The role of language in West African Islam

Abstract

Opening Paragraph‘A translation of the meaning of the Holy Koran into the Hausa language’ – this is the careful wording of the title of the work sponsored by the Jama'atu Nasril Islam (whose President is the Sultan of Sokoto) and signed by Abubakar Mahmoud Gummi, the chairman of its executive committee and former Grand Khadi (Gummi, 1980). It is, in short, as official a Muslim publication as there can be in Nigeria. The Arab text (set in a standard Beirut naskh typeface) is on the right of the page, the Hausa, in roman script (boko), on the left; yet colleagues say that the Hausa still reads as if it was simply part of an oral, abbreviated tafsiri transcribed for printing. Though it is nowhere labelled as tafsiri, it has some footnotes and a sentence introducing each sura; and it is a truly vernacular translation – that is, it is not as awkward to read as, say, the books translated by Haliru Binji into what one could best describe as ‘malamanci’. Lastly, the printed text originally was circulated in sections – in part, it is said, to assess people's reactions to a Hausa translation of the Holy Koran being sold in the streets of Nigerian cities. It is a measure of the public's acceptance of this work – which is in reality no more than a printed version of the various oral ‘translations’ one can hear every year in public, on the radio or on tape – that not merely has it now appeared as a single volume but that it has already gone into a second edition; indeed, Alhaji Nasiru Kabara has now almost completed the process of producing his own version.

The Role of Islam, Ajami writings, and educational reform in Sulemaana Kantè’s N’ko

“…The colonial period's major shifts in political economy disrupted such traditional religious authority and carved out space for larger societal debates about Islam and Muslim identity (Launay & Soares 1999:501). As such, as elsewhere on the Continent (Brenner & Last 1985;Peterson 2006), the postwar moment in French West Africa gave rise to unique and competing Muslim experimentations with language-in-education that were designed to address both the French colonial system as well as concerns in the Islamic sphere.…”

The Role of Islam, Ajami writings and educational reform in Sulemaana Kantè's N'ko

“…The colonial period's major shifts in political economy disrupted such traditional religious authority and carved out space for larger societal debates about Islam and Muslim identity (Launay & Soares 1999:501). As such, as elsewhere on the Continent (Brenner & Last 1985;Petersen 2006), the postwar moment in French West Africa gave rise to unique and competing Muslim experimentations with language-in-education that were designed to address both the French colonial system as well as concerns in the Islamic sphere.…”

Multilingual Language and Literacy Practices and Social Identities in Sunni Madrassahs in Mauritius: A Case Study

“…One of the vernacular literacies documented in this literature is maktab literacy, a term used by Street (1984) to describe the literacy practices taking place in Islamic religious schools across the world: in West Africa (Brenner & Last, 1985;Scribner & Cole, 1981), Ghana (Herbert & Robinson, 2001), Iran (Rassool, 1995;Street, 1984), Morocco Wagner, 1986Wagner, , 1993Wagner, Messick, & Spratt, 1986), Pakistan (Rahman, 1998;Zubair, 2003), South Asia (Maddox, 2007), and Bangladesh (Maddox, 2005). In an early and seminal anthropological study of the Vai people in West Africa, Scribner and Cole documented the multiple natures of literacies, arguing that different literacies are used in different domains, such as the home, the school, and Quranic schools.…”