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Textual Life: Islam, Africa, and the Fate of the Humanities
Author(s): Wendell Marsh (Author)
- Publisher: Columbia University Press
- Publication Date: October 14, 2025
- Language: English
- Print length: 304 pages
- ISBN-10: 023121071X
- ISBN-13: 9780231210713
Book Description
The Senegalese Muslim scholar Shaykh Musa Kamara (1864–1945) wrote
History of the Blacks, a monumental history of West Africa, in a time when colonial discourses asserted that Africans lacked both writing and history. He sought to publish a bilingual Arabic and French edition of the book by working with humanists in colonial institutions, but the project was ultimately undermined by the disregard of the French state. Textual Life considers Kamara’s story as a parable about the fate of the humanities amid epistemic and technological change. Wendell H. Marsh argues that Kamara’s scholarship reflected what he calls the textual attitude, an orientation to the world mediated by reading. Colonial humanists shared this attitude even while upholding racial and religious hierarchies, and they took an interest in African texts and traditions. The bureaucrats and technocrats who succeeded them, however, disdained such dialogue―for reasons that bear a striking resemblance to the algorithmic antihumanism that is ascendant today.Drawing on Kamara’s body of work, colonial archival documents, and postcolonial knowledge production within Senegal,
Textual Life offers a decolonial vision of the humanities. By engaging with African and Muslim intellectual resources, Marsh shows how thinkers like Kamara who were subjected to colonialism can help us find a future after empire.Editorial Reviews
Review
The life and monumental work of Shaykh Musa Kamara is a manifestation of the depth of a tradition of West African Islamic scholarship. To fully understand his story as a postcolonial “third space” in which the modernity of Muslim Africa is being invented, we need to use the critical approach of philology. Wendell H. Marsh’s
Textual Life is a brilliant example of this approach. — Souleymane Bachir Diagne, author of Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with the Western TraditionThrough Shaykh Musa Kamara, Wendell Marsh journeys across Saharo-Sahelian margins to reveal an African Islamic humanism rooted in northern Senegambia. Drawing on overlapping archives, he uncovers how indigenous thought unsettled colonial “Islamology” and offered a counternarrative to the universalizing claims of Muslim societies. — Mamadou Diouf, editor of
Tolerance, Democracy, and Sufis in Senegal Textual Life is a seminal work of profoundly diligent scholarship and brilliance with a commendably wide scope. Wendell Marsh’s reading of the Arabic writings by the twentieth-century Senegalese scholar Shaykh Musa Kamara brings a generative new perspective to the fields of African, Islamic, and Black studies, as well as the history of ideas and literary criticism. It exemplifies the sort of intellectual history we need at this moment. — R. A. Judy, author of Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiēsis in Black
