The Extraordinary Afterlife of Nana Asma’u

In the community, the role of women was largely passive. They sat tucked away in the female-designated spaces in the masjid, catching fragments of the Friday sermon. Whatever the Imam said was law; there was no room for questioning, and no tools for cross-referencing scripture. Many of the women couldn’t read the Arabic text themselves, so they had to rely entirely on the Imam’s recitation and interpretation. But what was more disturbing was the belief that faith was secondary for women. I grew up hearing the phrase ‘Óbìnrín ò lẹ́sìn’, which implies that a woman has no independent faith of her own, only that of her husband. She was like a spiritual chameleon. If she married a Muslim, she practised Islam. If she married a Christian, she adopted Christianity. Men answered to God, and women answered to men.

This is a memory that never sat right in my heart. I was just a child absorbing the world around me, deeply curious and hungry for answers. Then Fauziyyah, my primary five classmate, was taken to Kano to become a child bride at just ten years old. No matter how much the adults tried to explain it, my confusion only grew. It wasn’t until years later, through my own private study of Islamic history, that I discovered the truth: none of this belongs to Islam.

For years, I carried this memory as absolute truth; that in West Africa, spiritual authority was inherently male, and women were merely silent observers. It was a narrative that reduced centuries of complex female intellectual history to the domestic margins. But history tells a radically different story. Long before the modern ilé kéwú stripped women of their authority, there existed across the nineteenth-century Sahel an intricate, mobile and powerfully organized network of female scholars known as the Yan Taru movement. At the centre of this revolution was its founder and the daughter of Shehu Usman dan Fodio, Nana Asma’u. 

Finding Asma’u in the ruins of that history did more than heal a childhood wound; it gave me back my voice. Asma’u understood what the mallams of my childhood feared: that an educated woman is difficult to subjugate. Her weapon was not force, but the deliberate democratization of knowledge. Through the Yan Taru, she composed poetry in Hausa, Arabic and Fulfulde, translating complex legal and theological concepts into languages the everyday woman could understand...