Wendell Marsh, "Textual Life: Islam, Africa, and the Fate of the Humanities" (Columbia UP, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Madina Cham
Guest: Wendell Marsh
Episode: Wendell Marsh, "Textual Life: Islam, Africa, and the Fate of the Humanities" (Columbia UP, 2025)
Date: September 22, 2025

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Overview

This rich, nuanced episode centers on Wendell Marsh’s forthcoming book, Textual Life: Islam, Africa, and the Fate of the Humanities. Through an engaging dialogue, host Madina Cham and Marsh explore the book’s central themes — the legacies of West African Islamic scholarship under colonialism, the meaning and fate of the humanities, and the enduring importance of the textual, or philological, life. The discussion also ranges through Marsh's personal journey, the intersection of black studies and Islamic thought, and the political, pedagogical, and public impact of studying texts in depth.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Author’s Trajectory and Motivation ([04:01]–[09:38])

• Overcoming a Speech Impediment and Discovering the Power of Language:

  • Marsh recounts his childhood struggle with a severe speech impediment, noting formative moments where his older sister "translated" for him. This early challenge inspired a lifelong appreciation for language, translation, and study.
    • "Not even my parents could actually understand me often. And they would ask [my sister] what was I saying? Well, anyway, what that kind of early experience did for me is really made me appreciate the power of language." ([04:01])
  • The role of formal language study, particularly French, became instrumental in his eventual path toward Pan-African solidarity and Black internationalism.

• Encounter in Senegal and Draw to Islamic Intellectual Traditions:

  • During college, a trip to Senegal introduced Marsh to Sheikh Hassan Cisse, an influential Tijani Sufi leader, whose room overflowed with people and texts in multiple languages — especially Arabic.
    • "What literary traditions were available to me that could take me beyond the plantation and the colonial school? And so Sherhasan Sise embodied those things that I knew very early on, right? The power of Language, the importance of translation and the necessity of study." ([07:40])

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2. Sheikh Moussa Kamara – Life, Works, and Contemporary Reception ([10:36]–[16:39])

• Introduction to Sheikh Moussa Kamara:

  • Kamara was a late 19th–early 20th-century Senegalese Muslim scholar prolific in Arabic writing, known especially for Zuhur al Bassettin Fitarikh es Sawaddin ("Flowers from Among the Gardens in the History of the Blacks").
  • Marsh emphasizes Kamara's unique position within a vibrant West African Islamic intellectual culture, noting Kamara's idiosyncrasies and poetic sensibility.

• Recent Resurgence and Scholarly Interest:

  • The last decade has seen renewed scholarly work on Kamara, spurred by modern concerns (e.g., the Mali insurgency, debates over jihad).
  • Kamara's critical stance on jihad — arguing the modern absence of prophetic leadership and the immense loss of Muslim life — resonates with contemporary calls for Islamic quietism.

• Parallel with Black Feminism:

  • The rediscovery of Kamara in the post-independence period is likened to the recovery of Zora Neale Hurston by Black feminists in the U.S.
    • "In ways that aren't too dissimilar to the ways in which black feminists in the United States recovered someone like Zora Neale Hurston..." ([15:34])

• The Parable of the Humanities:

  • Kamara’s lifelong struggle for his work’s publication serves as a microcosm for broader questions about the fate of knowledge, translation, and the humanities.
    • "That story...is a compelling parable...not only the story of his life, but a larger story about the fate of the humanities amidst political, technological and epistemic change." ([16:12])

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3. The Historical Context: Islam, Colonialism, and Futa Toro ([19:10]–[29:46])

• Understanding Senegal’s Intellectual Terrain:

  • Marsh lays out the nuanced relationships between Islam and colonialism in Futa Toro (border of modern Senegal and Mauritania), through three key 19th-century figures:
    1. Bul Mogdad Sec: First African salaried colonial employee, representing Muslim civil society and collaboration with colonial powers.
    2. Hajj Omar Tal: Influential Tijani Sufi who led social, political, and religious reform, centered Islam, and opposed both ancestral religions and, controversially, Muslim states.
    3. Louis Faidherbe: French military engineer and colonial administrator, instrumentalizing Islam to build governance frameworks and educational institutions.

• Debate, Negotiation, and Resistance:

  • Marsh traces how these figures’ differing visions for Islam and society set the stage for Kamara’s intellectual and social world.
    • "Between these three, you can kind of triangulate an understanding of Islam as one of debate, one of a fertile kind of intellectual life." ([27:14])

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4. Philology, “Textual Life,” and the Fate of the Humanities ([31:28]–[41:54])

• Philology Reframed:

  • Marsh redefines philology not just as a technical or colonial discipline, but as “the love of study”—a deep, cross-cultural orientation toward interpretation, reading, and learning.
    • "If we approach it differently, as a human tradition across time and cultural difference, as indeed the love of study, we might better appreciate what the textual attitude has meant in places as diverse as Malcolm X's prison cell and Kamaran's riverside village..." ([32:40])
  • Philology, when freed from representing reality, signals “a future for the humanities beyond the world slavery and colonization made.”

