides of history have not worked in Ajami’s favor: the two cultures that dominated sub-Saharan Africa for centuries—Arab and European—were convinced that whatever African wisdom was preserved in the hybrid writing system could not possibly have any value.
“When the Europeans arrived,” Ngom says, “recognizing the existence of an African intellectual history was tantamount to purposefully undermining the agenda of the colonial administration. The African had to be portrayed as intellectually challenged, with a history that began with the arrival of Europeans.”
“This is a form of writing whose documents are as varied as all knowledge. The amazing thing is, most of these texts have never been translated.”
But in fact, Ngom counters, Ajami has done more than fix a record of African cultures—it also helped to shape them. While Ajami did help to spread Islam in Africa, as its creators intended, it also contributed to the emergence of regional variants of Islam in a number of sub-Saharan countries. These Africanized forms of Islam incorporated elements of indigenous animist religions while ignoring strictures that were culturally incompatible, such as those requiring women to hide their faces and those forbidding physical contact between unmarried men and women.
“They interpreted the Koran in a way that would fit their social context,” he says. “Things like wearing a veil were not even part of the discussion.”
In anticolonial movements of the 20th century, the tool created to spread the word of Allah was put to new purpose—and one even further from its original aims—when it was used to spread the word of resistance and self-reliance.
“In Senegal,” says Ngom, “Ajami was used to disseminate among the Murids the teachings that the people could make it by themselves, that they didn’t need the French and they didn’t need the Arabs.”
A poem written in Ajami at the end of World War II by the popular Fulani writer Cerno Abdourahmane Bah, rues the African peoples’ history of mistreatment:
None of us was consulted about what we had to do.
They have been led as animals, exploited to satisfy every need,
going up and down,
without knowing the reason why!
…
Among all nations, so numerous in the world, we were chosen:
We are the black people, to work hard, and to supply contributions
That cannot be known.
Sixty years later, Ngom finds himself in a position to help the Western world finally come to know the contributions of the colonized people. Language instruction in both Latin-based script and Ajami script in Wolof, Fuuta Jalon Pular, and Hausa is now up and running, and, in the next several years, he would like to see the program expand into an Ajami-focused teaching center that would link anthropologists, historians, literary scholars, and medical experts to bring long-buried knowledge once again to light.
Jennifer Yanco, a lecturer at the African Studies Center and the U.S. director of the West African Research Association, a nonprofit consortium of more than forty universities housed at BU, believes that Ngom’s effort could encourage an important correction of the historical record. “In the popular mind, Africa is often thought of as largely illiterate,” she says. “But Ajami documents attest to a significant history of literacy there, dating back to well before European colonialism. They document history from the point of view of the people who lived it. They are valuable parts of the human heritage.”
Hamlet of Arabia
Margaret Litvin
In the Arab world, Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy is often translated as “Shall we be or not be?” This linguistic nudge, which occurs because Arabic lacks the infinitive, is telling, says Margaret Litvin, an assistant professor of Arabic and comparative literature who is now at work on a book about the diverse ways Arab writers have appropriated Shakespeare’s play. The switch to “we,” says Litvin, reveals the degree to which Arab cultural commentators see the character, and Hamlet itself, as a potent way to talk about “an existential threat to a valued collective identity.” Hamlet’s dilemma mirrors a dilemma facing the Arab world as a whole: “to exist or dissolve, to awaken politically or to slumber while history passes by.”
Looking at performances, adaptations, and citations of the play in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and elsewhere, Litvin argues that Hamlet speaks to the region primarily as “a play about power, justice, and what to do when you’re in the middle of a political conspiracy. Your uncle has stolen the election and defrauded you of the crown, you’re surrounded by villains and spies, there’s a reign of terror, and the king cuts off the heads of everyone he dislikes.”
“That’s all there in Shakespeare, but it’s a dimension of the play that’s been lost to many Western interpreters,” she says, who are more likely to focus on Hamlet’s “inwardness and doubt” than on his role as a political player in a time of crisis.
This particularly Arab take on Hamlet developed as a reaction to political changes, says Litvin, whose scholarly interests include political philosophy as well as literature and who is also studying Cold War–era cultural ties between the Soviet Union and Arab countries for a separate research project.
“The sixties were the high point of Arab nationalism,” she says. “Before the 1967 war, Egypt aspired to be a world power. There was a real feeling that Arab countries could achieve both social justice at home and dignity abroad, and the theater community was eager to help.” Staging performances of Hamlet and other classic dramas was proof that Gamal Abdel Nasser’s progressive government had brought Egypt and the Arab world up to par with the West.
