Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 2, No. 1 | Scholarship for Social Change, page 4 (low bandwidth)

To do research for her doctoral dissertation—Wa’ko’kin Mata: Hausa Women’s Oral Poetry—Mack traveled on a Fulbright grant in 1979 to Kano to find, record and analyze Hausa women’s poetry. In pursuit of her goal, she spent a great deal of time at the emir’s palace, drawn by the emir’s female “praise singer,” who entertained the court and preceded him in public places with lavish praise. Mack learned that praise singing also includes oral poetry and was told about other women who also wrote and recited poetry. “What I found,” she said, “was poetry written in a religious tradition that served to inform people about their history, religion and current events. Some sang contemporary songs of wisdom and warning about childcare, hygiene, politics or drugs. They also sang extemporaneously—often weaving social criticism into their songs while playing a stringed instrument or a calabash drum.”

In 1982, Mack returned to Kano for post-doctorate research and teaching at Bayero University, where she lectured about African and African-American literature. One result of her work there was her edited and annotated volume of Hausa poetry, Al’kalamai a Hannun Mata (A Pen in the Hands of Women). Published in 1983 by the Northern Nigerian Publishing Company, the poems of Hauwa Gwaram and Hajiya ‘Yar Shehu appear in the original Hausa. “When I first visited the publishing company, the editors told me that Nigerian women didn’t write poetry,” Mack recalls. “But when I took out a stack of poems by Hauwa Gwaram and Hajiya ‘Yar Shehu, they had to admit that perhaps there was something to publish after all.” The book is still widely used in northern Nigeria as a text for adult literacy classes.

Now at the University of Kansas, Mack has been an associate professor of African and African-American studies since 1996 and an associate professor of religious studies since 1997. Her most popular, introductory course, “Women and Islam,” usually draws a large and diverse assortment of students, including some Muslim women in veils, as well as Middle-Eastern and African-American students.

Another course covers Nana Asma’u bint Shehu Usman dan Fodiyo, a prolific 19th century poet and teacher. Although she was still a legendary figure in 20th century Nigeria, her writing was not published and there were no books about her. When Mack first inquired about Asma’u during her 1979 trip to Nigeria, she was directed to Jean Boyd, an expatriate Englishwoman who taught school in Sokoto, Nigeria. Concerned that Nigerian schoolchildren in the 1960s were being taught European history for lack of African history books, Boyd began researching regional history. In the course of that work, she met Nana Asma’u’s great-great-great grandson, who loaned her a goatskin satchel filled with Asma’u’s manuscripts. Asma’u had written about history, battles she witnessed, political conflicts and Muslim values and principles. Boyd and Mack subsequently received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to work full-time for two years translating and annotating The Collected Works of Nana Asma’u, Daughter of Usman dan Fodiyo, 1793-1864, a 753-page volume published by Michigan State University Press in 1997; in 2000, it won the African Studies Association’s Text and Translation Book Award.

Mack and Boyd completed their study of Asma’u with a literary biography, One Woman’s Jihad, published by Indiana University Press in 2000. Mack and Boyd’s books are widely used by scholars and students in a variety of college courses including history, women’s studies, literature, anthropology and religion. In One Woman’s Jihad, one of Asma’u’s poems, written in 1856, describes some basic principles of Islam. In one section, she encourages women to pursue their education as they would food:

Women, a warning. Leave not your homes without good reason.
You may go out to get food or to seek education.
In Islam, it is a religious duty to seek knowledge.
Women may leave their homes freely
for this.

Why had Asma’u and other respected women scholars been overlooked and gone unpublished? Mack’s explanation is that Muslim women traditionally lived a very private life and were revered for their central role in the family. Given their more secluded life, their accomplishments rarely broke the surface of public life to receive the attention they deserved. Indeed, in the Islamic community, Asma’u’s manuscripts were kept in the family’s home and not in a state or university library. As a result, women’s writings and scholarship have largely escaped the attention of publishers and historians. This is changing with the growth of interest in social history and as more women become historians and enjoy the kind of access to the world of Muslim women that is denied to men.

In 2000, Mack was named a Carnegie Scholar and given support to undertake exploratory research. She hopes to discover pre-19th century works of Muslim women scholars, mostly in sub-Saharan and North Africa. The only evidence she has that such scholarship once existed is some 19th century correspondence and other materials that refer to a wealth of women’s scholarship going back several centuries. What survives is uncertain.

After taking a preliminary trip to Morocco this summer, Mack plans to make a half-dozen field trips over the next year to North Africa, where Islamic communities have existed since the 10th century or earlier. As in the past, she will generally avoid well-known archives and, instead, develop a network of sources that should lead her to privately held collections where women’s writing is much more likely to be found. She is optimistic about uncovering, and ultimately publishing, a wealth of theological writing, eulogies, literature, correspondence and historical, social and political commentaries. “But I don’t know what I’ll find or where I’ll find it until I get there,” Mack says. “It’s a mystery, but whatever happens, I’ve learned that ‘Allah will provide.’”

Next page: “Providing historical proof of Muslim women’s scholarship is a culturally appropriate way to support women’s education.”—Beverly B. Mack

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