• Hope for the Humanities:

  • Marsh distinguishes between the institutional crisis of higher education (budget cuts, closures, anti-intellectualism) and the enduring value of the humanities as a way of being.
    • "Fundamentally, the crisis that we're kind of dancing around isn't really the crisis of the humanities. It's a crisis of higher education more broadly." ([35:37])
    • "The humanities is much more than a set of disciplines ... it's the commitment to reading again." ([36:11])
  • Drawing on Talal Asad and Toni Morrison, Marsh differentiates hope (a matter of belief and commitment) from optimism based on calculation.
    • "Hope, he argues, is distinct from optimism or pessimism, because hope isn't bad based on calculation. It is actually about a deeply profound commitment that is only founded on belief." ([41:44])

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5. Pedagogy: Practicing the Textual Attitude ([42:04]–[45:42])

• “Notice, Describe, Question”:

  • Marsh describes his teaching method at Rutgers — focusing on slowness, care, and attention. He trains students in "notice, describe, question" (NDQ) as a mode of deep engagement with texts and images, inspired by Kamara's own practices.
    • "I give them a certain protocol for reading, right? Which I developed in studying Kamara...notice it, describe it, and then...formulate a question." ([42:04])
  • The aim is to cultivate a living, not dead, relationship with language, echoing Toni Morrison’s call in her Nobel lecture.

• Sustaining Life and Critical Needs:

  • Courses are organized around “critical breath, housing, water, food, pleasure,” valuing what is needed to sustain life, and encouraging students to approach texts with that in mind.

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6. Beyond the Classroom: “Powers of the Unseen” Exhibit ([45:42]–[51:44])

• Curatorial Practice:

  • Marsh discusses curating “Powers of the Unseen” at Express Newark — an art exhibit using the Sufi/Islamic concept of the ghayb (the Unseen) as a framework to interrogate representation.
    • "Powers of the Unseen, at its core, is about the politics of representation, but it uses a core Sufi and more generally Islamic concept of the ghayb, or the unseen, as a way to kind of see through this problem." ([46:32])

• Community Impact:

  • Notably, an elder from the local Muslim community interprets the exhibition’s journey as moving from “Islam” (outward practice) to “Iman” (faith) to “Ihsan” (spiritual excellence).
    • "When you come upstairs...they take you from Islam to Iman or Faith...by the time you get into Powers of the Unseen, you arrive to Ihsan, right, Or Spiritual Excellence." ([49:01])
  • Marsh is deeply moved by this response, viewing it as a mark of successful engagement across academic and community lines.

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7. What’s Next? Looking to Africa ([52:35]–End)

• New Position in Morocco:

  • Marsh will join Mohammed VI Polytechnic University as Associate Professor of African Literature and Philosophy, focusing on grounded, continent-based networks and scholarship.

  • He plans to continue both making Kamara’s work available and collaborating with African-based decolonial and research initiatives.

    • "As far as I can tell from every indication, the future looks African." ([52:35])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Philology's Power:
  “Philology as the love of study and the cultivation of the textual attitude promises a future for the humanities beyond the world slavery and colonization made.” ([32:40])

• On Hope vs. Optimism:
  “Hope...is actually about a deeply profound commitment that is only founded on belief.” ([41:44])

• On the Pedagogical Method:
  “What I'm teaching there is this textual attitude, that engagement. But I'm also teaching something else...the commitment to life.” ([45:02])

• On the Exhibit’s Community Reception:
  “They take you from Islam to Iman or Faith...you arrive to Ihsan, or Spiritual Excellence. I was really struck by her reading of the exhibit.” ([49:01])

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Key Timestamps

• 04:01 – Wendell Marsh discusses his early experiences with language and motivation for Black Studies and Islam in West Africa.
• 10:36 – Introduction and importance of Sheikh Moussa Kamara.
• 20:18 – Placing Kamara within the larger historical context (Futa Toro, key 19th-century figures).
• 31:28 – The book’s core: Not biography, but a meditation on philology and its relevance.
• 32:40 – Marsh reads his definition of philology from the book.
• 35:37 – Differentiating the “fate of the humanities” from crises in higher education.
• 42:04 – Marsh’s classroom philosophy: “notice, describe, question.”
• 45:42 – The “Powers of the Unseen” exhibit and its intersection with Islamic aesthetics.
• 49:01 – Memorable account of community engagement with the exhibit.
• 52:35 – What’s next: Marsh’s move to Morocco, plans for future research, and commitment to Africa.

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Conclusion

This episode weaves together personal narrative, historical analysis, and cultural critique to illuminate Textual Life’s bold thesis: that the humanities, grounded in the love of study and deep attention to texts, maintain vital power to shape collective life and knowledge – even amid political, technological, and institutional upheaval. Through stories of scholars like Kamara, the lessons of classroom practice, and the spirit of artistic curation, Wendell Marsh offers both a diagnosis and a defense of the humanities “beyond the world slavery and colonization made.”

