Great article as always Isaac. A few thoughts to consider on Swahili Ajami. It might be hard to trace the age and depth of written work due to the numerous Portuguese invasions and subsequent destruction that occurred between the 1500s and 1600s. I suspect we lost important documents and artifacts during these invasions, especially considering majority of the destruction happened at the two most prominent Swahili Cities at the time (Mombasa and Kilwa). In that case it makes sense to say "oldest surviving" or "oldest known" when referencing such documents. Additionally, I am not sure what language The Mombasa Chronicle is written in (should be Arabic or Ajami)...currently working on accessing it at SOAS and have personally never seen it, but that dates back to the 1300s. Might you have more information on this?
True. These dates are only for the oldest surviving manuscripts we have, rather than the beginnings of the ajami tradition itself. The emphasis is necessary for those who need "hard evidence" for the beginnings of vernacular writing on manuscripts (rather than, say, stone inscriptions for which we have plenty). It's possible that the nature of manuscript production in most of Muslim Africa, which wasn't associated with institutions but private collections of individual scholars or families, means that a lot of ancient writings have been lost (not forgetting the effects of the humid climate on fragile paper manuscripts).
On the Mombasa chronicle, Jack D. Rollins's 'A History of Swahili Prose' suggests that it was probably composed between the 17th and 19th centuries. It's possible that chronicle writing wasn't the earliest genre of Swahili writing, but something that may have emerged relatively late in the context of the struggles with the Portuguese (i cover this briefly for the Kilwa chronicle https://www.africanhistoryextra.com/p/persian-myths-and-realities-on-the#footnote-anchor-28 ) and later, against the Mazrui (see: the Pate chronicle https://www.jstor.org/stable/3171975 ). The older Swahili texts (besides the 600-year-old Quran from Lamu) most likely consisted of works of theology and genealogy (a precursor to the chronicles).
Hm, this is interesting. I've looked into this a little more. Majority of the academic resources I have seen so far actually date the original chronicle to the 14th century which would make sense because it details inidigenous Swahili rule before the Omani Arabs. Omanis were well established by the 17th century and if a chronicle had been written at that time, then it would have told a very different story because Omanis are notorious for rewriting the history of the Swahili Coast. I believe there was an update sometime in the 18th or 19th century that was added to the original manuscript. Anyway, I look forward to seeing that manuscript with my own eyes one day. :)
Really interesting piece. Does the ajami tradition not make the stronger argument here? The Timbuktu manuscripts are written in Arabic by a scholarly elite, so won't pointing to them keep the dependency story intact? I mean Ajami is different because it shows ordinary people writing in languages they actually spoke, spread beyond scholars precisely because the Sufi brotherhoods needed to reach mass audiences.
Yes, this essay is about vernacular writing after all; that's why I tried to list all the oldest known manuscripts of complete Ajami texts. ie; Harari, Berber, Malagasy, Fulfulde, Hausa, and Swahili documents.
It's not really about the script/writing system itself (which in both cases is still the Arabic script); it's about the language contained in the documents. The Timbuktu manuscripts contain both Arabic and Ajami texts.
That makes sense actually. Though the problem is less what's in the manuscripts and more which ones people actually reach for. When Timbuktu gets cited in an argument, it's rarely the ajami texts doing the work.
That's the challenge. I think it's because philologists are more familiar with classical Arabic than with old African languages. For example, just one specialist (Dmitry Bondarev) who is familiar with an African language (Old Kanembu) made an astonishing discovery that the ajami glosses in Old Kanembu were written in a dead language (like Ge'ez and Latin). Old Kanembu was apparently only spoken in the older Kanem empire of the late Middle Ages. Its remarkable survival as a scribal language in Bornu suggests that there was an entire intellectual tradition during the pre-1400 period of Kanem that we know nothing about.
It really is a tragedy. Feels like so many intellectual worlds are just sitting there, erased simply because the right eyes haven't learned how to read them yet. I wonder how many other chapters of our history will stay undiscovered.
