Body, text, and talk in Maroua Fulbe Qur'anic schooling

Abstract

In this article, I present a language socialization approach to the study of Qur'anic schooling. Integrating insights from holistic study of the community and the institution, analysis of video recordings of Qur'anic school interaction, and video playback and interviews with community members, I describe the apprenticeship of Fulbe children into Qur'anic orality and literacy as a gradual transfer of responsibility for rendering the sacred text. I describe the organization of Qur'anic schooling at three levels: the stages of the curriculum, the phases of a lesson, and the turn-by-turn organization of child–teacher interaction. I present fine-grained analysis of video to illustrate how teachers and children used specific practices of body positioning, pointing, and eye gaze in conjunction with the written text and utterances in Arabic and Fulfulde to manage the transfer of the text during the first phase of a lesson. I then discuss perspectives on these multimodal practices articulated by Fulbe concerning how these practices contributed to the achievement of desired outcomes of Qur'anic schooling. I conclude by discussing how the language socialization perspective and attention to multiple modalities increase our understanding of Qur'anic schooling as an activity setting in which Muslim subjectivities come into being.