The history of Arabic writing spans a period of eight hundred years in sub-Saharan Africa. Hundreds of thousands of manuscripts in Arabic or Ajami (African languages written with the Arabic script) are preserved in public libraries and private collections in sub-Saharan Africa. This Islamic Library includes historical, devotional, pedagogical, polemical and political writings, most of which have not yet been adequately studied. This book, Non-Europhone Intellectuals, studies the research carried out on the Islamic library and shows that Muslim intellectuals, in West Africa in particular, have produced huge literature in Arabic and Ajami. It is impossible to reconstitute this library completely. As the texts have existed for centuries and are mostly in the form of unpublished manuscripts, only some of them have been transmitted to us while others have perished because of poor conservation. Efforts toward collecting them continues and the documents collected thus far attest to an intense intellectual life and important debates on society that have been completely ignored by the overwhelming majority of Europhone intellectuals. During European colonial rule and after the independence of African nations, Islamic education experienced some neglect, but the Islamic scholarly tradition did not decline. On the contrary, it has prospered with the proliferation of modern Islamic schools and the rise of dozens of Islamic institutions of higher learning. In recent years, the field of Islamic studies in West Africa has continued to attract the attention of erudite scholars, notably in anthropology and history, who are investing in learning the languages and working on this Islamic archive. As more analytical works are done on this archive, there will be continued modification in terms of the debate on knowledge production in West Africa.

"This book was written as a working paper when I was Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa at Northwestern University"--Acknowledgements.

This volume continues to build on the relationship between the Research in Management Consulting series and the intervener-researchers at the Socio-Economic Institute for Firms and Organizations (ISEOR) in Ecully, France, extending that partnership to our recent work with the French Foundation for Management Education (FNEGE), a foundation dedicated to closing the gap between the teaching and practice of management in France. As part of the Foundation’s multifaceted activities—which range from seminars and an advanced training initiative for French doctoral students to joint programs with international organizations an associations—FNEGE partnered with ISEOR to sponsor a series of workshops on developing high quality intervention-research. This volume is one of the results from that endeavor. Although intervention-research helps to uncover valuable insight into organizational dynamics and performance, the challenge of capturing and disseminating that insight to both academics and practitioners is entrenched in the rigor-relevance debate. While we are witnessing increased calls for “actionable knowledge,” this ideal, unfortunately, remains a rather elusive concept as critics contend either that rigorous academic research falls well-short of relevance to the practitioner world or research that proves to be valuable to practitioners falls short of the rigor expected in academic life. This volume is intended to help bridge that divide. Drawing on the FNEGE-ISEOR intervention-research workshop, the volume contains 18 chapters that explore the intervention-research process, from initial conceptualization, to implementation, to publication. The volume will be published in French and English

Le bassin du Congo représente 70 % de la couverture forestière du continent africain et abrite une grande partie de la biodiversité de l’Afrique. Historiquement, la pression exercée sur les forêts du bassin du Congo a été comparativement faible, mais des signes indiquent que cette situation ne devrait pas durer, car la pression sur les forêts et les autres écosystèmes s’accroît. La reconnaissance croissante de l’importance des forêts pour endiguer le changement climatique a introduit un nouvel élan dans la lutte contre la déforestation et la dégradation de la forêt tropicale. La plupart des pays de bassin du Congo sont activement engagés dans un processus de préparation des cadres et stratégies-cadre capable de créer des incitations à « réduire les émissions dues à la déforestation et à la dégradation des forêts », encourageant « la conservation et la gestion durable des forêts ainsi que l’amélioration de la séquestration du carbone par les forêts » (REDD+). Ils travaillent ainsi d’ores-et-déjà à renforcer leur capacité de suivi des émissions liées aux forêts, à améliorer la gouvernance des forêts, à promouvoir le développement et à réduire la pauvreté, tout en protégeant les ressources naturelles de la région. Un exercice de deux ans visant à analyser et comprendre en profondeur la dynamique de la déforestation dans le bassin du Congo est résumé dans le présent rapport, qui s’organise comme suit : Le chapitre 1 donne une vue d’ensemble des forêts du bassin du Congo • Le chapitre 2 présente la dynamique de la déforestation et résume les résultats d’une analyse secteur par secteur des grands facteurs de déforestation dans le bassin du Congo. • Le chapitre 3 fournit une actualisation de l’état des négociations REDD+ dans le cadre de la CCNUCC et des implications pour les pays du bassin du Congo.

The papers in this volume were prepared for Consciousness and Inquiry, a conference jointly sponsored by the National Museum of Man and the Canadian Ethnology Society, and held in London, Ontario in 1981. The papers focus on interests and concerns which characterize contemporary Canadian ethnology.