“That period of hope and confidence got utterly smashed by the 1967 war and the resounding defeat by Israel,” Litvin continues. The mood changed to one of anger and defiance, and the theater of the period was marked by “bitter calls to arms directly to the people, bypassing the governments.” In this era, she says, “Hamlet was a revolutionary, a righter of wrongs, and the ‘to be or not to be’ hesitator was way downplayed.”
Toward the late seventies, dramatic defiance was largely replaced by cynicism and parody, as a series of autocratic governments failed to make good on Nasserism’s promise. In recent years, Litvin says, Hamlet adaptations are “about his inefficacy, his absorption in words that no one will hear or heed. It becomes a kind of lament for the death of Arab nationalism and the days when the Arab world at least had ideals to aspire to.”
A popular adaptation reflecting changing Arab attitudes is Forget Hamlet, first produced in Cairo in 1994 by Jawad al-Asadi, an Iraqi living in exile in Jordan. “The first thing he does is take out any shred of suspense. You know exactly who’s committed the murder, Ophelia has seen the murder, and there’s no shortage of evidence,” Litvin says. “But you can’t prosecute the crime because there’s no judge and no jury. Claudius is in complete control, running the guillotine day and night. He becomes kind of a Saddam Hussein figure. “Even the subversive characters in the play, the gravediggers, end up shoring up his power, by joking about it,” she adds. “It’s a play about why the sword is mightier than the pen, and it’s very persuasive.”
Islam’s Visual Kaleidoscope
Emine Fetvacı
“There are multiplicities in the Islamic world,” says Emine Fetvacı, an assistant professor of art history who specializes in Islamic visual arts and architecture. “Islam is not homogeneous. Persian is not the same as Arab is not the same as Turk is not the same as Indian is not the same as Pakistani—even among themselves, these people are so diverse and different from one another. I tell my students to remember that we’re dealing with human civilization and its richness.”
In the classroom, Fetvacı draws on her current research in Asian and Middle Eastern countries to illustrate “the diversity and the colors of the Islamic world,” by inviting students to compare, for example, the late 14th- and early 15th-century architecture of Timurid Iran and Central Asia, where mosques and imperial tombs were decorated with geometric designs crafted from blue-and-white tiles, to Egyptian architecture of the same period, whose structures were made completely of stone and embellished with carved inscriptions.
Books, like buildings, show the divergent aesthetics of Islam at any given time. In the 16th century, Ottomans in what is now Turkey had a penchant for illustrated books on historical subjects—a genre Fetvacı has researched extensively, beginning in graduate school—while the contemporary Safavid Empire in Persia preferred luxuriously bound and crafted books about mythological kings and heroes, and epic love stories.
In 2008, Fetvacı was one of three researchers at BU to be awarded a three-year, $50,000 Peter Paul Career Development professorship, designed to help promising junior faculty expand and enhance their research programs. Fetvacı used the award to travel to India, Syria, Turkey, and other countries to examine and photograph historically significant art and architecture. Highlights of her research trip included the tomb of the emperor Akbar in Sikandra, India, and Delhi’s Qutb Minar, a tower begun in 1199 AD as a testimonial to the strength of Islam and which, at 238 feet, is the tallest brick minaret in the world.
Now Fetvacı has trained her camera, and again her scholarly attentions, on Ottoman manuscripts dating to the 1500s, the height of the Ottoman Empire. During that era, she says, political chicanery and public relations posturing by high-ranking members of the Ottoman court contributed to published and subsequently accepted revisionist history.
“I’m working on a monograph about identity formation during this period, how books played into it and how art helped the process along,” she says. “I’m studying the ways that we think about the past and how certain things have come to be accepted as fact as a result of campaigning and writing.” Books were a means of shaping identity, and the high-level government officials and courtiers who financed their production typically expected a starring role in exchange for their patronage. “One person appears to be very important to a battle described in one book because it’s written by a historian he’s paying; another book shows someone else as the hero of the same conflict because the author is his protégé. I have to read between the lines.”
Fetvacı plans further travel to Islamic countries, as well as to Spain and Italy, and also hopes to visit the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, which houses a valuable collection of Persian manuscripts relating to Islamic art. The Peter Paul award will help her purchase digital images of manuscripts for more detailed study in Boston, and she will use the photos she’s taken of Islamic art during her travels as learning tools in the classroom.
“I find it really important in teaching to show students that when we talk about the Islamic world, we’re talking about a lot of cultural diversity,” says Fetvacı. “The negative images of the Islamic world one often finds in the media do not do justice to the rich history and traditions of the Islamic world.”
The divergent aesthetics of Islamic art and architecture can be seen in two very different tributes to Muslim rulers: the tomb of Ghiyath al-Din Tughluq (d. 1325), founder of the Tughluq dynasty in India, above left, and a portrait of Ottoman Sultan Selim II (1524-1574).
Photo of tomb courtesy of Emine Fetvacı
Image of Sultan Selim II from Getty Images