For listeners and readers:

• Textual Life will be available from Columbia University Press (discount code: CUP20).
• The episode encourages not only reading Kamara’s and Marsh’s work, but living and advocating for the deep textual engagement that is at the heart of humane scholarship.

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Transcript

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[Madina Cham]

Welcome to the New Books Network. In May of 1924, the Senegalese Muslim scholar Sheikh Moussa Kamara Mustaf felt an urgency to document the histories and the cultures of those then subject to French colonization. After years of consulting Arabic manuscripts and collecting oral testimonies from griots, village chiefs, and others, Kamara could not wait any longer. Eager to have his work translated and published into French, he sent off an incomplete manuscript to Henri Gaden, the French lieutenant governor of Mauritania and an amateur philologist. Kamara wagered that Gaden, who had been involved in publishing a cohort of indigenous writers, would be interested in a chronicle about the state that had been established following an Islamic revolution during the peak of the global slave trade. He was right, gaddan wrote back enthusiastically, asking Camara to send the rest without delay. Kamara took this as a favorable sign and picked up the pace of his work, writing the rest and signing it off within just a few months. But then Kamara had to wait he never stopped waiting. All right. Welcome to the African Studies Channel of the New Books Network. My name is Madina Cham, and what you just heard was the opening paragraph of one of the most anticipated books of 2025, Textual Islam, Africa, and the Fate of the Humanities. And I'm so, so honored and delighted to sit today with its author, Wendell Marsh, to discuss this book a little bit. It's coming out in the month of October with Columbia University Press, and we're going to be discussing the contents of the book, but also the path that led Wendell to write this book. Welcome to the show, Wendell.

[Wendell Marsh]

Thank you for having me. This has been a dream of mine. Thank you, truly.

[Madina Cham]

And we're doing something actually different, and we're doing a first Tuesday, which is that we're recording both an audio version of this podcast that you'll be able to listen to on. On the usual channels of the New Books Network, as well as a video portion which we're filming in the beautiful setting of Express Newark. And towards the end of the podcast, we'll explain why we're filming here. But let's jump in. Wendell, can you just tell us a little bit more about your trajectory and also, how and why did you become a Black Studies scholar interested in Islam in West Africa?

[Wendell Marsh]

I had a severe speech impediment as a small child, and it was so severe, in fact, that I couldn't pronounce and distinguish about half of the sounds in the English language. And as you can imagine, not being able to communicate often put me in difficult situations. And one of my most kind of vivid childhood memories was on one such occasion, I think I was in kindergarten. And I don't remember all the details, but what I remember is the feeling of some injustice having been done to me. And, you know, maybe it was an unshared crayon or something of that effect, but I was trying to plead my case, and I was trying to explain what happened. And I just remember these, you know, kind of white faces surrounding me, scolding me, the teachers. And I was in quite the bind. But thankfully, my older sister Wendy was able to come and translate for me. She was one of the only people in the world who could understand me when I spoke. Not even my parents could actually understand me often. And they would ask her, what was I saying? Well, anyway, what that kind of early experience did for me is really made me appreciate the power of language.

[Interjecting Commentator]

Right.

[Wendell Marsh]

The importance of translation and the necessity of study. Right, study. Because following that incident, I was diagnosed and had to do hundreds of hours of speech therapy in a very intensive way throughout my elementary years. And so I grew to be quite comfortable in the language classroom, right? I had to formally study my native language in that setting. And by middle school, I was studying French. And by high school, I actually had found. Established a Afrocentric book club at my high school. And, you know, we were trying to learn the other ABCs. And one of the texts I remember reading was this little essay by Du Bois. It was a short essay that he writes, kind of encouraging African Americans to study French and Portuguese because half of, you know, the continent of Africa's population and much of its diaspora spoke those languages, right? And so the study of language and of different languages took on a new meaning and purpose for me that it was actually a means to achieve the Pan African ideal. And so I really committed myself to the study of French for the purposes of kind of Pan African black internationalist solidarity and, you know, unity. And eventually I would kind of take that interest and skills I had developed in French to Senegal. When I was at Morehouse College, I went on a trip led by Spelman sisters who were doing a service, learning kind of experience, experience in Medina by Kaulak, which is a global hub of Tijani Sufism. And while I was there, I was taken as one of the few folks in our group who could speak French to see the sheikh at this point, it was Sheikh Hassan Sise, who's now a pass. And I just remember being in his room, which was filled with people sitting in little circles all around the room, and he was kind of reclined on his kind of cushions, and he was engaging with the different groups of people speaking English, French, Arabic, Wolof, and probably other languages that I couldn't even recognize. And what. I mean, that did something very significant for me because in every space of the room where there wasn't Arabic, where there wasn't a person, there was books and papers, most of which was in Arabic. And so at that point in college, I had been in between the choosing between an English major and a history major, right. I was obsessed with literary form, but the canon was so white, right? And even those exceptions to that, which we certainly learned at Morehouse was, you know, I felt there was a constraint by the kind of, you know, European colonial languages in which they were written. And I just wanted to know about what literary traditions were available to me that could take me beyond the plantation and the colonial school. And so Sherhasan Sise embodied those things that I knew very early on, right? The power of Language, the importance of translation and the necessity of study.

