Description

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Equals in Learning and Piety is an intellectual history of the ‘Yan Taru (Associates) movement, a women-led Islamic educational organization that continues to this day in both northern Nigeria and in the United States. Drawing on extensive scholarship across disciplines including history, Islamic studies, anthropology, gender and women’s studies, and literary studies—and alongside rigorous ethnographic research and interviews with leading Nigerian Muslim scholars—Beverly Mack argues that this formidable Muslim women’s movement consolidated the religious and social order established by the Sokoto Jihad in the early nineteenth century. 

Mack shows how women scholars instructed rural Hausa and Fulani women in Muslim ethics, doctrine, traditions, and behavior that followed and replaced the traumatic experience of warfare unleashed by the Jihad. She shows that these unique social engagements shaped people’s agency in the dynamic process of social change throughout the nineteenth century. Women imaginatively reconciled Muslim reformist doctrines and traditional practices in Nigeria, and these doctrines have continued to be influential in the diaspora, especially among Black American Muslims in the United States in the twenty-first century. With this major investigation of a little-studied phenomenon, Mack demonstrates the importance of women to the religious, political, and social transformation of Nigerian Muslim society.

About the Author

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Beverly Mack is professor emerita of African studies in the Department of African and African American Studies at the University of Kansas. Her books include Educating Muslim Women: The West African Legacy of Nana Asma’u (with Jean Boyd) and Muslim Women Sing: Hausa Popular Song. She has written widely on Muslim women, particularly scholars, in Nigeria. 

Praise For…

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“Through a detailed history of Muslim women’s education in Hausaland and contemporary North America, Mack brings her deep knowledge of Hausa, poetry, and Islam to bear on how we understand Muslim women as educators, poets, and essential actors in their societies. This is an important book that will change how people think about Muslim women.”—Katrina Daly Thompson, author of Zimbabwe’s Cinematic Arts: Language, Power, Identity

“An excellent addition to scholarship on Nigerian religious studies. With a firm foundation in the religious, social, and political history of Nigeria from the nineteenth century to the present day, Equals in Learning and Piety is engaging, insightful, and wide-ranging. Mack’s analysis of the impact of ’Yan Taru on Black Muslims in the United States in particular underscores the dialectical tension between the local and the global, national and transnational, gender and generation in the age of neoliberal globalization.”—Olufemi O. Vaughan, author of Religion and the Making of Nigeria

“A seminal study. . . . A masterpiece of original scholarship.”—Midwest Book Review