Educating Muslim Women: The West African Legacy of Nana Asma’u 1793-1864

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Nana Asma’u was once a devout, learned Muslim who was once ready to observe, record, interpret, and influence the major public events that happened around her.

Daughters are still named after her, her poems still move people profoundly, and the memory of her remains an important source of inspiration and hope. 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 place of birth—through the traumas of the colonization of West Africa and the establishment of the up to date state of Nigeria—but could also be being revived and adapted somewhere else, notably among Muslim women in america.

This book, richly illustrated with maps and photographs, recounts Asma’u’s upbringing and critical junctures in her life from several sources, mostly unpublished: her own firsthand experiences presented in her writings, the accounts of contemporaries who witnessed her endeavors, and the memoirs of European travelers. For the account of her legacy the authors have depended on extensive field studies in Nigeria, and documents pertaining to the efforts of women in Nigeria and america, to develop a collective voice and establish their rights as women and Muslims in nowadays’s societies.

Beverley Mack is an associate professor of African studies at the University of Kansas. She is co-editor (with Catherine Coles) of Hausa Women in the Twentieth Century and co-creator (with Jean Boyd) of The Collected Works of Nana Asma’u, 1793–1864 and One Woman’s Jihad: Nana Asma’u Scholar and Scribe.

Jean Boyd is former principal research fellow of the Sokoto History Bureau and research associate of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. She is the author

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