School of Humanities and Sciences
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Abdulbasit Kassim
IDEAL Provostial Fellow/Lecturer
BioAbdulbasit Kassim is an IDEAL Provostial Fellow at the Department of African and African American Studies. He is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in the histories and cultures of Muslim societies with a geographical focus on West Africa and the African Diaspora. 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 ideas that circulated in Muslim societies in West Africa and the African Diaspora. His research and pedagogical focus aim to bridge the Afrocentric, Black Atlantic, and Black Mediterranean models of African and African Diaspora Studies by synthesizing the historical interconnections between the peoples and cultures of Africa and the experiences of African diasporic communities as they adapt to new lives in the Atlantic World, the Ottoman Empire, and the Mediterranean Arab World and Lands of Islam.
Abdulbasit's current book project, Requiem for a West African Caliphate: A Social and Intellectual History of Islamicate Societies in Hausaland and Bornu, c. 1450-2015, examines the continuities and changes in the longue durée of successive waves of Islamic reform, counter-reform, dissidence, rebellion, and jihad in Muslim West Africa. The nine-chapter book tracks the textual practices, discursive productions, and doctrinal interpretations that reformers and dissidents in Hausaland and Bornu have debated, enunciated, and deployed to legitimize their projects of reform and jihad from the mid-fifteenth century to the early twenty-first century. His second book project, From the Black Atlantic to Sankoré, examines the multi-directional travel, global networks, and migration of Muslims of African descent from the Black Atlantic and the African Diaspora to the ancient 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.
Abdulbasit is the co-editor of the book The Boko Haram Reader: From Nigerian Preachers to the Islamic State (Oxford University Press and 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, Senegal, Niger, Mali and Sudan. His work has received support from the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the 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 Working Group.
Before coming to Stanford, Abdulbasit completed his PhD at Rice University. He held a postdoctoral research fellowship at New York University’s Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora (CSAAD). 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 at the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa (ISITA) and the Program of African Studies (PAS) at Northwestern University. He received an MA from Keele University Newcastle-under-Lyme Staffordshire in England and a BSc from Ahmadu Bello University Zaria in Nigeria.
