Bass Connections: Learning From the Middle East Presents: Beyond African Orality: Sufi Poetry and Ethics-centered Islam

Join us in-person (Bryan Center 005) or via Zoom (meeting ID: 974 1884 5784)!

Professor Fallou Ngom is an expert in Africa's intellectual histories, concentrating on the interplay between African and non-African languages, the adaptation of Islam across the continent, and Ajami literatures-African languages rendered in Arabic script. His recent research delves into Islam and grassroots literacy movements in Africa, alongside sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology.

He has been awarded prestigious fellowships, including Fulbright, ACLS, and Guggenheim, with additional support from the British Library Endangered Archives Programme and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Professor Ngom's work appears in esteemed journals such as African Studies Review, Islamic Africa, and the International Journal of the Sociology of Language. His book, Muslims beyond the Arab World: The Odyssey of ʿAjamī and the Murīdiyya (Oxford University Press, 2016), received the 2017 Melville J. Herskovits Prize for best book in African studies. His forthcoming publication, Beyond African Orality (OUP), examines the ʿAjamī poetry of the Muridiyya, a Sufi order based in Senegal, West Africa.