Feminist or Simply Feminine?:Reflections on the Works of Nana Asm?'u, a Nineteenth-Century West African Woman Poet, Intellectual, and Social Activist

Abstract

Nana Asma'u, a remarkable West African Islamic woman poet, intellectual, and social activist who flourished in the first half of the nineteenth century, offers an alternative to the popular stereotype that the Qur'an and the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad have historically sanctioned the abuse and low social status of women throughout the Islamic world. By focusing on the life Nana Asma'u, who distinguished herself as one of the most eloquent of the Fodiawa reformists, one can trace not only formation of the esthetic canons of West African Arabic literature but aspects of Islamic discourse in this literature as it relates to the role of women. The term Fodiawa refers to the dynasty of the great Islamic reformer Shaykh 'Uthman b. Muhammad Fodiye (1754-1817) Asma'u's fatherwhose early nineteenth-century jihad resulted in the radical transformation of the old Habe, or Hausa, states of present-day northern Nigeria from a domain of crass corruption and administrative incompetence into a powerful and well-ordered Islamic theocracy known as the Sokoto Caliphate. A forceful and determined champion of a radical return to the fundamentals of pure Islam, the shaykh lists the abuse of women among the major forms of unwholesome innovation introduced by generations of Islamic