The example of the Prophet Muhammad was one which the West African religous leader and anti-colonial resistant, al-Hajj Muhammad al-Amin, sought to emulate in his relatively brief moment ofl eadersihip on the late 19th century cusp of West African imperialism and modernity. A precondition of Muhammad al-Amin’s claim to leadership was the creation of an Islamic religious community of sufficient ideological credentials to justify brutal wars against rival Muslim states, in addition to the Christian French and non-Islamic African peoples. In this respect, it would be a project following the example of West African antecedents in the tradition of Jihad like Usman dan Fodio and Umar Tall, figures Muhamamd al-Amin took direct inspiration from, who both emphasized highly centralized reformist movements led by a singular political and religous authority drawing on the Prophet’s example.

In addition, the lettered, Jakhanke-Soninke scholarly milieu in which Muhammad al-Amin was formed (particularly in the Goundiouru scholarly center in the east of contemporary Senegal, but with contacts spreading far to the West and South where the poem was written) had developed their own prophetology– their own conception of the theological and institutional role of mainly the Prophet Muhammad– but also of other prophets of the Quran, as gleaned from sources such as the Quran and highly popular biographical materials and poetry which circulated throughout the Sahara. One observable outlet of this prophetology appears in the genre of original epic poems that Arabic-literate scholars authored in the middle of the 19th century, the “biniiboo”, or praise poem for the prophet Muhammad.

For my portfolio, I hope to complete a modest digital humanities project which can perform a frequency analysis on selections of a long and important example of this poem authored by the scholar, in Pakao in present day Senegal. The project would aim to guage whether Mecca or Medina/Taybah is mentioned more in the reading. Once this is done and the model has been trained to recognize these strings, a secondary project can be to look at the kinds of episodes that are evoked most strongly in the poem around these places. Hopefully, this will create a methodology by which, later in the thesis, I can work with other examples of praise poetry to make claims about the Soninke scholarly community’s understanding of the prophets and of leadership of a Muslim community, in the period leading up to Muhammad Al-Amin’s taking up of an explicit military-political role as leader of a Jihad movement.

Practically, in this project I would have to begin by digitizing the codex of a little over 300 folios, then apply a transcription model, similar to other projects we have completed in the digital humanities course. Then, I would have to begin coding a simple python loop which can look through the transcription and pull the data I choose. In this case, I will choose to survey the number of occurrences of Medina and Mecca, and then list the page numbers of each appearance of these words in the text. These words can give me a sense of what was important to represent in the life of Muhammad, especially political and social ramifications of creating an Islamic community for scholarly communities, for a scohlarly community in a region with proximity and occaisonally fraught relations between Muslims and non-Muslims. This would give me some tangible data I can work with, in addition to allowing me to create a method for future use in digital humanities projects.