During the beginning of the spring 2018 semester, I have critically rethinking about an effective digital history project relevant to the field of African History, and historian Walter Hawthorne and Bala Saho’s open access web-based archive called Social history of the Gambia: rescuing an endangered archive, police and court records stood out to me. Before going into the details of the Social History of the Gambia, I will provide a brief snapshot of the scholarship on Islam in Africa in the first half of this short essay. The second half of the essay will make an argument regarding the need to produce digital scholarly articles and books on women in Islamic Africa. Over the last four decades, scholars working in Islamic Africa have produced substantial monographs that broadly focused on male Muslim clerics as agents of “Islamization, while simultaneously painted a picture of women as blind followers of these male clerics.
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