Contact:
Faculty of Languages & Cultures SOAS
University of London
London
WC1H 0XG
England

Professor Philip J. Jaggar
Tel: 44 (0)20 7898 4387 (direct)
44 (0)20 7898 4096 (faculty office)
Fax: 44 (0)20 7898 4679
Email: pj@soas.ac.uk

Dr Dmitry Bondarev
tel: 44 (0)20 7898 4383 (direct)
44 (0)20 7898 4096 (faculty office)
fax: 44 (0)20 7898 4679

Email: db5@soas.ac.uk



A brief description of the project

In the late 1960s some copies of the Koran were discovered in northern Nigeria, written in Arabic with commentaries in Kanuri, and dating back to the 17th/18th centuries. These detailed and comprehensive manuscripts represent a rich and unique corpus of written evidence for Kanuri as spoken over three hundred years ago, and a rigorous scholarly examination is long overdue. The documents also provide a valuable historical insight into the key role of local Kanuri scholars in the development of Islamic (sub-Saharan) scholarship. A team of specialists plan to examine, catalogue and publish them.

The project covers a 3-year period (2005-2008) and has the following objectives: a palaeographic study of the manuscripts; a linguistic analysis of the Kanuri glosses; expanding the existing corpus by means of research visits to northern Nigerian libraries, archives, and private collections; digitization and systematization of existing manuscripts for analysis and long-term preservation; indexation and analysis of the digitized manuscripts and transcription of the Kanuri glosses and Arabic commentaries by means of structured storage in a database; creation and deployment of a web service application to access the database content for viewing, searching, and data analysis of text and graphics. The team of the specialists involved into the project is: Pofessor Philip J. Jaggar (coordinating and linguistic analysis), Professor A. D. H. Bivar (palaeography), Ms Rosemary Seton (archiving), Dr Dmitry Bondarev (linguistics and palaeography), Mr Abba Isa Tijani (project assistant, Kanuri dialects), Mr Daniel Vazquez-Paluch (Arabic/Quranic studies).

Research questions

The key research questions to be confronted fall into a number of fields.

The Ajami script represented in the early Nigerian Koranic manuscripts differs from known later styles of Kanuri/Kanembu Arabic writing. The palaeographic study of this script is important for linguistic purposes as it will permit access to an earlier form of Kanuri/Kanembu and we may be able to identify some of the changes which have taken place in the structure of the language over the last three hundred or so years.

A major linguistic question relates to the lexicon and morphology. Many words cannot be interpreted at this early stage; some recognizable words contain unknown structural elements. The study of these forms may provide answers to some important questions such as: did old Kanuri have a vowel length distinction?; what were morphosyntactic functions of the archaic postpositive markers?; what is the identity of the verbal derivations?; is it possible to specify the Kanuri dialect used in the glosses?

Another set of questions relates to the rich Arabic commentaries represented in the Manuscripts. We intend to: identify what kind of tafsîrs were used by the Bornu scribes; elucidate the exact significance of the endorsements in the margins; examine whether there is a correlation between the Kanuri glosses and Arabic commentaries.

Research context

Although Kanuri was one of the first sub-Saharan languages to be documented, written sources prior to the early 19th century were generally recognized to be limited to a short 17th century word-list recorded by a French traveller to the Bornu area and discovered in a Paris archive (Lange 1972: 278), and an even shorter 17th century record of Kanuri words and phrases found in the works of the renowned Turkish traveller Evliya Çelebi (Habraszewski 1967)..

In 1959, however, Professor A. D. H. Bivar, on a visit to northern Nigeria, discovered some copies of the Koran with the glosses in a Kanuri dialect and commentaries (tafsîr) in Arabic, dating back to the 17th/18th centuries (Bivar 1960). These manuscripts represent a rich and unique corpus of written evidence for the Kanuri/Kanembu language as spoken over three hundred years ago. The materials also provide a valuable historical insight into the key role of Kanuri/Kanembu scholars in the early development of Islamic scholarship and religious traditions in the Kanem-Borno empire, historically one of the most extensive and powerful Islamic states in west Africa.

Despite their scientific significance, historians and linguists have been largely unaware of the quantity and content of these documents, and so they have never been analyzed in any depth. In 2003, however, thanks to the generosity of Professor Bivar, Dr Dmitry Bondarev has been able to access and examine them in photocopied form in the Special Collections section at the School of Oriental and African Studies. At present, Bivar’s collection is deposited in the Special Collections Department of SOAS library, under the inventory number MS. 380808. The SOAS corpus contains copies of three different manuscripts, two of which comprise more than 100 pages each in microfilm form; the third has only 4 pages. There is also an additional Koranic manuscript with Kanuri glosses, deposited in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris (Catalogue number: N334 Arabe 402). It was first described by F. Déroche as Arabic and possibly ‘African’, then identified by N. Dobronravin as Arabic and ‘Saharan’ (Kanuri?), and subsequently analyzed in more detail by D. Bondarev. We plan to carry out a comparative study of the entire collection, including this under-researched document.

The research output will be relevant to a variety of disciplines, including: linguistics, palaeography, the history of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa, Koranic studies, in addition to more general computer applications in the humanities. The output will be of great value for the general African community shedding light on the obscure pages of African languages and history.

(References: Bivar, A. D. H. 1960. “A dated Kuran from Bornu”, Nigeria Magazine 65:199-205; François Déroche. 1985. Les manuscrits du Coran. Du Maghreb à l’Insulinde, p. 48, Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale; Habraszewski, Tomasz 1967. ‘Kanuri – language and people – in the ‘Travel book’ (Siyahetname) of Evliya Çelebi’, Africana Bulletin, 6, 1967, 59-66; Lange, Dierk. 1972. “Mots en langue Barnaony”, p. 311, Bibliothèque Nationale, nouvelles acquisitions.)


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