Murid Identity and Wolof Ajami Literature in Senegal

Ajami ¹ has a long history in West Africa in general. From the tenth century onward, Islam has been the principal faith in many areas of Africa. Arabic accompanied the Islamic faith, and over the past millennium many West African Muslims have written works in Arabic: theology, law, history, poetry and official documents of all kinds. ² The Arabic script was also adopted by the speakers of some African languages in order to write their own languages, and hence, Arabic became “the Latin of Africa,” used in the same way Latin had been used as a literary language in Europe in medieval times and its literature adopted for writing European languages. ³ In West Africa, Kanuri, a language spoken just north of Lake Chad, was one of the first to be written in the Arabic script; then Fulfulde; and later Hausa, Wolof and Yoruba. ⁴ Evidence suggests that most of these Ajami literatures sprung up some three hundred years ago and that the Touareg of the Sahara and Sahel developed an Ajami system for writing their language some five hundred years ago. The recent discovery in Niger of a five-hundred-folio Tamasheq Ajami manuscript dating from the sixteenth century may be one of the most significant of the past decade. ⁵