Event Details:

About the Talk:

The long standing presence of Islam in the Senegambia region have had profound influence on its diverse peoples. The steady but significant acceptance of Islam among the region's population increasingly brought the region into a wider intellectual world extending into northern Africa and the Middle East. For many centuries, Senegambian Muslims had been conducting the hajj and traveling to Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to study Islam. However, the scholarship on Islam in the Senegambia region is concentrated largely on the Sufi figures in the northern portion of the region, ignoring other lesser-known transformational figures such as Alhagie Baba Jallow (c.1890-1996) whose father, Cherno Omar Jallow, founded one of the most important centers of Islamic learning in Gambia's north bank region in the late 19^th century. This will be centered on the contributions of this family to the development of Islam in the region.

About the Speaker:

Assan Sarr is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History at Ohio University. His research interests include peace and conflict in Africa, land tenure, agrarian change, oral history, slavery and Islam in West Africa's Senegambia region. He is the author of Islam, Power and Dependency in the Gambia River basin and several book chapters and articles, which appeared in the African Economic History, African Studies Review, Journal of West African History and Mande Studies. He is a member of the Ohio University Press board and a Core member of the African Studies Program and the Contemporary History Institute at Ohio University. In 2014 he was honored by the Charles J. Ping Institute for the Teaching of the Humanities of Ohio University for his outstanding teaching. He is also the recipient of the 2016-17 Grasselli Brown Faculty Teaching at Ohio University.