Islamic manuscripts in Africa
Arabic manuscripts played an important role in recording the history of Arab-African relations and the history of Islam in Africa, as well as recording the arrival of preachers to previously unknown regions, and dated to previously unknown countries, as they are a natural product of Arab-African cross-pollination, written by Arabs and Africans, strengthening ties and laying the foundations for an Arab-Islamic civilization in sub-Saharan Africa.
The spread of Islam in Africa
Caravans of merchants and migrating tribes began to spread Islam throughout Central Africa. Traders between Arabia and East Africa also brought Islam to the east of the continent. However, due to the presence of mountains in the East, Islam did not penetrate much because of the difficulty of traders reaching it, unlike the West African region with flat plains, in which the Islamic call flourished; Islam crossed the Sahara Desert and reached the tropical forests on the west coast of the continent.
Also, the efforts of some African reformers, such as Abdullah Al-zilai, Ahmed Al-Qurain, and others from East Africa, and Abdullah bin Yassin, Othman bin Fodi, Omar al-Foti, Ahmadu Sheikho, Ahmadu samadu and Ahmadu Bello in West Africa, contributed to the stability and prosperity of Islam, until several large Islamic kingdoms appeared in Africa.
The majority of cultural production in this vast region is attributed to Arab imams and sheikhs from North Africa, who frequently spread "Arab Islam," and later, indigenous people began to write their languages, particularly in several communities in West Africa, as the sheikhs of the North were bypassed and began to appear among them.
East African manuscripts
The heritage of Islamic manuscripts in East Africa is rich, diverse, and spread throughout the entire Swahili cultural region, including Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, and Comoros.
Despite this, East Africa's manuscript heritage continues to receive less academic attention than West Africa's. One of the reasons for this is that the manuscript collections that still exist today in East Africa are fewer in number and significantly more modern than those in its west; they date back to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Furthermore, many collections are still in the hands of their original owners, whether families or mosques.
The agamic line
The Ajami script is a set of Arabic spelling letters and movements that has been used as a writing system for several African languages since the 17th century AD, including Malagasy, Swahili, and Hausa. According to Ludwig Monti, there are 7 thousand of pages of manuscripts written in Malagasy with Arabic characters in a Norwegian academic library, and the Swahili language is attributed to the east coast of Africa, as there was an early African-Arab cultural intermarriage that helped spread that language in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Somalia, Comoros, and other African countries.
One of the manuscripts written in the Arabic-Swahili script is the poem "Exposure," in Arabic "الانكشاف", which is one of the oldest texts of the established Swahili language, written by Abdullah bin Nasser (1720–1820), a native of the island of Bati on the Kenyan coast, the poem includes 79 verses according to the Arabic poetry system (quatrains). It is written in the Arabic script in the Lamu and Mombasa dialects.
As Monti sees it, the approach to the heritage of these languages written in "Ajami", referring to its alienation from the mainstream, confirms its exposure at the moment to intentional exile, despite its prevalence in the West, East and South of the African continent, simply because it is written in Arabic script.
Timbuktu manuscripts
Timbuktu Manuscripts (Tombouctou Manuscripts) is a blanket term for the large number of historically significant manuscripts that have been preserved for centuries in private households in Timbuktu, a city in northern Mali.
Today, More than 100,000 manuscripts attest to that period, when Timbuktu was a center of Islamic sciences. These manuscripts were written in Arabic, which was then the language of the elite in West Africa, and dealt with topics such as Islamic law, philosophy, medicine, astronomy, and mathematics. One of the families' possession is one of the oldest manuscripts, a thirteenth-century Qur'an written on deer skin.
Some of these manuscripts came from Andalusia, others from North Africa and the Middle East, and still others were written in Timbuktu by African writers. African languages were also written in Arabic letters for diplomatic correspondence and contract negotiations.
