Mining the Islam West Africa Collection: Mapping Print Culture and Intellectual Networks in Francophone Regions

Scholarship on Islam in West Africa has long privileged manuscript traditions, leaving the vibrant Muslim periodical press of the 1980s, 90s, and early 2000s largely unexplored. My project fills this gap by tracing the emergence of modern Islamic print culture and the networks of Western-educated Francophone Muslim intellectuals who animated it in Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire and Togo.

Working with the Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC), I combine digital humanities methods with close reading to analyse around 1,500 Islamic publications published between 1980 and 2020. Topic modelling, word embeddings, and sentiment analysis chart the shifting meanings of key religious terms (ummah, Salafism, jihad) alongside political concepts such as democracy and laïcité), revealing the themes, semantic turns and affective registers that have shaped Muslim public debate during a period of rapid socio-political change.

Network analysis maps the contours of an "Islamic Francophonie", visualising the links between authors, publishers, NGOs and state institutions. These visualisations show how French became a strategic language for Islamic debate among urban elites, and how regionally rooted networks engaged with - rather than merely echoed - broader Arab-Islamic currents.

By integrating these computational insights with ethnographic fieldwork and close textual study, the project offers a composite portrait of Islamic thought in Francophone West Africa - one that situates religious ideas within their material, linguistic and political ecologies. In doing so, it advances the intellectual history of the region and proposes a new approach to the study of print publics at the intersection of religion, morality, and civic life.