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

*Experimenting with AI on two multilingual collections, West African and Central Asian Islam, to read them at a scale close reading cannot reach, and to find where the methods mislead.*

- **Period:** 2026 – 2028
- **Co-directors:** Aksana Ismailbekova
- **Funder:** Volkswagen Foundation
- **Programme:** Open Up — New Research Spaces for the Humanities and Cultural Studies
- **Regions:** West Africa, Central Asia
- **Source languages:** Russian, Arabic, Hausa, Tajik, Uzbek, Persian, Turki, French, Ewe, Kabyè, German
- **Web page:** https://www.frederickmadore.com/research/islams-peripheries-dh-ai-west-africa-central-asia

Co-directed with [Aksana Ismailbekova](https://www.zmo.de/en/people/dr-aksana-ismailbekova), this project tests what artificial intelligence (AI) can do with two multilingual collections on Islamic communities in West Africa and Central Asia. Between them they hold thousands of documents whose volume and range of languages have kept most of the material out of reach.

Both regions sit at the edge of how Islamic history is usually written: West Africa since the 1960s, Central Asia across the colonial and early Soviet periods and the Tajik civil war of 1992–97. Reading them against each other compares Islamic discourse and responses to modernity under two different secular orders: *laïcité* in francophone West Africa, Soviet and post-Soviet secularism in Central Asia.

## Three aims

1. **From documents to structured data.** Multimodal LLMs now outperform specialised OCR and HTR systems on low-resource languages and unfamiliar scripts: Hausa, Arabic, Cyrillic, Old Tatar, Tajik. Paired with context-aware entity extraction, we expect them to turn scanned pages into records that can be queried and linked.
2. **Access through MCP and a chatbot.** We plan a [Model Context Protocol](https://modelcontextprotocol.io/) (MCP) server that gives any AI assistant a single interface onto both collections, with a companion “skill” that encodes curatorial judgement: search strategies, transliteration variants, documented bias. A researcher should then be able to put one question in natural language to both collections at once, without reading every language in them. The intended deliverable is a conversational assistant on the project website, running on an open-source LLM.
3. **Open, local, reviewable.** What the project builds is pipelines: code that calls existing LLMs to run OCR, handwriting recognition, and entity extraction. They are designed for open-source models small enough to run locally, without costly infrastructure. Domain experts keep the final say through [human-in-the-loop validation](https://github.com/fmadore/AI-NER-Validator), and all code, data, and publications are to be released open access under FAIR principles.

## Two “peripheral” collections

Both are held at [Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO)](https://www.zmo.de/en):

- The [*Islam West Africa Collection*](https://islam.zmo.de/s/westafrica/): nearly 21,000 items (newspapers, Islamic publications, photographs, and some 35,000 minutes of audio and video, including Hausa recordings) covering Islam and Muslim communities in six West African countries from the 1960s onward.
- The [*Reinhard Eisener Collection*](https://www.zmo.de/en/library/special-collection-1/translate-to-english-reinhard-eisener-bestand): 1,546 documents across 50 archival boxes in eight languages (Russian, Uzbek, Tajik, Persian, Turki, English, German, French), on the Emirate of Bukhara (1917–30), early Soviet governance, and the Tajik civil war (1992–97).

If the methods hold across two collections this different, they should transfer to any collection that is large, multilingual, and under-described.

## Grants

- **2026-2028** [Open Up – New Research Spaces for the Humanities and Cultural Studies](https://projektdatenbank.volkswagenstiftung.de/projekt/0200839), Volkswagen Foundation (€332,390, Awarded)

## Talks

- [Same Name, Different Country: AI Agents, Human Oversight and Entity Disambiguation in the Islam West Africa Collection](https://www.frederickmadore.com/communications/same-name-different-country-alevi-archive-leipzig-2026.md) · Workshop presentation
  Data Modelling in the Project Alevi Archive, Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany, 3 December 2026
- [Islam's "Peripheries": Digital Humanities, Algorithmic Analysis, and AI in West Africa and Central Asia](https://www.frederickmadore.com/communications/islam-peripheries-dh-ai-west-africa-central-asia-2026.md) · Lecture
  Seminar series ‘Digital History in/of Central Asia and the South Caucasus’, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany, 29 June 2026
- [Beyond Keywords: AI-Mediated Access to the Islam West Africa Collection through an MCP Server and Agent Skill](https://www.frederickmadore.com/communications/beyond-keywords-ai-iwac-mcp-2026.md) · Conference paper
  Eighth Conference on Digital Humanities and Digital History, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, 15 June 2026
- [Dormant Digital Collections, AI Triage: Lessons from the Islam West Africa Collection and Beyond](https://www.frederickmadore.com/communications/dormant-digital-collections-ai-triage-dga-2026.md) · Lecture
  Deutsche Gesellschaft für Asienforschung (DGA), Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Germany, 6 May 2026
- [From Digital Hoarding to Open Archives: Using AI Agents to Unlock West African Newspaper Collections](https://www.frederickmadore.com/communications/digital-hoarding-open-archives-warsaw-2026.md) · Workshop presentation
  Non-European Approaches in European Academia: Strategies for De-Europeanizing Research, Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland, 16 April 2026
- [Islam's "Peripheries": Digital Humanities, Algorithmic Analysis, and AI in West Africa and Central Asia](https://www.frederickmadore.com/communications/islam-peripheries-open-up-2026.md) · Conference paper
  Kick-off ‘Open Up’, Xplanatorium Herrenhausen, Hanover, Germany, 4 March 2026

## Links

- [Islam West Africa Collection](https://islam.zmo.de/s/westafrica/)
- [Reinhard Eisener Collection](https://www.zmo.de/en/library/special-collection-1/translate-to-english-reinhard-eisener-bestand)