Classical Arabic language is no strange to West and East Africa. In West Africa, particularly from Timbuktu ... to Yorubaland .... Markazu Taleemul Arabi and and its imeasurable impacts in spreading Arabic language throughout Africa and beyond has few comparison.
Ogunbiyi writes,
Yoruba language was all but settled by
1875 when the Church Missionary Society convened a conference
to put finishing touches to the Romanized Yoruba
orthography on which Samuel Ajayi Crowther and a host of
others (Christian clergymen and specialist linguists) had laboured
during the preceding 35 years. In spite of this seeming
fait accompli status of the Romanized Yoruba orthography,
a subdued feeling of resentment persisted among Muslim
scholars, especially those of them who were not immersed in
the Western education promoted by Christian missionary enterprise.
This subterranean feeling surfaced time and again
in form of direct and indirect attacks on the superimposition
of Christian/British colonial education over Arabic, the primary
tool of Muslim education, which preceded the entry of
Christianity into Yorubaland in the early 1840s.
Link:
http://hf.uib.no/i/smi/sa/14/14Ogunbiyi.pdf
