Ameera Abid

Feminism, gender equality, and woman empowerment all seem like phenomenon of the modern world. However, if you are to dive deeper in Islamic history you will come across influential Muslim women in all phases of history in all the different ranks. You will find women who were warriors, leaders, scholars, advisors who worked together with men to give us the lives we are living today.

Throughout our education we are taught about some of the prominent figures in Islam, such as the four rightly guided Caliphs and the wives of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). Today, I would like to shed light on a very important woman who you probably never heard of, Nana Asma’u. This woman was the daughter of the founder of theSokoto Caliphate, Usman Dan Fodio, in Nigeria.

She was a poet, teacher, and a princess. She devoted her life to educating the women of her time. She outlived most of the founding generation of the Caliphate so she became an important guiding source for the government in her later life.

She was tutored in Quranic education. She was well versed in four different languages: Arabic, the Fula language, Hausa, and Tamacheq Tuareg

Nana Asma’u became the counselor for her brother, who was the second Caliph, and stood out in her work as a counselor. There are records of her writing instructions to the governors and she debated fearlessly with scholars and other princes.

Nana Asma’u was also a prolific author and was well educated in the classics of the Arab and Classical world. She witnessed many wars and wrote about them in prose in her work titled “The Journey”. Her and her family’s work held so much importance and value that later the governments held this era as a scale to measure themselves against. This was a time of prosperity and knowledge. Minorities were being educated and Islam was successfully spreading.

She was a strong, confident, and strict leader and scholar. Nana Asma’u was not one to bite her tongue and hold back for her allies. If someone was wrong ethically or lawfully, even if that someone was an ally she was never hesitant in taking action against it.

Nana Asma’u was following in the footsteps of the Prophet’s wife Aisha who was a general, scholar, and teacher. She became the leading scholar in the most influential Muslim state in West Africa. In her surviving works she mostly wrote to educate Muslims about Islam. During most of her adult life she was responsible for the education of woman. In 1830, she created a cadre of woman teachers who were titled as “Jajis”. These educated women travelled throughout the caliphate to educate other women. They went to the houses of their students to educate them.

These teachers or jajis were bestowed with a “malfa”, a hat tied with a red turban. This became a symbol of the women who were educators and who played an important role in spreading Islam. These women led by Nana Asma’u became so important and prominent that they became representatives of the caliphate.

These women were teachers in the 18th century, travelling the caliphate to educate other woman. They became symbols on which the other residents of that time took pride in mentioning. It is a distortion of the religion of Islam to claim that Islam promotes racism and sexism.

The media is very quick to cover news stories like Boko Haram and then to manipulate the story to make it look like all the people of that race or religion behave like that single group.

The legacy of Nana Asma’u continued not only in her literary work, but today in northern Nigeria, many Islamic woman organizations, schools, and meeting halls are named after her.

When studying Islamic history, you find that Islam stresses upon education, so much so that it is a religious obligation to seek worldly and Islamic knowledge, for men and woman equally. The fault that we see today in oppression of women and girls is not in the religion; the fault is in the unjust men of power who impose restrictions on women and girls, preventing them of their rights to education.