[Madina Cham]

There's many things in what you said now, these moments of translation. The first one would be with your sister, right? Intervening on your behalf and being this go between the power of language of different languages, but also this moment of encounter with the sheikh. And now it helps me understand better, actually, the dedication of your book. The first line is in service to the sheikh. And I'm glad you brought this moment because it helps us also understand better part of the setting that gave rise to this book. And I want to talk, so I want us to go back now to another scholar who is the one that you focus on the most in this book. We open this discussion and this episode with this story of a failed encounter, the story of a manuscript and of a broken promise from a French colonial administrator to the Senegalese Muslim scholar, Sheikh Moussa Qamara. Tell us more about him. Who was Sheikh Moussa Qamar?

[Wendell Marsh]

Sheikh Moussa Qamar was a brilliant writer from colonial era Senegal who wrote in many disciplines in the kind of arable Islamic tradition.

[Interjecting Commentator]

Right.

[Wendell Marsh]

He was born in 1864 and he dies in 1945. And he's best known for writing a major history of West Africa known in Arabic as Zuhur al Bassettin Fitarikh es Sawaddin, or Flowers from Among the Gardens in the History of the Blacks. And he's quite remarkable and singular, not because he was a writer or author.

[Interjecting Commentator]

Right.

[Wendell Marsh]

He's a part of a very robust intellectual culture in West Africa, but he was a bit idiosyncratic. Well, what I found interesting in kind of returning to Kamaran and thinking about his reception is that in the last, in the years, in the 10 years between 2013 and 2023, there's been more work published about Camorra than in any other 10 year period while he was living or since he perished. And so, you know, we might ask, well, what were some of the, you know, contextual factors that led to this resurgence of interest in Kamara? And it actually has to do with two of his other works, actually have a couple of his works here. So, you know, there's Tabshil Kha' Elfairan Wah or the Announcement of the Fearful and Confused and his Reminder of the Breath of God's Mercy, the Generous Bestower God. You know, Kamaran writes these very kind of poetic and cosmic titles for his works. So that work is an autobiography.

[Interjecting Commentator]

Right.

[Wendell Marsh]

And there's another work that has really come to the attention of people, which is his Akhtar Raghabin Fijihad Bar Nabiyin, or, you know, those who want jihad the most after the prophets. It's actually very long time. I'll spare you. But in that work, he offers a critique of jihad as a legitimate practice in essentially the modern period. So it's a historical critique. And he says that the big, biggest problem with jihad is that there's no prophetic leadership to authorize it first and foremost. And that in the absence of that, this, the major loss of Muslim life, which in his concrete historical experience accompanied the entire waves of jihad that had, you know, occurred between the 17th century and the, you know, 19th century. And so this was an important and timely argument for him. And so in the context, if we think about 2013 to 2023, what was happening? Well, you know far better than I about the insurgency in Mali in 2012 and how the broader kind of regional dynamics of a kind of very militant Islamist politics made local references for more quietist Islam very attractive. And there have been a number of scholars who have found in Kamara such a reference. There's been great work that's been done by people like Muhammad Saeed Ba, a kind of a Rebaphone intellectual who's currently leading the Qamar Research center in Senegal and in Gangl, but also Abdulmol Jopp and Mbailo down at Duke and many others. Right. So there's like this robust return to Camara.

[Interjecting Commentator]

Right.

[Wendell Marsh]

And this isn't the first time there's been such a renaissance of common studies. The first one arguably was in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Right. In this post independence or nationalist period in Senegal and where in which scholars such as Amr Sam and Mustafa Jai recover Kamaran as an important writer of Arabic and kind of making the argument that this is a part of the national literature.

[Interjecting Commentator]

Right.

[Wendell Marsh]

And in ways that aren't too dissimilar to the ways in which black feminists in the United States recovered someone like Zora Neale Hurston right around the same time period.

[Interjecting Commentator]

Right.

[Wendell Marsh]

And so in the work, when I describe the fate of the humanities, I'm interested in the returns of someone like Kamaran. Now, at the heart of the book is a very specific story about Kamaran's struggle to get his, you know, 1700 page manuscript translated and published by colonial officials. And, you know, I won't go into detail here. You'll just have to order the book. But that story kind of is a compelling parable for us that is not only the story of his life, but a larger story about the fate of the humanities amidst political, technological and epistemic change.

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[Wendell Marsh]

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[Madina Cham]

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[Wendell Marsh]

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[Madina Cham]

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[Madina Cham]

See mintmobile.com yeah and I think you show really well in the book these sort of, like, different periods and different readings of Kamara. And there is. There is something that various audiences and people speaking to various publics in specific contexts across time can get from this author or decide to read into this author. And I think you do such a great job at showing these successive readings of Kamara. And there may be still new readings of Kamara awaiting us in the future. Who knows?

[Wendell Marsh]

I believe there is.

[Interjecting Commentator]

Yeah.

