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Educating Muslim Women: The West African legacy of Nana Asmau 1793–1864 by Jean Boyd and Beverly Mack

EDUCATING MUSLIM WOMEN

Nana Asma’u (1793–1864) was a prolific Muslim scholar, poet, historian, and educator, a legend in her own lifetime.

That legend lives to this day; people still name their daughters after her; her poems are read and recited both privately and in public gatherings, and still move people profoundly; the memory of her remains a vital source of inspiration and hope.

Asma’u was a devout, learned Muslim who was also courageous and independent-minded, able to observe, record, interpret, and influence the major public events that happened around her.

Most important of all perhaps, her example as an educator is still followed: the system she set up in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, for the education of rural women, has not only survived in its homeland – through all the traumas and disruptions of the colonization of West Africa and the establishment of the modern state of Nigeria – but is also being revived and adapted elsewhere, notably among Muslim women in the United States.

In this book, we give an account of Asma’u’s upbringing and the critical junctures in her life, described from several perspectives: that of her own first-hand experiences as presented in her writings; that of those who witnessed her endeavors as her contemporaries; and that of travelers to the region. We have relied on a variety of sources, primary and secondary.

Of the former, the most important are Nana Asma’u’s own works, notably her poetry collected and preserved by her family in their home.

 For an outsider’s view of life at the time, we have referred primarily to nineteenth-century travel memoirs, especially those of Hugh Clapperton and Heinrich Barth.