Dr. Ali Diakite is a Cataloger for West African Manuscripts. He joined HMML in 2019. A native of Burkina Faso, he holds a MA from the Université de Bamako Department of Arabic Studies, Bamako, Mali, and a MA and PhD from the École Normale Supérieure, Lyon, France. Prior to joining HMML, Diakite was at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign working on a postdoctoral fellowship financed by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, Germany. He is co-editing, with Dr. Mauro Nobili, a definitive critical edition of the Tarikh al-Fattash and Tarikh ibn al-Mukhtar, two important chronicles of West African history to be published with Oxford University Press.

As a scholar and native speaker of Arabic, Fulfulde, and Bambara, Diakite brings his skills and knowledge of these texts to his role at HMML. Diakite is part of an international community of scholars who are shaping the field of West African manuscript studies and standardizing metadata for authors, titles, and Arabic scripts unique to this tradition. His cataloging work will allow the hundreds of thousands of Timbuktu manuscripts digitized by HMML to be shared online.

What he enjoys most about his work: “To participate in disseminating knowledge about West Africa throughout the world and be part of a new project with a fantastic team.”

Stories by Dr. Ali Diakite

•   Eclipses in Early Muslim History — Between Myth and Reality
•   Nasheeds from West Africa: Uniting Texts and Sound
•   A Scribble of Scribes: Men, Women, and Children Copyists Across Mali’s Manuscript Collections
•   Why so Many Fragments? Incomplete Manuscripts in the Timbuktu Collections.
•   Smoking in the Desert — Between Supporters and Opponents of Tobacco
•   The Story of the Talking Camel and the Exploits of Ali Genre in West Africa
•   Travelers and Texts Crossing the Sahara
•   Medical Texts From Timbuktu — Local Pharmacological Remedies with Qur’anic Verses
•   Yeɗi Sanba Ɓooyi, a Fulani Scholar and Poet
•   Creating Cataloging Standards for Regional Names
•   Postscript — A Fāʼidah
•   Database Partnership Expands Access to West African Manuscripts