[Madina Cham]

And we'll come back to that and what this means for the fate of the humanities. I want to go back a little bit and really plant the context, both geographical and historical, that this author emerges out of. You introduced him to us a little bit. But your book is also, in a way, one story of the encounter between Islam and French colonialism, but set in a very specific subspace, a region of West Africa named Futa Toronto, that is today located at what is now the border between Senegal and Mauritania. And that also has significance, again, relating to the encounter between French colonialism and Islam. So can you explain to us a little bit more that relationship and how you understand it? What is specific about the encounter between French colonialism in its various iterations and Islamic as it happens in this region of West Africa, Futa Toro, in the lifetime of Sheikh Musakamara and the years preceding it also?

[Wendell Marsh]

Yeah. I think one really effective way of understanding this history and the historical specificity is actually thinking a little bit before Kamara, right. The generation that precedes him and thinking it through three figures in particular, right? Bul Mogdad, sek, Hajo Mortal and Federbe, right. The French kind of. Who's often considered the architect of colonial Senegal, Louis Vdherb. So if we take Bul Mogdajsek, right? He's the first salaried employee, African salaried employee of the colony, right. He is an interpreter, a kind of a guide. He facilitates trade going up and down the Senegal river, right. When he's active toward the mid 19th century, he is at one time a kind of representative of Muslim civil society in the colony of St. Louis, right? And a kind of reliable partner of the colonial state. Now, Bul Mogdad Sac comes from a scholarly family, right, that had long been established in St. Louis, a family engaged in long distance trade, right, both across the Sahara and across the Atlantic. And he comes to, you know, kind of represent in a lot of ways, the set of Muslim interests that saw themselves as being aligned with a mercantile presence that would eventually become a colonial one, right? And we really get a sense of his politics and his kind of vision of the world when juxtaposed with someone like Hajj Omar Tal, right, who is in many ways the most consequential figure of 19th century West Africa, at least in the Sahelian zone, for the ways in which he revolutionizes the political, economic and religious landscape and intellectual landscape of the region, right. He is a Tijani scholar, right, who leaves Halwar on the banks of the Senegal river in Futa Toro and travels to Mecca and Medina on religious pilgrimage.

[Interjecting Commentator]

He.

[Wendell Marsh]

Serves as a kind of a student and disciple of some of the major Tijani scholars who are in the Arabian Peninsula at the time. And he comes back and on the way there, and upon his return, he actually spends a lot of time in what's now northern Nigeria. And he develops a reputation of being someone with a lot of baraka of charisma or grace that has real effects in the world. He is respected as an author and a scholar. He writes this well known sophisticated poetry that our colleague Amir Said has done some really fantastic work on. But he eventually declares a jihad in 1852 and at first is against the followers of ancestral religions in West Africa at this time, Islam had been. Had already had a, you know, 900 year history or so, right? And most importantly, a generation before Omar, there had been several initiatives to make Islam the guiding framework for collective life. Right before the so called age of jihad or Islamic revolutions, Islam was one point of reference among many, right? One form of life among many. But with that shift of the Islamic revolutions, you had a social, political, economic revolution that centralized Islamic paradigms and Islamic normativity as central in several pockets, right? So Futa Toro, Massina, which you know very well, of course, and other. And a few others. And in between were these pockets of followers of ancestral religions. And at first, Hajmor's project seems to be connecting the Muslim political formations. But at a certain point, that process falls back on itself and he actually declares jihad on another Muslim state in violation of kind of what is conventionally considered as a core principle of Islamic international affairs. Anyway, the reason why he's important is because he in so many ways is the exact opposite of Bul Mogdad Sec. In his vision of collective Muslim life, right? Hajmar wants to establish a space of Islamic economics that is actually kind of distinct and insulated from the Atlantic economy, right? The generation before both Sec and Tao, there had been a political struggle. And our colleague Rudolf Ware, I think shows this very well to kind of Delink, so to speak, from the slave economy. And work by Paul Lovejoy also shows this. Anyway, the third figure of that moment is also illustrative, though, right. Louis Federbe establishes the architecture of the Islamic State, Right. And he was a military engineer by training, Right. He trained at Metz, the Grande Cole in France. And his attitude toward Islam was an instrumental one.

[Interjecting Commentator]

Right.

[Wendell Marsh]

And a lot of the kind of forms of knowledge, the institutions of learning that are established in colonial Senegal are set up by him.

[Interjecting Commentator]

Right.

[Wendell Marsh]

He also sets up the tribunal in the kind of schema for Muslim citizenship in the colony. And between these three, you can kind of triangulate an understanding of Islam as one of debate, one of a fertile kind of intellectual life.

[Interjecting Commentator]

Right.

[Wendell Marsh]

And this kind of characteristic and feature of Muslim scholars who are confronting the ravages of the. An emergent capitalism with the slave trade and the kind of solutions they come up with, and the responses they come up with really define the kind of repertoires and just culture debate that Kamara inherits and that he very enthusiastically engages in as he comes of age shortly thereafter.

