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. 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
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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
Both held at ZMO
Two multilingual digital collections
- 14,500+ items — newspapers, Islamic publications, photographs
- 9,315 minutes of audio in Hausa
- 6 countries, since the 1960s
- 1,612 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, live
A scholar's estate · not yet online
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
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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
AI turns scanned, multilingual pages into machine-readable data.
- Extracts text from scans — Hausa, Arabic, Cyrillic, Old Tatar
- Handles complex layouts that defeat conventional tools
- Transcribes audio recordings
- Pulls out people, places, dates as structured fields
Innovation 2 / 3
Queried by AI, not surrendered to it
39 of 43 heritage institutions hit by AI-bot traffic spikes (Weinberg, GLAM-E Lab, 2025); Wikimedia: 65% of its costliest traffic is bots. Read it ↗
Not a choice between unrestricted scraping and a locked repository.
- The default is extraction — bots crawl GLAMs, ignoring
robots.txt - MCP, a middle layer — auditable, institution-controlled; the data stays put
Live demo · the IWAC MCP server
From a plain question to cited sources
A Claude Desktop extension — read-only, ~22 tools, no API key for the core tools.
One real question — the server runs the method live.
- Scopes the collection, then searches it in French
- Reads the strongest hits in full
- Every claim linked back to its IWAC record
Live for the IWAC (West Africa); 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 — no expensive infrastructure
- Human-in-the-loop: experts validate before anything enters the database
- All code open access — reusable by scholars and archivists anywhere
Honest about the downside
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.
- Scholars from West Africa and Central Asia, in one room
- 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. islam.zmo.de