Department of Arabic
Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Recent Submissions
Item Arabic Manuscripts Production in Ghana: A Close Study of Jumcat's al-lāmiyyat al-Ṣughrā(University of Ghana, 2020-03-05) Hafiz, M.The study contributes to an ongoing discussion on the need to engage with the content of the Arabic and Ajami manuscripts deposited in archival centers across West Africa. Using one of the primary manuscripts from the Arabic and Ajami collection of the Institute of African Studies in the University of Ghana, the study vividly describes three core iterant processes that recur in manuscripts writing in Ghana and in West Africa. These processes comprise the occasions that necessitate the production of Arabic and Ajami manuscripts, the choice of appropriate titles and thematic interconnectedness of various Arabic manuscripts. The essence of the study is to demonstrate how these three processes have been catered for in the selected manuscript relative to a few manuscripts from the IAS collections. To contextualize the discussion, the paper began with an overview of Arabic manuscripts production in Ghana, accompanied by a brief description of the manuscript under study. The study revealed that akin to several Arabic manuscripts from the IAS collections, the occasion that necessitated the manuscript under consideration has been elaborated in a prelude. Indeed, for emphasis, the purpose of writing the manuscript has also been explicitly stated in the third lines of the poem. The two-worded title of the manuscript (al-lāmiyyat al-ṣughra) although catchy, barely reflects the content. Nonetheless, the manuscript share a close thematic affinity with a few manuscripts from the IAS collection and many others from West Africa. Notwithstanding, it is unique in many respects. It qualifies as a funeral dirge, a genealogy and obituary poem apiece. Above all, it contains invaluable information for historical and anthropological enquiriesItem Muslim Scholars of Yoruba Origin in Ghana: A Critical Study of Musah Abdul- Kadir’s Dirge(2018-11-14) Hafiz, M.The Yoruba migrant community has been an integral part of the Ghanaian society since the late nineteenth-century. Their vast contribution to the thriving of trade and commerce in Ghana, chiefly in the informal sectors has been extensively examined by H. Polly (1970) and J.S. Eades (1994) among others. Nonetheless, there are dearth of studies on the socio-cultural impact of Yoruba people on the Ghanaian community. This study sheds some insight into the contribution of Ghanaian Muslim scholars of Yoruba origin to the Arabic literary tradition in Ghana. It focuses on the late Sheikh Musah Abdul-Kadir who traces his root to Ilorin. The study upon analyzing a dirge Musah composed to eulogize the late Sheikh Ahmed Yasin of HAMAS, came to the conclusion that it was a critical and an original contribution that provided extra insight into the assassination of Ahmed Yasin, and that Musah’s contribution to the cause of Arabic and Islamic, and those of his ilk’s’ in Accra and Kumasi, signal that Ghanaian Muslims of Yoruba origin contributed substantially towards the blossom of Arabic and Islamic education in Ghana in the twentieth- century.Item On the Pleasure in Madness and the Grammar of Insanity(2018-11-15) Afis, O.A.Is madness, known in Arab-Islamic culture as al-Junun, a condition, a phenomenon or both? Is it a utopia, a dystopia and a heterotopia where the real and the unreal interpellate? To Aristotle, madness is a virtue, a quality that scholars must not only cherish but possess He says: "No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.” In Hamlet of Shakespeare' counsels- ‘if you must go mad, let there be a method to it”. Deeper contemplation of the problematic returns extremely rich cross-cultural tradition and cues in which contests and contestations around madness circumscribes religious, cultural, political and indeed intellectual vocations … What better example could be cited other than Gunter Grass, the German Nobel laureate in Literature who, while on his death bed, remonstrated with the medics that the only physician who could cure him of his ailment is a character he himself created in one of his works! The pursuit of the ‘pleasure’ in madness/insanity is thus conceived in the womb of time as a cultural site of meanings which only ‘mad intellectuals’, qua, al-Nasayburi and Mitchel Foucault after him, could explore particularly in an extremely ‘maddening’ world of today!