[Madina Cham]

So Pulmong Datsek, Hajo Martel and Louis Faidherbe as kind of the. Particularly the first two is a juxtaposition I had not thought about. And now you're making me think. Rethink some of the ways to think about this era and this territory. But you're right, I guess these three characters are instrumental and what they represent also as archae. I don't want to reduce them to archetypes, but what they represent instrumental to understanding the world that Sheikh Musakamara is born into and works in.

[Wendell Marsh]

And just to elaborate a little bit, right. So Hajomar, you know, Zahaji, he goes. He crosses that. That Sahelian route, and then he, you know, crosses over and goes north to Egypt and eventually into the Arabian Peninsula. But sec, in response to Hajmar, actually goes to the French and say, you know what? We need our own haji, right. To combat the propaganda of Hajj Omar and actually the French fund sex Hajj. And this is actually the beginning of an entire institution of the Hajj in Senegal, and it becomes also a diplomatic mission for the colony. So just to kind of illustrate a little bit what I mean by how we can use these figures to think through that. That context.

[Madina Cham]

No, absolutely. And I think it, again, it picks a really clear picture of some of the different forces at play in shaping the region and shaping it in that moment.

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[Madina Cham]

Hi Mel. Hello.

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[Madina Cham]

I'm hopeful that I'll find true love.

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[Wendell Marsh]

Mel has never been exposed to women like us.

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[Madina Cham]

I want to turn to another aspect of your book. It's not an aspect in many ways. It's the core of the book, actually, because as you're saying, you introduce these various readings of Kamara, but this is not actually an intellectual biography of Shahmusa Qamara that you're writing. It's also not a reception history of how different peoples in different epochs have read and understood his work, although the book does all of that. But that's not quite what it is at its core. This is a book about philology. Philology which you, again, you open the book with, which you describe as the love of study and which you also describe, I'm paraphrasing you, I think, as an under recognized practice in the tradition of black thought. I'm going to want us to linger on this a little bit and to really, really understand where you're getting at with this, to really understand what Wendell means with philology and how he deploys it in his book. I've actually asked him to read an excerpt from his book explaining exactly what philology is, how he understands it, and the power that this concept has had for collective liberation. All right, I can go ahead and read this.

[Wendell Marsh]

Philology has often been thought of as either a contemporary technical discipline or an antiquated soft science that ordered human difference in racial and religious hierarchies in a time better left in the past, that is, philology was a quintessentially colonial form of knowledge. But if we approach it differently, as a human tradition across time and cultural difference, as indeed the love of study, we might better appreciate what the textual attitude has meant in places as diverse as Malcolm X's prison cell and Kamaran's riverside village at the edge of the French colonial empire. Once prized for what it could do and then dismissed as irrelevant, philology now returns as a vitally human orientation toward the world. In this account, considering philology as a particular form of knowledge has been a way to track developments in the organization of knowledge more broadly. Unburdened from the work of representing reality, philology as the love of study and the cultivation of the textual attitude promises a future for the humanities beyond the world slavery and colonization made. Thus, the story of the Senegalese Muslim scholar Sheikh Moussa Kamara, who devoted his life to. To reading and producing monumental texts that were initially celebrated but eventually disregarded before being retrieved by postcolonial intellectuals, provides a parable of the rise, fall and return or the fate of the humanities.

[Madina Cham]

All right, so before we recorded the podcast, I told you this was the most Wendell paragraph ever. And that is why I needed to hear it in your voice. Yeah, really?

[Wendell Marsh]

Because so verboten and convoluted.

[Madina Cham]

Those are your words. I did not say that.

[Wendell Marsh]

Extra. We can just call it extra.

[Madina Cham]

Yeah, you're a little extra in the sense. And I really mean, you know, we've known each other for several years now, because I think at the core of it, you're the person I know the most who lives a textual life. And reading the book and thinking back about. About many of our discussions, but also just how I see you moving in the world, I was like, yeah, this tracks the fate of the humanities, which you see as represented in the parable of Kamara, but it goes way beyond him. The fate of the humanities is something to be hopeful about, if I read and understood correctly. And you have to be the last man standing in 2025 who actually has hope, who is actually hopeful about the fate of the humanities. Explain that to me.

[Wendell Marsh]

So I think first we have to distinguish the humanities as kind of a mode of being and a subjectivity from higher education as a particular institutional arrangement in a specific historical moment, right? Fundamentally, the crisis that we're kind of dancing around isn't really the crisis of the humanities. It's a crisis of higher education more broadly.

[Interjecting Commentator]

Right.

[Wendell Marsh]

A couple of weeks ago, Indiana University announced the closure of 100 programs, right? Not just African American studies in French and ballet, but basic science.

[Interjecting Commentator]

Right?

