Al-Hajj Modibo Diarra, a new actor of the Malian religious landscape, since 1987 has been publishing several booklets popularizing Islamic doctrine in Bambara language. These also contain translations from Arabic (including excerpts from the Qur’an). This initiative ties relationships between languages, oral and written forms of communication, genres of knowledge, and networks in West African, especially Malian, Islam. The Islamic bookshops in Bamako serve as places of publication and circulation while the village where the writer lives is including the actual writing of these works. The milieu of urban Islamic bookshops proves to work as a link for a phenomenon which remains, though, fundamentally rural, both in its origins and in its target. However, this very phenomenon must also be understood as a result of the growing integration of a milieu so far considered impervious into different kinds of networks that go beyond a merely local setting: the author/translator’s biography considered here is a case in point. The impact of this Bambara Islamic literature is discussed, alongside its implications upon local representations and reconfigurations of Islamic knowledge.