91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳

Research Overview

Abdulbasit Kassim is an Assistant Professor specializing in the histories and cultures of Muslim societies with a geographical focus on West Africa and the African Diaspora. His research focuses on the continuities and changes in the intellectual history of African and African Diasporic Islamic traditions. His cross-temporal research spans the early modern and modern periods. By studying both the “yesterday” and the “today,” he traces the ebbs and flows of the intellectual networks, transregional scholarly communities, and the transmission and reception of canonical ideas in Islamic sciences that circulated and connected the movement of people, caravans, texts, local histories, and material artifacts across the societies in Muslim West Africa, the Islamic West (al-Andalus and the Maghrib), the Islamic East (Mashriq) and the African Diaspora in the Atlantic world and Mediterranean Lands of Islam. His pedagogical focus situates the centuries-old literature and scholarly writings produced by Muslims of African descent in Arabic and African languages within a global conversation with other intellectual currents and disciplinary regimes across the world.

Abdulbasit's current book project, entitled Requiem for a West African Caliphate: A Social and Intellectual History of Islamicate Societies in Hausaland and Bornu, c. 1450-2015, examines the continuities, discontinuities, ruptures, and changes in the longue duréeof successive waves of Islamic reform, counter-reform, dissidence, rebellion, and jihad in Muslim West Africa. The nine-chapter book, divided into three parts (early modern, colonial, and post-imperial periods), tracks the textual practices, discursive productions, and doctrinal interpretations that reformers and dissidents in Muslim West Africa have debated, enunciated, and deployed to legitimize their projects of reform and jihad from the mid-fifteenth century, when scholars in the Maghrib such as Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Maghīlī al-Tilimsānī (d. 1504-5) and Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī (d. 1505) taught the ‘core curriculum’ of pre-modern Islamic sciences and authored politico-theological manuals for state-building projects across Muslim West Africa to the early twenty-first century when new religious movements seeking to establish God’s rule attempted to overthrow the post-imperial secular polities and fragmented nation-states that were violently established during the twentieth-century European conquest. Requiem for a West African Caliphate tells the history of how Muslims in West Africa, particularly Hausaland and Bornu, have grappled with the loss of the caliphate and the common goals, divergent aspirations, and intersecting methods that different religious movements have proposed toward the idea of reclaiming the political theology that governed the defunct African Islamic empire-states in their pristine form as they imagined them to have been before colonialism.

Abdulbasit’s next book project, tentatively entitled From the Black Atlantic to Sankoré, examines the multidirectional travel, global networks, and migration of Muslims of African descent from the Black Atlantic and the African Diaspora to the medieval centers of Islamic learning in Western, Central, and Eastern Sudanic Africa. The book traces the intellectual contributions of Black Muslims in the United States, Caribbean, and Latin America to the global transmission, circulation, preservation, and bio-bibliographic documentation of the centuries-old African Islamic intellectual heritage. From the Black Atlantic to Sankoré, tell the global history of ‘reverse diaspora’ and the ‘return mission’ of Muslims who have migrated back to the continent to study and reconnect the descendants of enslaved African Muslims with the extant African Arabic and Islamic intellectual traditions.

Abdulbasit is the co-editor of the book The Boko Haram Reader: From Nigerian Preachers to the Islamic State (Oxford University Press & Hurst Publishers, 2018), nominated for the best critical edition or translation into English of primary source materials on Africa by the African Studies Association (Paul Hair Prize). He has conducted ethnographic and archival research in Nigeria, Niger, Mali, Senegal, Sudan, Algeria, and Morocco. His work has received support from Mellon Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, American Philosophical Society, and African Studies Association, among others. He is a member of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), American Historical Association (AHA), African Studies Association (ASA), Association for the Study of Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD), Lagos Studies Association (LSA), and Islam in Africa Studies Group.

Abdulbasit completed his PhD at Rice University. Before joining the 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ as an Assistant Professor, he was a Provostial Fellow and Lecturer at the Department of African and African American Studies at Stanford University. From 2023 to 2024, he held a postdoctoral research fellowship at New York University’s Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora (CSAAD). From 2022 to 2023, he was a postdoctoral scholar for the Mellon Sawyer Seminar “Unarchiving Blackness: Why the Primacy of African and African Diaspora Studies Necessitates a Creative Reconsideration of Archives” at the Center for Ideas and Society, University of California, Riverside. He also held a predoctoral fellowship from 2019 to 2021 at the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa (ISITA) and Program of African Studies (PAS) at Northwestern University. He received an MA from Keele University, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, England, as a Commonwealth Shared Scholar and a BSc from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria, as a Bomarah Foundation Scholar.

Research Interests

• Histories and Cultures of Muslim Societies
• Islamic History and Civilization
• Islamic Thought
• African and African Diaspora Islamic Intellectual Traditions
• Arabic and Ajami Literature of Africa