zmo.de

The Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC) archives francophone West African newspaper articles, Islamic publications, archival documents, audiovisual records, and academic references on Islam and Muslim societies in Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Niger, Nigeria, and Togo. WORKFLOW: start with `search` (a concept or name), then `fetch` an id from the results to read the full text. The unified `search` matches each word of a multi-word query independently — every word must appear somewhere in the item — so 'pèlerinage Mecque' narrows results rather than failing; prefer a single concept per call. The finer search_* tools' `keyword` filter instead does ONE literal substring match, so for those search one term at a time ('pèlerinage', then 'Mecque'). When many items match, weigh result counts and AI abstracts before fetching full texts. Beyond search/fetch, finer tools exist (search_articles, search_publications, search_references, search_index, search_documents, plus get_* and list_*) with country, newspaper, subject, and date filters — prefer the `subject` filter over keywords for curated themes. For trends over time, call get_temporal_distribution (counts per year or month under the same filters) instead of paging through search results. All matching is accent- and case-insensitive; country filters take exact names (Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Niger, Nigeria, Togo). RESULTS & ERRORS: list/search tools return a pagination envelope — read `total_matches` to gauge scale without paging, and request a sane `limit` (an over-large one is capped visibly via `requested_limit` + `limit_warning`, never silently dropped). Enumerated filters (`country`, `polarity`, `centrality`, `index_type`) are validated: an invalid value returns {error, valid_values} to self-correct — an error to fix, not a finding — whereas a VALID value with 0 rows is a real absence (there is no Nigerian press, so country='Nigeria' on search_articles is genuinely empty). Free-text filters (newspaper, subject, author, reference_type, language) are NOT validated, so a typo there returns 0 silently — sanity-check them. On list_locations / list_persons, `country` means 'mentioned in records from that country' (not 'located there') and `frequency` is a collection-wide total; the response restates this in a `note`. REPORT LANGUAGE: write the final report, synthesis, and follow-up questions in the language of the user's question. If the question is mixed, use its dominant language. QUERY LANGUAGE: formulate keyword/substr search strings and concept keywords in FRENCH for press articles, publications, documents, and index searches, even when the user asks in another language (laïcité, confrérie, pèlerinage, enseignement islamique). Academic references are multilingual: search title/abstract keywords in French and English when relevant, while keeping metadata/filter values such as reference_type and language in French. Keep proper names and canonical filter values exact. TRANSLITERATION: Arabic-Islamic terms appear in FRENCH transliteration — search the French form and try variants: Tabaski or Aïd el-Kébir (not 'Eid al-Adha'); Korité or Aïd el-Fitr; Maouloud/Mouloud (not 'Mawlid'); charia (not 'sharia'); confrérie; Wahhabisme. CITATIONS: every result has a `url` field such as https://islam.zmo.de/s/afrique_ouest/item/28576 — always cite IWAC items using this full URL (rendered as a markdown link), never a short form like "art. #28576" or "item 28576". CAVEATS: coverage is uneven — Niger is thin (one newspaper, 2018 on) and Nigeria has NO press articles (audiovisual only), so disclose this in any cross-country claim. The press is ~96% francophone, reflecting Western-educated Muslim voices more than Arabic-trained (arabisant) leaders. Never present results as exhaustive — absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Polarity/sentiment fields are AI-derived, not editorial ground truth; press coverage reflects what was published, not necessarily what happened.