Nana Asma’u

Works

• c. 1837Sufi Women

  A poem of c. 1836/37, transmitted in Fulfulde and Hausa versions, that lists holy women from the time of the Prophet to the women of the Sokoto community, as models for the women she taught.

Position

Nana Asma’u saw education as a religious duty for women as well as men, continuing her father’s teaching on the subject. Her method was poetry in the languages people spoke: verse could be memorised, sung and passed on by women who could not read, and so it carried religious knowledge, moral guidance, history and practical advice into households. In “Sufi Women” (1837) she listed holy women from the time of the Prophet to the women of her own community, offering them as models of piety, learning and service. Her historical poems record the jihad and the early years of the caliphate, and her elegies commemorate members of her family and community. She worked within the norms of the Sokoto community and within the Qadiriyya Sufi tradition, and her teachers’ network relied on the support of the caliphate. Scholars such as Jean Boyd and Beverly Mack present her as a central figure of Muslim women’s scholarship in West Africa; others caution against reading her through modern feminist categories. Her work shows how learning in a society with a strong oral culture could be organised and passed on by women.

Life & context

Nana Asma’u bint Uthman ibn Fudi was born in 1793 in Degel in Gobir, a daughter of Usman dan Fodio, and was named after Asma, the daughter of Abu Bakr. She grew up in a family of scholars in which girls, too, learned the Qur’an and the Islamic sciences, and she came to write in Arabic, Fulfulde and Hausa and to know Tamasheq. As a child she experienced the emigration of 1804 and the years of the jihad. She married Gidado, who became vizier of her brother Muhammad Bello. After her father’s death in 1817 she was an adviser to Bello, who ruled the caliphate until 1837, corresponded with scholars across the region and wrote elegies, histories, religious and medical poems. Around the 1830s she organised the ’Yan Taru (“those who come together”), a network of women teachers led by appointed leaders (jaji), who learned her poems in Sokoto and carried them to women in the countryside. She died in Sokoto in 1864. Her collected works were edited and translated by Jean Boyd and Beverly Mack in 1997; schools and institutions in northern Nigeria bear her name, and the ’Yan Taru still exist.

Further main works

• Elegy for Muhammad Bello (1837)
• Poems on the history of the jihad and the caliphate
• Didactic poems for the ’Yan Taru
• Collected Works of Nana Asma’u (ed. and trans. J. Boyd and B. Mack, 1997)