Introduction: Epistemology and Corporeality in West African Islam

This introduction provides the context within which the conversation about Rudolph Ware's book is conducted. It identifies the key issues The Walking Qur'an addresses as well as the epistemological ruptures indispensable, according to Ware, to reading the phenomenological manifestations of Islam in West Africa within the epistemologies of the global intellectual economies of Islam, the colonial library, and the Atlantic slave trade and its abolition.