Description: The Senegalese Muslim scholar Shaykh Musa Kamara wrote a monumental history of West Africa in a time when colonial discourses asserted that Africans lacked both writing and history. Textual Life considers Kamara's story as a parable about the fate of the humanities amid epistemic and technological change.
Review Quotes: 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 Tradition