[Wendell Marsh]

Anything remotely theoretical. And in the coverage of this massive restructuring, the comments, I believe, of the governor Was that we need something more practical. Another instance that I read about recently was the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma, right. Which had an honors program that was modeled on the Great Books format, right? You know, Western civilization, from the Greeks to the freaks. So we can say, but more or less, right? That was the model, which is an important model, right? Great Books, Serious Engagement. There's an essay that was in Making the Rounds by the dean of that program, and she said that the closure of that program wasn't because of low student enrollment. It wasn't because it wasn't making money, actually. They had a robust student participation. That was a profitable program. And yet the board of governors and these folks who actually know nothing about higher education oftentimes come in and actually say these programs aren't doing what we need them to, right? And so we're in the midst of a hostile takeover of specific universities and of particular programs, right? And we see a conservative, mincing my words, a fascist regime that is conducting a pincher movement on elite universities from one side and targeting these kind of more public schools and restructuring their programs on the other to completely transform higher education as we know it, right? And that's not about the humanities as such, right? The humanities just comes to be like a stand in as a kind of, you know, example of uselessness. Having made that very important distinction, what I want to emphasize is the humanities is much more than a set of disciplines or a set of subjects especially, right. I want to, following a kind of religious studies perspective, approach the humanities as the commitment to reading again, right? So this is an attitude, right? This is a posture, this is an orientation toward the world through serious, prolonged and repeated readings, right? I talk about the textual attitude in the book that I take from Edu said it's a kind of passing reference in his Orientalism to develop a critique of Orientalism. But in the book, I kind of repurpose it to kind of think through how we might think of the place of the textual attitude in an algorithmic age that we're in, right. In a time when AI gives us the illusion of the obsolescence of knowledge, the warrant for serious engaged reading of study can't be kind of market metrics, can't even be some political utility, right? It actually is only justification, is a set of values that are profoundly traditional, dare I say, religious. And so, in short, yes, I'm very hopeful about the fate of the humanities not because of a calculation, right? Actually, and here I'm thinking about a recent podcast that the anthropologist and theorist Talal Assad gave where he kind of looked out on our current world, right, Seeing genocide in Gaza. And to that we can add the extraction in war in Congo and the wars in Sudan and the kind of gangs that terrorize Haiti, et cetera. If you kind of look at the evidence and were to make a calculation, we can only be pessimistic. There's no room for optimism. But hope, he argues, is distinct from optimism or pessimism, because hope isn't bad based on calculation, right? It is actually about a deeply profound commitment that is only founded on belief.

[Madina Cham]

In a very practical sense. I want to understand, as an educator, how you translate that in your practice as an educator.

[Wendell Marsh]

So the most important translation I can make is one that emphasize slowness, care, attention. In one of the main courses I teach, I teach here at Rutgers, the Intro to Africana Studies. And there's a kind of semester one and semester two sequence. But what I'm trying to do in both of those courses is practice close reading. Reading here might be a passage, it might be a painting, it might be a photograph, you know, some kind of object. And I give them a certain protocol for reading, right? Which I developed in studying Kamara, right? And his mode of commentary, right? Where you kind of confront an object or a claim, and the first thing you have to do is notice it, right? And then you describe it to kind of generate language around it. And then through the language itself, you might formulate a question. And in all my classes, that's what I'm trying to teach, this ndq, as I like to say, notice, describe, question. And I want to be clear. It's very basic, right? It's very simple, it's very straightforward, but it's much harder to do, Right, but. And it requires practice. And over the course of the semester, you can do it, right? But what I'm teaching there is this textual attitude, that engagement. But I'm also teaching something else to accompany the textual. I often structure the course around critical breath, housing, water, food, pleasure. And there I'm really influenced by Toni Morrison's Nobel lecture from 1993. She talks about dead language and living language in a lot of ways. I think if you return to that speech, she is announcing AI and she's announcing the problem and the risk of a philosophy of language that is completely complicit in power. So she talks about the language of journalism and of the state, state and ultimately of power. It's a dead language. And she contrasts that with a living language, right? And so by attending to critical needs, we read Last semester, for example, Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower.

[Interjecting Commentator]

Right.

[Wendell Marsh]

You know, after the fires in Altadena in January, a lot of people were kind of thinking about this text and the way it kind of prefigured what actually happened, you know, and we read that with an attention to the critical needs. These critical needs is that which is needed to sustain life. So between those kind of two moves that I make in any course, which is about close reading and textual engagement and the commitment to life, that's my whole substance of what I have to profess.

[Madina Cham]

And it's not just in the classroom. Right. We started off this discussion by explaining that we're sitting now at Express Newark, the place where you put together, co curated an exhibit, Powers of the Unseen. And we're recording this in late July 2025, which means people really only have a few days to come catch this exhibit. And I cannot beg everyone enough to come have a look, please. But please explain to us, what is this exhibit, Powers of the Unseen, and what's going on? And what are you trying to do in terms of also outside of the classroom, just opening up these forms of knowledge, these forms of reading, not just text, objects, art, into the community?

[Interjecting Commentator]

Yeah.

[Wendell Marsh]

Powers of the Unseen, at its core, is about the politics of representation, but it uses a core Sufi and more generally Islamic concept of the ghayb, or the unseen, as a way to kind of see through this problem.

[Interjecting Commentator]

Right.

[Wendell Marsh]

And so the, you know, traditionally, the ghaib appears in the Quran many times as a core concept, and it refers to fundamentally, the divine right and an entire realm that is beyond human perception.

