Nana Asma’u bint Usman ﵀

The daughter of the shehu, the sister of the caliph, and in her own right the most prolific female alima West Africa has ever produced. Quadrilingual, sixtyfold as an author, and architect of a women’s education system that two hundred years later still walks through northern Nigeria.

Life

She was born in 1793 in Degel, at about 13.03° north latitude and 5.25° east longitude, in the jama’a village where her father Usman dan Fodio ﵀ had by then been preaching, teaching and writing for nearly twenty years. Her mother was Maymuna, one of Usman’s ﵀ wives; her twin brother Hassan would die young. She was named after Asma’u bint Abi Bakr ﵂, the daughter of the first caliph, the woman who at the hijra to Medina brought food to her father and the Prophet ﷺ in the cave of Thawr. The name was no accident; in that house names were chosen with intention.

She grew up among books and voices. Her father, her uncles Abdullahi ﵀ and Muhammad Sambo ﵀ and her older brother Muhammad Bello ﵀ were all scholars, all poets, all teachers, and in that milieu she was treated as her brothers were treated: Qur’an first, then grammar, then fiqh, then hadith, then poetry. According to tradition she had memorized the Qur’an in full before her ninth birthday. She read Maliki fiqh in the Mukhtasar of Khalil ﵀, she read tafsir, she read tasawwuf in the Qadiri tradition of her father.

When Usman ﵀ left Degel for Gudu on 21 February 1804, she walked along, eleven years old. What she saw on that journey, the dust, the fear, the old people falling behind, her father on the camel surrounded by his followers, she would later set down in Wakar Gewaye, “The Path of Wanderings”: a historical poem in Fulfulde about the struggle of the Sokoto state, one of the rare primary sources for the jihad years from the perspective of someone who had been there.

She married Gidado dan Laima ﵀ around 1807, one of Bello’s ﵀ closest confidants and later waziri, chief vizier, of the caliphate. They had children, and Gidado ﵀ died before her. After her father’s death in 1817 her brother Bello ﵀ became the second Amīr al-Muʾminīn, and she became more than his sister: she became his secretary, his Arabic-to-Fulfulde translator, his political advisor, his sounding board. Every incoming letter in Arabic was rendered by her into Fulfulde so that Bello’s ﵀ replies struck the right tone; every outgoing letter received her editorial eye. The correspondence of Sokoto with the ulama of Kanem-Bornu, with el-Kanemi ﵀, with scholars in Timbuktu and in Egypt passed in large part through her hands.

She survived Bello ﵀ (died 1837) by twenty-seven years, and in those later decades she continued working under the third caliph, her nephew Aliyu Babba ﵀. She died in 1864 in Sokoto, seventy-one years old. Her grave lies in Sokoto, not far from her father’s.

Faith and culture

Nana Asma’u ﵀ wrote in four languages: Arabic, the lingua franca of the ulama; Fulfulde, the language of her mother and her Torodbe line; Hausa, the language of most of the caliphate’s subjects; and Tamasheq, the language of the Tuareg who lived in the Aïr desert north of Sokoto and who formed an important part of her correspondence. Not every text had four versions, but the larger works she deliberately made available in multiple languages, so that they could circulate in ajami script to the villages where no Arabic was read.

Her oeuvre comprises more than sixty surviving works, of which poetry, the qasidas and the madīḥ nabawī, forms the largest part: Sunago, Tabban Hakika, Wakar Gewaye, Godaben Gikku, Kitab al-Nasiha, and dozens of shorter risalat on tawhid, on fiqh, on mourning, on the duties of the believer. Wakar Gewaye, in Fulfulde and later also in Hausa ajami, is of the greatest historical importance, since she writes the founding history of Sokoto from the perspective of someone who was at Gudu, was at the victory over Gobir, was at the founding of Sokoto. It is the kind of eyewitness testimony that in most jihad traditions is monopolized by male chroniclers. Here it is by a woman.

Her greatest institutional contribution, however, is not a book but a network. Around 1830, in the years when Bello ﵀ was consolidating, she began to build a system that she, and later researchers, called the 'Yan Taru, “The Associates”, “Those Who Come Together”. It worked like this. Women from Sokoto and surrounding cities were trained by her in the basic principles of the faith: tawhid, prayer, fasting, basic fiqh in Maliki form, the life stories of the Prophet ﷺ and of female sahabiyat such as Khadija ﵂, Aisha ﵂, Fatima ﵂ and the early women warriors. These trained women, called jajis after the Hausa word for “leader”, then traveled back to the villages across the caliphate. There they gathered other women, often during the quieter hours of the agricultural calendar, and passed on what they had learned. They taught Islamic basic curriculum and household skills together, feeding, weaving, caring for the sick, spinning, because Nana Asma’u ﵀ understood that the one did not function without the other.