Great article as always Isaac. A few thoughts to consider on Swahili Ajami. It might be hard to trace the age and depth of written work due to the numerous Portuguese invasions and subsequent destruction that occurred between the 1500s and 1600s. I suspect we lost important documents and artifacts during these invasions, especially considering majority of the destruction happened at the two most prominent Swahili Cities at the time (Mombasa and Kilwa). In that case it makes sense to say "oldest surviving" or "oldest known" when referencing such documents. Additionally, I am not sure what language The Mombasa Chronicle is written in (should be Arabic or Ajami)...currently working on accessing it at SOAS and have personally never seen it, but that dates back to the 1300s. Might you have more information on this?
True. These dates are only for the oldest surviving manuscripts we have, rather than the beginnings of the ajami tradition itself. The emphasis is necessary for those who need "hard evidence" for the beginnings of vernacular writing on manuscripts (rather than, say, stone inscriptions for which we have plenty). It's possible that the nature of manuscript production in most of Muslim Africa, which wasn't associated with institutions but private collections of individual scholars or families, means that a lot of ancient writings have been lost (not forgetting the effects of the humid climate on fragile paper manuscripts).
On the Mombasa chronicle, Jack D. Rollins's 'A History of Swahili Prose' suggests that it was probably composed between the 17th and 19th centuries. It's possible that chronicle writing wasn't the earliest genre of Swahili writing, but something that may have emerged relatively late in the context of the struggles with the Portuguese (i cover this briefly for the Kilwa chronicle https://www.africanhistoryextra.com/p/persian-myths-and-realities-on-the#footnote-anchor-28 ) and later, against the Mazrui (see: the Pate chronicle https://www.jstor.org/stable/3171975 ). The older Swahili texts (besides the 600-year-old Quran from Lamu) most likely consisted of works of theology and genealogy (a precursor to the chronicles).
Hm, this is interesting. I've looked into this a little more. Majority of the academic resources I have seen so far actually date the original chronicle to the 14th century which would make sense because it details inidigenous Swahili rule before the Omani Arabs. Omanis were well established by the 17th century and if a chronicle had been written at that time, then it would have told a very different story because Omanis are notorious for rewriting the history of the Swahili Coast. I believe there was an update sometime in the 18th or 19th century that was added to the original manuscript. Anyway, I look forward to seeing that manuscript with my own eyes one day. :)
Really interesting piece. Does the ajami tradition not make the stronger argument here? The Timbuktu manuscripts are written in Arabic by a scholarly elite, so won't pointing to them keep the dependency story intact? I mean Ajami is different because it shows ordinary people writing in languages they actually spoke, spread beyond scholars precisely because the Sufi brotherhoods needed to reach mass audiences.
Yes, this essay is about vernacular writing after all; that's why I tried to list all the oldest known manuscripts of complete Ajami texts. ie; Harari, Berber, Malagasy, Fulfulde, Hausa, and Swahili documents.
It's not really about the script/writing system itself (which in both cases is still the Arabic script); it's about the language contained in the documents. The Timbuktu manuscripts contain both Arabic and Ajami texts.
That makes sense actually. Though the problem is less what's in the manuscripts and more which ones people actually reach for. When Timbuktu gets cited in an argument, it's rarely the ajami texts doing the work.
True.
That's the challenge. I think it's because philologists are more familiar with classical Arabic than with old African languages. For example, just one specialist (Dmitry Bondarev) who is familiar with an African language (Old Kanembu) made an astonishing discovery that the ajami glosses in Old Kanembu were written in a dead language (like Ge'ez and Latin). Old Kanembu was apparently only spoken in the older Kanem empire of the late Middle Ages. Its remarkable survival as a scribal language in Bornu suggests that there was an entire intellectual tradition during the pre-1400 period of Kanem that we know nothing about.
It really is a tragedy. Feels like so many intellectual worlds are just sitting there, erased simply because the right eyes haven't learned how to read them yet. I wonder how many other chapters of our history will stay undiscovered.