[Interjecting Commentator]

Right.

[Wendell Marsh]

And there was an analogy with the. With the tradition of Muslim aesthetics, which has for, you know, hundreds of years been primarily what we would describe as Sufi, of trying to express the inexpressible.

[Interjecting Commentator]

Right.

[Wendell Marsh]

And so there was an analogy there with the problem of representation, or what we were calling the conundrum of representation today.

[Interjecting Commentator]

Right.

[Wendell Marsh]

So this exhibit wasn't so much about kind of Muslims in Africa and the Middle east and in Newark.

[Interjecting Commentator]

Right.

[Wendell Marsh]

It was a way of seeing the world through the concepts and aesthetic traditions that those experiences offer all of humanity. And so it consisted of about 13 international artists, 12 of which are alive.

[Interjecting Commentator]

Right.

[Wendell Marsh]

One deceased, the great Gordon Parks. But there were, you know, Chester Higgins and Yazi Ali Poor and Camila Janan Rashid and Malik Welly, Amina Cadous. So, you know, so many really phenomenal artists. And all of the works engage with photography as a medium.

[Interjecting Commentator]

Right.

[Wendell Marsh]

And conventionally, you know, photography is a Kind of, you know, spicy subject when it comes to Islamic thought.

[Interjecting Commentator]

Right.

[Wendell Marsh]

There's a whole robust debate about the permissibility of photography. But there were these very interesting experiments and engagements with the form itself that we wanted to explore with these artists. And there was a experience I had actually that I would like to share of a community member, a kind of an elder in the kind of Newark Muslim community who came kind of in the past few weeks and she visited the various exhibitions, Powers of the Unseen as well, one exhibit among several, part of the annual theme for Express Newark of Ritual. With that, my colleague Salamisha Tillet, kind of. And Aaliyah Allen, you know, directed and curated the whole kind of ensemble. But what the comment of this community member, she said, you know, when you come in, you see pictures of Newark area African American Muslims, and they were works by Nzinga Oyo in which these woven prayers where they're like these tapestries of prayer mats and family portraits. And the elder said, you know, oh, that's Islam, right? The first level. But then she said, when you come upstairs, you come into the gallery in which Powers of the Unseen is. You know, when you move through the other exhibitions, they take you from Islam to Iman or Faith, right. But then by the time you get into Powers of the Unseen, you arrive to Ihsan, right, Or Spiritual Excellence. And I was really struck by her reading of the exhibit, right, because by her own admission, she wasn't an art person. You know, she didn't really know how to engage with the space. But then she had this incredibly sophisticated reading grounded in the tradition of a self understanding of how to read it. And I could see she was really quite moved by the exhibit. And you know, accordingly, I was moved by her being moved that I couldn't imagine to have achieved such a thing. So I'm really grateful for the other curators, Alex Dika Segerman, O Ternai and Sandrine Collard. You know, we worked together for three years to put this exhibit on. It has been an incredible life experience.

[Madina Cham]

And what an amazing endorsement you received from this visitor, from this community member, really. I cannot urge people enough to come check out the exhibit with the time that's remaining. So there's been Powers of the Unseen and that's this exhibition that you've co curated that's occupied you for several years now. And it's coming to a close. The book Textual Islam, Africa and the Faith of the Humanities coming out in October, although I think people can pre order it right now with Columbia University Press.

[Wendell Marsh]

And there's a discount, a 20% discount cup. 20 if you buy it directly from the publisher.

[Madina Cham]

After these big projects, what's next? What does the future look like? What are you on? What are you working on? What are you plotting? What is next?

[Wendell Marsh]

As far as I can tell from every indication, the future looks African. And so I'm actually going to be moving to Muhammad 6 University Polytechnic in Morocco, where I'll be an associate professor of African Literature and philosophy, where I'll be continuing my work in global Black Studies, but grounding it on the continent in that kind of Walter Rodney tradition of grounding doing so on the continent. And I have a few different projects that I hope to take off, but I'm really interested in developing networks of collaboration of African based scholars, folks doing community engaged work alongside the, you know, the, the textual commitments that I have in study of Camara. I want to kind of make his work more widely available in conjunction with the Comrade Research center in Senegal. And I also am continuing work that I've been doing with the group Dacion d' Etude Critique in San Luis, Senegal, with Abdurrahman Sack and students and colleagues there, which is a decolonial collective. And so, you know, there's tons of work to do and I look forward to doing it on the continent and.

[Madina Cham]

I look forward to keeping up to, you know, what you'll be up to. This was not our first and it's definitely not our last conversation about your work and about these things that we've been thinking on for quite some time. And really, really I hope people will engage with your book. It's a beautiful book. There's a lot to be learned from it, both in terms of thinking but also in terms of practice. What you said about your work in the classroom and as an educator really now stuck with me. So again, I just hope that people will read the book, engage with it and read it slowly as we've learned and adopt the textual life and textual attitude. Thank you so much, Wendell, for joining us on the podcast. It was really, really such a pleasure to talk with you today.

[Wendell Marsh]

Thank you so much, Medina. This has been a g.