Within 30 minutes last week, Prof. John Hunwick received two phone calls from CBS requesting interviews and one call from a museum curator hoping to display Hunwick’s discoveries, which are re-writing the Western perception of Africa.
Hunwick, who recently received a $1 million grant to establish an international forum for his research, does not look like a celebrity. With his thinning white hair and tweed suit, Hunwick just looks like a professor, but he has taken a break from teaching to change centuries-old stereotypes about Africa.
Seated in his office cluttered with thick textbooks and volumes of his own manuscript translations, the Northwestern history and religion professor peered out from behind wire-rim spectacles. Speaking about his work, he chose his words slowly and with precision.
For generations, scholars have disregarded ancient Africa as illiterate and lacking historical records. But Hunwick’s evidence suggests otherwise, and he’s determined to remedy misconceptions of African civilization.
“Africa’s was a culture of thought, not just song and dance,” he said. “There is a rich tradition of learning and teaching, and it goes back many centuries.”
Arabic has been the language of Africa since Islam first reached the continent in 1400, but Hunwick was one of the first scholars to suggest that the use of Arabic language in writing and speaking was not limited to highly educated Africans.
“Every good Muslim would study (the Quran) and try to memorize it and understand it well,” Hunwick explained. “From there it’s a small jump to people discovering that once they understand the language, they can communicate with it.”
Hunwick has taught NU classes on African history and Islam since he joined the faculty in 1981, but he said investigating the impact of Arabic writing and language on African culture has motivated him for more than 40 years.
The British-born professor recalled his first job teaching in Nigeria.
“There were some manuscripts around, and that began to interest me,” Hunwick said.
Half a lifetime later, Hunwick has discovered thousands of detailed Arabic manuscripts in sub-Saharan Africa, ranging from religious texts to legal documents. His most recent discovery, a family library of 3,000 documents dating back to the 16th century, was presented to the professor by owner Ismail Haidara in the hope that Hunwick could help with the manuscripts’ analysis. Haidara is the descendent of a long line of Muslim scholars in Timbuktu.
Thinking back to August 1999, when Haidara approached him in Timbuktu, Hunwick smiled.
“My first reaction was ‘It can’t be true,'” he recalled. “And then I went to see (the documents) and they were obviously genuine.”
According to Hunwick, while the size and age of the al-Kati collection are certainly impressive, the originality of the books lies in the Arabic scrawl squeezed into the margins of exquisitely inked pages.
“That was the only paper (in Africa), and any little scrap was enough to tempt somebody to use it,” Hunwick explained. The original owner of the collection “was using the margins as his journal, writing what he wanted to write, not necessarily anything related to the text.”
As a result, the pages of many of the collection’s texts are littered with accounts of political events, the deaths of public figures, and one instance of “stars flying over the heavens,” which Hunwick interpreted as a meteor shower.
While defacing the texts, the marginal notes in the al-Kati collection increase its value to historians by providing a colorful and personal look at daily life in Timbuktu.
“One note records a marriage in the 16th century and was celebrated with a wedding gift from the bridegroom to the bride consisting in an ounce of gold and 20 sheep,” Hunwick joked.
While Haidara and other Timbuktu natives will assist in the translation and cataloguing of these manuscripts, the project largely will be the responsibility of the new Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa, a research program within the Department of African Studies at NU. A $1 million grant from the Ford Foundation will fund ISITA over the next four years, under Hunwick’s leadership.
This spring, Hunwick will analyze digital images of several of the al-Kati manuscripts on his computer at NU until he can return to Timbuktu later this year. He plans to incorporate his research into the classroom when he switches his focus from ISITA back to teaching next year.
“One of the courses I’d like to teach is one on Islamic thought in Africa,” he said. “Most people conceive of Islam as an Arab religion or Middle-Eastern, even though there are probably more Muslims in Africa than there are in the Middle East.”
