Term: Fall 2022
Participating Campuses: Host – University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign | Receiving – University of Minnesota
Semester Dates: August 22 to December 16, 2022
Course Dates & Times: TBA
Course Number and Title:
Students at participating campuses can enroll in the following sections for local course credit:
- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: HIST 213, AFST 213, REL 215 “African Muslim Societies”
- Recieving Campus TBA
Instructor: Dr. Mauro Nobili, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign | nobili@illinois.edu
Less than ten years after the death of the Prophet Muḥammad in 632 CE, Muslims “overflowed” from the Arabian Peninsula into the African continent. Soon, from North Africa and the Indian Ocean, the new religion entered sub-Saharan Africa. Today, one Muslim out of three is from Africa and one out of two Africans is Muslim.
Through the study of secondary sources, in-class reading and discussions of primary sources, as well as documentaries, this course will provide students with the knowledge and skills they need to understand this central phenomenon in modern world history, now an unfortunate and misunderstood staple of contemporary news due to the prominence gained in the past ten years by Jihadist movements such as Boko Haram in Northern Nigeria and those active in the Republic of Mali.
About the Instructor: Mauro Nobili is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a historian of pre-colonial and early-colonial West Africa, with a specific interest in the area of the modern Republic of Mali and the town of Timbuktu. His speciality is the Muslim societies of the region and their Arabic manuscript heritage. He is currently finalizing a critical edition and translation of the West African Chronicles, the Tarikh of Ibn al-Mukhtar and the Tarikh al-fattash. He is also working on a new monograph that is a microhistory of an imperial encounter that took place in the Niger Bend in the 1850s, when a renowned scholar from Timbuktu, hosted Heinrich Barth, a German traveler on a diplomatic mission on behalf of the British government.
Nobili is the author of Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the Faith: Ahmad Lobbo, the Tarikh al-fattash, and the Making of an Islamic State in West Africa (Oxford, 2020) and the co-editor of The Arts and Crafts of Literacy: Islamic Manuscript Cultures in Sub-Saharan Africa (De Gruyter, 2017). His work has also appeared in the Journal of African History, History in Africa, Islamic Africa, and the Journal of Manuscript Culture, among other publications.