SOAS awarded funding for new humanities project
Dr Dmitry Bondarev, Ahmad Achtar, Professor Philip Jaggar & Dr Abba Tijani
24 February 2009
The School has been awarded £381,730 as part of a joint framework of agreement between the (German) Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the AHRC to fund collaboration between German- and UK-based humanities researchers.
The project, "A Study of Old Kanembu in Early West African Qur'anic Manuscripts and Islamic Recitations," has developed out of an earlier AHRC-funded project (£277,461, 2005-08), and the two awards together total £660,000. Other SOAS-based members of Philip Jaggar's research team are Dr Dmitry Bondarev (researcher) and Dr Abba Isa Tijani (project assistant). The German element involves Professor Roland Kiessling (main applicant), Professor Michael Friedrich, and Dr Doris Löhr (all based at the Asien-Afrika Institüt, Hamburg University).
By way of background to the project, a number of major languages of sub-Saharan Africa have a long and rich history of writing in Arabic script (Ajami). Possibly the oldest known Ajami manuscripts date back more than 300 years and are found in commentaries on the Qur'an, written in a pre-modern variety of Kanuri known as "Old Kanembu".
In 2005, during the course of a field trip to the Kanuri-speaking area of northeastern Nigeria, Dmitry Bondarev and Abba Tijani discovered a previously undocumented sacred language—Tarjumo (< Arabic tarjama 'translate, interpret')—used by Borno Muslim scholars to deliver religious recitations and commentaries mainly on religious texts in Arabic, especially the Qur'an. Tarjumo, together with the manuscripts, represents "Old Kanembu", and the fact that it is unintelligible to speakers of modern Kanuri attests to its antiquity—it is at least 600 years old on linguistic and historical evidence. With the significant discovery of this diglossic Tarjumo corpus, scholars are now in the position to extract and understand much more of the linguistic evolution of Kanuri.
