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Beverly Mack and Jean Boyd, One Woman?s Jihad: Nana Asma?u, Scholar and Scribe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), ISBN 0253213983
This is a carefully researched book which benefits from the longstanding interest of both Jean Boyd and Beverly Mack in studying the poetry of women in a part of Africa better known for its high rate of female illiteracy than for women?s scholarly production. For this reason it is essential reading for those who seek to see beyond the surface, beyond the simplified depictions of the development industry, and to travel into the legendary past and consider the complexities of faith and culture, and the particular dynamics of cultural production by women.
Nana Asma?u has long been an important figure in the lives of women all over the vast West African savannah lands. For intellectuals she has a particular importance: as neither a military leader nor a trader in guns and slaves but as a female scholar - a poet and scribe acclaimed across the nineteenth-century Islamic world. For girls pursuing Islamic education, or indeed any other form of literacy, this particular ? 'ft intellectual has long provided a powerful counterweight to the highly conservative brand of Islam propagated by the Saudi-oriented Muslim elite of northern Nigeria. The fact is that the patriarchs of contemporary Nigerian Islam still need to be reminded that their religion allows women as well as men to study and participate in religious and political affairs, because they have often unashamedly perverted laws and practices to suit themselves. Despite the best efforts of progressive political activists such as the late Mal lam Aminu Kano, those who can afford to insist on keeping their wives in purdah, while ordinary men live in the hope of marrying off their daughters to moneyed elder men of the umma, often when very young. Many of the male elite practise polygamy in curiously modern forms that run quite contrary to the QuNEnic injunctions that enjoin men to marry more than one wife only when they can be certain of adhering to the stringent conditions spelt out by the Prophet.
In post-colonial Nigeria, religion is a complicated business. Within the Muslim half of the population (nobody knows the true proportions) there are those who resist the...