The jajis wore a distinctive hat, a malfa, so their status was recognizable. They were mobile, they traveled, and they returned periodically to Sokoto for further training. This was, documentarily attested, the earliest documented women-led religious education system in sub-Saharan Africa. It was no side project; it was the way the caliphate reached its female population, and Nana Asma’u ﵀ was its architect.

She taught at Wurno as well, the ribat that her brother Bello ﵀ founded about fifty kilometers northeast of Sokoto, where she held fieldwork sessions with her jajis. Degel, Gudu, Sokoto and Wurno lie within a radius of seventy kilometers, and within that small triangle a women’s education system was built that rolled out across the entire West African caliphate.

In her own work, in her Yearning for the Prophet (Begore) and in her Sunago (an elegy for her deceased sister Fadima), she speaks of faith as a domestic discipline and at the same time as a public duty. She never separated the two. Women’s knowledge was no supplement to men’s knowledge; it was the same Qur’an, the same sunna, the same juridical tradition, with attention to the concrete lives in which it was lived.

Legacy

Her collected work was first systematically published between 1989 and 1997 by Jean Boyd and Beverly Mack, in The Caliph’s Sister (Boyd, 1989) and The Collected Works of Nana Asma’u (Mack and Boyd, 1997). Before their work she was virtually unknown in the West. Within northern Nigeria and Niger she had never been forgotten: her qasidas were recited by jajis generation after generation, her pedagogical texts remained in use in Qur’an schools, and her Wakar Gewaye was learned by heart by children.

The 'Yan Taru network has lasted to this day. Until the second half of the twentieth century it operated in an adapted form in Sokoto, Kano, Katsina, Zaria and numerous smaller places, and the jajis, now sometimes in formal malama roles and sometimes informally, continued to teach women in the villages. After 1999, with the partial reintroduction of shari’a legislation in twelve northern Nigerian states, her legacy was made publicly visible again. Schools were named after her, and her grave in Sokoto became, and remains, a pilgrimage site for female scholars from across West Africa.

But the legacy has also suffered damage. The Boko Haram insurgency, which has devastated northeastern Nigeria since 2009, struck at education, and at women’s education above all, by no accident. In Borno and adjacent states, madrasas that stood in the 'Yan Taru tradition were destroyed, jajis were killed or driven out, and the network that Nana Asma’u ﵀ had built two hundred years earlier was systematically pulled apart in precisely those regions where it sat deepest. That this attack targeted her project is no footnote; it was strategic. A movement that took Boko haram, “western education is forbidden”, as its slogan understood very well that it was precisely Nana Asma’u’s ﵀ system, female ulama, mobile, literate, that embodied the opposite vision. The echo runs through into the twenty-first century, in the form of an as yet unfinished struggle.

Her existence answers a claim that is still made. When someone argues that Islam excluded women from scholarship, that the West African Islamic tradition was a male affair, that teaching is an import product from Europe, then Nana Asma’u ﵀ is the direct counter-argument. She is a representation rather than an exception: the most visible point of a tradition in which Fatima al-Fihri ﵀ founded a university in Fez in 859, in which female muhaddithat in Mamluk Cairo carried hadith chains, and in which Bangladeshi huffaz and Senegalese murshidat continue the work to this day. Her scholarly work was integral to how the Sokoto Caliphate functioned, not despite her gender, but because the caliphate knew that a state without women’s knowledge is a half state.

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Uncertainties:

The birth year 1793 is generally accepted, though a single source gives 1792. The exact marriage date with Gidado ﵀ is uncertain, and between 1807 and 1811 is the usual range. The oeuvre size of “more than sixty” follows the Boyd and Mack catalogue, while some later attributions remain disputed. Dating the beginning of the 'Yan Taru as a formalized network to “around 1830” is reasonable but not firm, since the network grew organically. The coordinates of Wurno are approximate (~13.2°N, 5.4°E): the modern town exists, but the historical ribat location within it has not been precisely established. The Boko Haram-targeted destruction of 'Yan Taru successor institutions is documented for specific schools in Borno, though the scope of the damage to the network as a whole varies by source.

