Njangaan: The Daily Regime of Qur'anic Students in Twentieth-Century Senegal

Abstract

In an essay on his life as a qur'ânic school student written in early 1940s, a young Senegalese man named Abdou Rahmane Diop voiced an educational ideal common in many Islamic cultures. According to a commandment of Qur'ân, he wrote, the teaching of Holy Book should not be monopolized. No sum should be asked of one who leaves family, money, and pleasures to come learn about God and his Prophet.1 Thus, in principle, learning Qur'ân should be free; but if it were, who would choose to teach? If qur'ânic education has ever truly been dispensed as an unpaid act of charity, this was not case in twentieth-century Senegal. There were many ways of remunerating a serin (teacher or cleric) for his educational services. One of most important ways was to consign a child to his care, thus giving him full authority over child's time and labor. In his essay, Diop called this process binding child to serin. Describing other live-in students in his large qur'ânic school, he wrote, often they come in 'lakhaskat' -that is to say, as people who have left their village or their region to go to another country and attend classes of an influential 'serigne'.2 In Wolof, laxas means to wrap, tie, or bind.3 This article explores changing perceptions and realities,of time and labor regimes of students who were bound to their serins during twentieth century. Another qur'ânic school student, Abdel Qader Fall, described such students as: real talibes [students, disciples]; they live with serigne.... Their parents, usually poor, confided them to holy man, marabout, ... convinced that their education would thereafter be in good hands. The serigne requires from them no remuneration. But they must cultivate his fields, procure wood for him, and do all domestic chores necessary to functioning of household. A painful existence, that of talibe. They are called N'Dianguanes [njangaan4}, which more or less means student.5 The sources used here to establish time and labor regimes of live-in qur'ânic students in early twentieth century are mainly Cahiers William Ponty like one written by Abdou Rahmane Diop quoted on previous page. The Cahiers William Ponty are take-home examinations on various topics written by advanced students from all over French West Africa who studied at Ecole Normale William Ponty. There are 791 Cahiers in all conserved at Institut Francais d'Afrique Noire in Dakar. Nine of Cahiers were written by Senegalese authors on subject of their experiences in qur'ânic schools. Some are undated; but all were written between 1940 and 1948 by students around age of twenty.6 They record practices and ideals that obtained in 1920s and 1930s and were written only a few years removed from experiences in question. These nine Cahiers on qur'ânic schooling comprise more than five hundred pages of manuscript with intimate details of qur'ânic study as it was lived in twenties and thirties. I also employ interviews executed by a research team from Organisation pour Ia Recherche Scientifique et Technique Outre-Mer (ORSTOM) between 1967 and 1969 in Bawol, central Senegal. Jean Copans, Phillipe Couty, and Jean Roch conducted social science research centered on agriculture, religion, and social order near Tuubaa (capital of Muridiyya Sufi order) in late 1960s. They left translated and lightly edited texts from their interviews at ORSTOM office in Dakar; these were later moved to IFAN for conservation. The extant texts record interviews with approximately fifty individuals, many of whom recounted and analyzed their experiences in qur'ânic schools at length. The experiences of daara (Wolof, qur'ânic school7) presented in these interviews sometimes reach back before 1900.8 I supplement these sources with interviews I conducted with former taalibes in cities and immediate hinterlands of Tiwaawan and Tuubaa in 2001-2002. …