EAST LANSING, Mich. – A new federal grant will help an Michigan State University history professor and colleagues to document the lives of Muslims in West Africa. 

“As we all know, 9/11 has had a tremendous impact on the world and the United States and brought Islam and Islam practice to the forefront,” said David Robinson, University Distinguished Professor. “But it’s obvious that (the terrorists) were on a fringe that some people would not consider Islam at all. This has driven some of us in the scholarly and teaching community to be concerned about how people in this country and elsewhere understand Islam and Muslims and Islamic practice.”

The three-year, $250,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities will allow Robinson and MATRIX: The Center for Humane, Arts, Letters and Social Studies Online to build a digital repository of information for scholars, researchers, teachers and students.

MATRIX digital librarian Catherine Foley hopes the online library will ease the exchange of ideas among scholars and help the public gain a better understanding of the Islamic faith and Muslims. Islam is the world’s second-largest religion after Christianity, with more than 1.5 billion members.

Researchers will gather photos and audio of Muslims interviewed in West Africa and present it to MATRIX, which will create a digital media library with the material.

“One of the interesting parts of this project is that the scholars are going to be collecting resources; several of them are doing oral interviews in the field right now,” Foley said. “They will analyze this stuff, analyze these materials and provide sort of a synthesis of these. Typically, this type of scholarship ends up going into an academic journal” that is read by only experts and specialists.

MATRIX applies new technologies to the teaching and research of humanities and social sciences. The center merges research in the humanities into developing online educational and academic resources.

MATRIX has developed a Web site filled with video, audio interviews, photos, historical documents and student activities on apartheid in South Africa (www.overcomingapartheid.msu.edu), a digital repository of shows from 40 years of the Detroit-based public television program, “American Black Journal,” (www.matrix.msu.edu/~abj) and an online gallery of images and audio devoted to the 1936-37 sit-down strike in Flint (www.historicalvoices.org/flint ).

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