Ngom Wins ASA Melville J. Herskovits Prize
Fallou Ngom, Director of the African Studies Center at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies and Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Boston University, was recently awarded the prestigious Melville J. Herskovits Prize for the most important scholarly work in African Studies for his book Muslims beyond the Arab World: The Odyssey of Ajami and the Muridiyya (Oxford University Press, 2016).
The African Studies Association (ASA) presents the Herskovits Prize to the author of the most important scholarly work in African studies published in English during the preceding year. Tge annual prize is named in honor of Melville J. Herskovits, one of the ASA’s founders. The winner of the Herskovits Prize is announced each year at the ASA Annual Meeting, where he or she also receives an honorarium.
In Muslims beyond the Arab World: The Odyssey of Ajami and the Muridiyya, Ngom deals with the vibrant tradition of writing African languages with the Arabic script called ʿAjamī and the rise of the Murīdiyya Ṣūfī order of Senegal, West Africa founded by Shaykh Ahmadu Bamba Mbakke (1853–1927). The book demonstrates that the development of the ʿAjamī literary tradition and the flourishing of the Murīdiyya as one of sub-Saharan Africa’s most powerful and dynamic Ṣūfī organizations are entwined. It offers a close reading of the rich hagiographic and didactic written, recited, and chanted ʿAjamī texts of the Murīdiyya, works largely unknown to scholars.
Dr. Fallou Ngom’s current research interests include the interactions between African languages and non-African languages, the Africanization of Islam, and Ajami literatures—records of West African languages written in Arabic script. He hopes to help train the first generation of American scholars to have direct access into the wealth of knowledge still buried in West African Ajami literatures, and the historical, cultural, and religious heritage that has found expression in this manner.