Seminar series · Digital History in/of Central Asia · FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg · 29 June 2026
Islam's “Peripheries”
Digital humanities, algorithmic analysis, and AI in West Africa and Central Asia.
Funding · Volkswagen Foundation
An “Open Up” research project
A collaboration funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, under its Open Up — New Research Spaces for the Humanities and Cultural Studies programme.
The conceptual stake
Why “peripheries”?
- In Islamic studies, sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia are often treated as marginal
- Distant from the “real” Islam of the Middle East
- Yet Muslim delegations from Togo and Dahomey (Benin) visited Soviet Central Asia, 1960s–70s — and vice versa
- The project challenges the centre–periphery frame itself
In the news · April 2026
Togo ↔ Kyrgyzstan, 2026
A different kind of tie in the present day. In April 2026, Togo's president made the first-ever state visit to Kyrgyzstan — diplomacy and trade now, where the 1960s links were religious.
République Togolaise
Faure Gnassingbé à Bichkek
AKIpress · Bishkek
Kyrgyzstan and Togo sign accords
01
The challenge
Vast multilingual archives, studied in silos.
The problem
Vast archives, locked away
Russian Arabic Hausa Ewe Kabyè Tajik French Uzbek Persian Turki German English
- Sheer volume and linguistic diversity defeat traditional analysis
- No single scholar or team reads every language and script
- Rich historical insight stays out of researchers' reach
Rarely compared
Studied in silos
- Islamic discourse and public engagement
- Post-colonial nation-building
- Western-educated Muslim voices
- Francophone press and audiovisual sources
- Russian imperial administration records
- Early Soviet governance of Muslim communities
- Islamic reformers and local agency
- Rare Emirate of Bukhara materials
- Secularism
- Modernity
- Development
- Islamic reformism
Both held at ZMO
Two multilingual digital collections
(IWAC)
- 14,500+ items — newspapers, Islamic publications, audiovisual recordings, photographs
- 9,315 minutes of audio in Hausa
- 6 countries, since the 1960s
Collection
- 1,619 documents across 50 archival boxes
- Bukhara (1917–30), Soviet governance, Tajik civil war (1992–97)
- 8 languages incl. Turki; multiple scripts
Open access · islam.zmo.de
The Islam West Africa Collection
A scholar's estate · access on request
The Reinhard Eisener Collection
Fieldwork · Osh, Kyrgyzstan
A possible third collection
Aksana Ismailbekova has been at Osh State University, in southern Kyrgyzstan.
- The university holds a large collection of Islamic materials
- Gathered from local people across the region
- Manuscripts, devotional prints, loose-leaf texts
02
The approach
AI-driven digital humanities, built across two regions.
How can AI-driven DH methods transform access to and interpretation of these collections — enabling new comparative methods for Islamic discourse across regions?
The project's guiding question
Innovation 1 / 3
From raw documents to structured data
Multimodal LLMs turn scanned pages into structured data
AI models that take in images and audio, not just text
- Extracts text from scans and audio files — Hausa, Arabic, Cyrillic, Old Tatar
- Now reads handwriting too — cursive letters and manuscripts, not just print
- Pulls out people, places, dates as structured fields
- Opens DH methods — maps, networks, analysis at scale
Innovation 1 · in practice
Reading printed Ewé
Togo Presse, 31 July 1976.
Loading the extraction…Printed Ewé, diacritics and all — scroll for the full extraction.
Innovation 2 / 3
Two layers: a server and a skill
- A standardised, read-only interface any AI assistant can call — Claude, ChatGPT, or open-source
- Both collections behind one door; the data stays on our servers
- A curator's method, written down — search strategies, transliteration variants
- Bias and gaps disclosed in every answer
Innovation 2 · the potential
Grounded answers
- Claims cited back to a record — grounding curbs the hallucinations a bare chatbot invents
- Exploratory — surfaces links across people, places and subjects the catalogue keeps apart
- Read-only and verifiable — every call a lookup; the data is never handed over
Live demo · the IWAC MCP server
From a plain question to cited sources
A Claude Desktop extension — read-only, ~22 tools.
Question in natural language — the AI runs the tools
- Scopes the collection, then searches it in French
- Reads the strongest hits in full
- Claims linked back to its IWAC record
Live for the IWAC; the same door onto the Eisener estate is the goal.
Two saved runs below — press ↓
Saved run · secularism in Côte d'Ivoire
Brief — the default depth
Claude Sonnet 4.6 · high effort
Saved run · Islam in Kpalimé, Togo
Extended — the full method
A five-phase pass — every claim traced to a record, not to the model's memory.
Innovation 3 / 3
Equitable, accessible, sustainable
Designed to run anywhere, and to be checked by people.
- Open-source models by default; commercial AI only as fallback
- Runs locally — but requires some infrastructure
- Human-in-the-loop: experts validate before anything enters the database
- All code open access — reuse and adapt the pipelines: fmadore/iwac-ai-pipelines ↗
Potential downsides
Embracing and managing risk
| Risk | Mitigation |
|---|---|
| AI invents text (hallucination) or modernises historical spelling | Original scans preserved beside every AI output; all models and prompts documented on GitHub |
| The chatbot approach is largely untested on these collections | Iterative development; we document what works and what does not |
| Collections are only partially catalogued | AI complements — never replaces — manual cataloguing |
| AI tools evolve rapidly | Modular architecture; swap components as better tools emerge |
Where it leads
Building sustainable networks
A concluding workshop turns the tools into a lasting network
- Bringing together scholars from West Africa and Central Asia
- Interdisciplinary: Islamic studies, history, anthropology, DH
- Hands-on training for researchers, archivists, heritage professionals
- Goal: South–South networks that outlast the project
Thank you
Comparing the “peripheries”
AI-driven DH lets two locked archives speak to each other and questions the centre they were measured against.