The 230-year-old copy of the Jawāhir al-Maʿānī (Jewels of Meanings) is showing its age: the red-and-black ink is fading in places; some pages are dotted with water spots, others torn along their edges. The delicate book—this edition bound in an animal hide cover—is considered a vital piece of African Islamic history.

After years hidden in a private collection in the Guinean village of Bambeto, the Jewels of Meanings has been digitally preserved for future generations and made available for all to see, wherever they are in the world, thanks to a Boston University–led project. 

BU researchers helped digitize the book—and more than 52,000 pages of other historic West African documents—with support from the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme. They spent two years sourcing and photographing original manuscripts, working with local experts and facilitators to track down rare—and often fragile—documents.

Among the materials they’ve saved for posterity are poems, prayers, regional and family histories, essays on religion, medical guides, financial records, and a 400-year-old copy of the Quran. The Jewels of Meanings is a biography of the founder of the Sufi Tijaniyyah order, Shaykh Aḥmad al-Tijānī; the order has tens of millions of adherents, mainly in North and West Africa. Like most of the other documents the BU team digitized, the original manuscript will stay with its owner, prominent Islamic scholar and educator Elhadji Algassimou Diallo, whose family have held it for four generations.

Some of the texts were penned in classical Arabic, but many are in Ajami, a modified Arabic script used to write in a range of African languages—in this case, Fuuta Jalon Fula. (Jewels of Meanings contains both Arabic and Ajami text.) The BU team of anthropologists and linguists was drawn from the University’s long-running National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Ajami Project, an effort to expand access to primary sources written in the often overlooked, but widely used, writing system; that broader work was recently celebrated in a special double issue of Islamic Africa.

The newly preserved documents largely originate from what is now the Republic of Guinea. For nearly 200 years, the Guinean highlands of West Africa were home to a theocratic Islamic state, the Imamate of Fuuta Jalon. Founded in the 1720s, it hit its lavish peak in the 19th century, before crumbling under French rule in the early 20th century. For a time, it was a commanding power in West Africa—and a hub for scholars and poets.

The researchers are confident the quantity and diversity of the digitized materials will give scholars an unprecedented insight into this important slice of African and Islamic history.

“We hope they add to a growing body of scholarly analysis of Ajami,” says Daivi Rodima-Taylor, a BU Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies lecturer and NEH Ajami Project manager. “This project is a major step forward in our efforts to explore the historical and comparative dimensions of Ajami—and to advance novel digital humanities approaches to preserve and study important texts.”

The complete Fuuta Jalon archive is the largest digital collection of its kind in the world, according to the BU team, and the first collection to make many of the documents publicly available.

“[The documents] capture the voices of scholars and common people on religious and nonreligious subjects over centuries; their significance cannot be overemphasized,” says Fallou Ngom, a BU College of Arts & Sciences professor of anthropology who led the project. “They are invaluable for scholars, researchers, educators, students, and the general public.”

In the more than 100 years since the imamate was dissolved, much of the written work generated by its leading thinkers—and its everyday citizens—was locked away in private libraries and collections. And that wealth of knowledge faced a perilous future, according to Ngom, who’s affiliated with the BU African Studies Center. He says many documents are decomposing, while others have been assaulted not just by time, but also by water, fire, and termites.

Having photographed the materials before it’s too late, Ngom and his team are now working with BU Libraries’ Digital Ventures program to put them on an open-access website to expand their reach. They’ve also taken steps to ensure other brittle West African manuscripts aren’t lost forever, training researchers in Guinea and neighboring Senegal—which also had a large Fuuta Jalon community—on digital archiving and preservation.

At the end of the digitization part of the project last year, the team donated the cameras and other equipment it used to the Musée du Fouta Djallon in Labé, Guinea, and the West African Research Center in Dakar, Senegal. Ngom, who was born and raised in Senegal, says the inclusion of Guinean and Senegalese teams throughout the whole project was essential—as is leaving a legacy for them to continue the work.

“We worked with respected local organizations, and our overseas team included members of local communities,” he says. “These people were chosen based on the respect and trust they enjoyed in their communities. They facilitated our access to manuscripts. Without them, we would not have been successful.”

This work was supported by a British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme area grant, which receives funding from charitable foundation Arcadia. Mouhamadou Lamine Diallo, a Pardee Wolof language lecturer and NEH Ajami Project language team consultant, was the project’s general coordinator.