One who studies

That line was the whole of this site’s About page for two years. It was a note to myself, and it is still the best description of what happens here.

The reading room is kept by Abd al-Rahim Ferrand. I am not a historian and I am not a scholar of Islam. I am a Muslim on the Carolina coast who builds websites, and who kept meeting this history in footnotes: a king in Ethiopia, a library in Mali, a man in a North Carolina jail writing on the wall in Arabic.

The site began late in 2023 as a notebook, while I was learning the basics of my own faith. Those first pages are now the guides in The Faith They Carried. The rest grew out of a simple discovery, which is that much of this story is local. Omar ibn Said stepped off a ship in Charleston. The rice of the Carolina coast was grown by people from Senegambia, and some of them prayed five times a day.

So this is a student’s shelf, put in order for other students: people preparing a halaqa or a Friday talk, teachers building a lesson, new Muslims wondering whether anyone like them was here before, and neighbors who are simply curious.

The rules of the room

1. Every claim comes from a named source, listed at the foot of its page and gathered on the sources page.
2. Where the sources are tradition, the page says tradition. Where historians disagree, the page says that too.
3. Verses and hadith are quoted only from verified text, with their references. Nothing sacred is paraphrased as a quotation.
4. No pictures are invented. Every image is a historical work in the public domain, with its origin recorded.
5. The drafting and layout were done with the help of an AI system, then checked line by line against the sources. The responsibility for errors is mine.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, I want to know. Write to corrections@ferrand.africa with the page and the source that says otherwise. Corrections are made in the text and noted on the sources page.