Islam's "Peripheries": Digital Humanities, Algorithmic Analysis, and AI in West Africa and Central Asia

This presentation introduced the project "Islam's 'Peripheries'" to the other funded projects at the VolkswagenStiftung "Open Up" kick-off event. In Islamic studies, sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia are often treated as marginal, yet these so-called peripheries share striking parallels and were historically connected through transregional Muslim exchanges that scholarship has largely overlooked. The project seeks to explore these connections. The project draws on two unique multilingual digital collections housed at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin: the Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC), with over 14,500 items across six countries since the 1960s, and the Reinhard Eisener Collection, comprising 1,612 documents on the Emirate of Bukhara and early Soviet governance of Muslim communities. Together, these archives contain approximately 16,000 documents in over ten languages, yet remain largely inaccessible due to their volume, linguistic diversity, and partial cataloguing. The presentation outlined three AI-driven innovations: (1) using multimodal large language models for text extraction and audio transcription across low-resource languages and scripts; (2) building a cross-regional research chatbot using the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to enable semantic search across both collections simultaneously; and (3) a methodological commitment to open-source AI, local infrastructure designed for Global South accessibility, and human-in-the-loop validation at every stage.