Sources

• Nana Asma’u bint Usman ﵀, Wakar Gewaye (Fulfulde, 1256/1840–1841), Sunago, Godaben Gikku, Tabban Hakika, Kitab al-Nasiha, Begore (Yearning for the Prophet) and the collected qasidas, among them the Arabic poems gathered in al-Durra al-‘asma’: her own works, on which the biography draws, with Wakar Gewaye as the eyewitness account of the hijra and the jihad years.
• Muhammad Bello ﵀, Infāq al-Maysūr, her brother’s chronicle, from which the dating of the hijra from Degel to Gudu on 10 Dhu’l-Qa’da 1218 derives.
• Murray Last, The Sokoto Caliphate, Longmans, Green and Co, London 1967, pp. xxxiv, xxxviii, 23–24, 60, 77, 81, 149–151, 156, 166, 184, 211, 221–223.
  • pp. 23–24, 60, 81: the hijra from Degel to Gudu on 10 Dhu’l-Qa’da 1218, Tuesday 21 February 1804, according to Bello ﵀ and Abdullahi ﵀, with Asma’u ﵀ leaving Degel after the Shaykh ﵀; the death of the Shaykh ﵀ on 20 April 1817 in Sokoto; the death of Bello ﵀ on 26 October 1837 and the succession of Abu Bakr Atiku ﵀ and Ali b. Bello ﵀ (1837–1859).
  • pp. 149–151, 184: her marriage shortly after the jihad to Gidado dan Laima ﵀, the first Vizier under Bello ﵀ (1817–1842); her mother Maimuna as the senior wife of the Shaykh ﵀, her twin brother al-Hasan ﵀ who died young, the Tamasheq she picked up already at Degel and the five sons she bore Gidado ﵀; her death twelve years after Gidado’s ﵀ and their burial in the house of the Shaykh ﵀ in Sokoto.
  • pp. 77, 156, 166: Wurno as the last of Bello’s ﵀ fortified camps within his system of ribats; her part, with the caliph Ali b. Bello ﵀, in the decision that Gidado ﵀ would not return to the vizierate after 1842, and her intervention with the caliph Ahmad ﵀ to have her son Abdullah ﵀ appointed Dangaladima, evidence of her political weight into her final years.
  • pp. xxxiv, xxxviii, 211, 221–223: her Fulfulde poem on the hijra and the jihad, composed in 1256/1840–1841 and 135 lines long, on which Abd al-Qadir b. al-Mustafa ﵀ based his Mausufat al-sudan; at least seven Arabic poems in al-Durrat al-‘asma’ and three books in Arabic, besides poems in Fulfulde and Hausa; her help in ordering the traditions about the Shaykh ﵀; her year of death 1280/1864; her standing as one of the most learned of the Shaykh’s ﵀ children, considered a wali, the last survivor of the emigrants from Degel, whose poems are still sung by women in Fulani areas.
• Ibraheem Sulaiman, The African Caliphate: The Life, Works and Teaching of Shaykh Usman dan Fodio, The Norwich Press, 2008, pp. 171, 190, 277, 281–283.
  • pp. 190, 277, 281–283: the hijra to Gudu on 10 Dhu’l-Qa’da 1218, Tuesday 21 February 1804, and the death of the Shehu ﵀ on 20 April 1817 in Sokoto; the Shehu’s ﵀ commitment to the education of women, Asma’u ﵀ as the teacher of a generation of women and through them many children, the title of honour Sayyidatunā, the successive caliphs who looked to her for guidance and her poems still heard today from the lips of women all over Nigeria.
• Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas, 15th anniversary edition, New York University Press, New York 2013, pp. 24, 288: the West African tradition of learned and teaching women, among them a daughter of Usman dan Fodio ﵀, and the Shehu’s ﵀ complaint against men who keep their wives and daughters in ignorance.
• Michael A. Gomez, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2018, p. 294: Usman dan Fodio ﵀ and Muhammad Bello ﵀ as adherents of the Qadiriyya and founders of the Sokoto Caliphate.
• Jean Boyd, The Caliph’s Sister: Nana Asma’u 1793–1865, Teacher, Poet and Islamic Leader, Frank Cass, London 1989, the pioneering study of her life, her teaching network of the 'Yan Taru and the jajis, and her role as adviser to the caliphs.
• Beverly Mack and Jean Boyd (eds.), The Collected Works of Nana Asma’u, Daughter of Usman 'dan Fodiyo 1793–1864, Michigan State University Press, 1997, the edition of her collected works on which the size of the oeuvre and the titles in this biography rest.