The poems the shelf never saw

Claim (verbatim)

Wolofal — Wolof written in Arabic script — carries a large devotional and didactic literature, above all the Murid and Tijani poetic corpus of authors such as Moussa Ka, Mor Kayre, and Serigne Mbaye Diakhaté, documented in Fallou Ngom's Muslims beyond the Arab World (2016) and digitized piecemeal by the Boston University African Ajami Library and EAP projects in Senegal. Yet this corpus is structurally absent from the manuscript record as classically conceived, and the mechanism is custody plus script: Wolofal texts lived and live in the daara and the disciple's household, copied for use rather than deposited in scholarly or state libraries, and when they did reach catalogues they met the same Arabist filter that could not see the vernacular — so a living, quantitatively large literature sits almost entirely outside the institutional shelf, its size legible only when whole household collections are imaged. Prediction: for twentieth-century Senegambian Sufi textual production, the ratio of Wolofal to Arabic works held in formal institutional catalogues (national and university libraries, colonial-era deposits) will be under one to five, while community and family digitization that images whole household collections will return a Wolofal-to-Arabic ratio at least three times higher — the gap between the two ratios measuring the shelf's blindness to the vernacular (primary clause: household digitization returns a Wolofal share at least threefold the institutional share; the verdict follows it). Kill: the Boston University African Ajami Library digital collections and the Endangered Archives Programme Senegal projects (for example EAP334 and its successors) for the household side, set against the formal holdings recorded in the West African Arabic Manuscript Database (AMMS) and the IFAN-Cheikh Anta Diop catalogues in Dakar; the comparison is a metadata count, parts of it not yet assembled in one place.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: for twentieth-century Senegambian Sufi textual production, the ratio of Wolofal to Arabic works held in formal institutional catalogues (national and university libraries, colonial-era deposits) will be under one to five, while community and family digitization that images whole household collections will return a Wolofal-to-Arabic ratio at least three times higher — the gap between the two ratios measuring the shelf's blindness to the vernacular (primary clause: household digitization returns a Wolofal share at least threefold the institutional share; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Boston University African Ajami Library digital collections and the Endangered Archives Programme Senegal projects (for example EAP334 and its successors) for the household side, set against the formal holdings recorded in the West African Arabic Manuscript Database (AMMS) and the IFAN-Cheikh Anta Diop catalogues in Dakar; the comparison is a metadata count, parts of it not yet assembled in one place.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

Ngom's Muridiyya work is exactly the scholarship documenting the large Wolofal devotional corpus (Moussa Ka, Mor Kayre, Mbaye Diakhaté) and its household custody outside institutional shelves — the discipline's named describe-not-count case. But the primary clause is a two-ratio comparison: that whole-household digitization returns a Wolofal-to-Arabic share at least threefold the institutional share. The conjecture concedes the comparison's parts are 'not yet assembled in one place,' and no published figure sets the Boston University African Ajami Library / EAP household counts against the IFAN and institutional holdings. The phenomenon is described; the threefold gap is un-run.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.