Muslim Women in African History
Roberta Ann Dunbar
A discussion of women and Islam must be seen in the context of class, country, and above all, the Quran. It is more accurate to say what a particular country does not permit women to do than to say what Islam permits or forbids. |
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—Ira G. Zepp1 | ||
It has not been the case that woman-sympathetic discourses have been entirely lacking in the history of Islam after all, but that they have not been able to attain authority. |
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—Ayesha M. Imam2 | ||
As members of society, women reside in social and political contexts that propose images and expected roles. Historical factors of culture, colonial rule, and post-independent political and economic patterns constitute pervasive shaping themes of context. Government, the law, and ideology—arenas dominated by men—set its tone. But women interpret, negotiate, mediate, and act, as men do. Until recently, quite different traditions of scholarship have informed our understanding of these matters: historical literature has more often characterized Islam by describing the context, whereas the social sciences have focused more on practice. Men and women do not necessarily experience religion the same way.3 Does this mean—as it has so often been portrayed—that women’s experience is any less Islamic?
The following narrative emphasizes women’s roles, experiences, and the way they have fashioned their identities as Muslims in different arenas of life. It looks upon women as actors, and explores examples of African Muslim women as adepts in spirit possession; as teachers and spiritual leaders; and as political actors and agents of change. The preceding chapters have described the history of Islam’s spread throughout the subcontinent and the primary features of Muslim law in Africa—the various contexts in which women live. The themes of political economy, regionalism, and family law found in those chapters provide important background to the discussion below.
Adepts in Spirit Possession
Questions about why women practice spirit possession have fueled much scholarly debate.4 Are women who engage in spirit possession exhibiting some kind of psychological catharsis made necessary by the stress of their relatively low status in hierarchical societies? Or do spirit possession and the social obligations practitioners impose represent strategies that women develop to create an arena to express their individual persona and negotiate more favorable rewards from their domestic situation? Do women find spirit possession useful as a buffer to patriarchal hegemony in the broader society? Women’s views have been much less visible in the literature on African Muslim societies until scholars began the deconstruction of Muslim societies’ social categories.5 The attention of these scholars to women’s conceptions of men, their world, and its relationship to women illumines the negotiated nature of gender and the moral order. These studies have enlarged our focus by going beyond the personal experience of possession and the motivations for it to considering how these cults offer possibilities—at least at the symbolic level—for the realignment of public values. Nowhere is this more clear than in discussions about spirit possession—most notably bori in West Africa and zar in northeastern Africa.
From the earliest instances of Islamic transformation of community in Hausaland, spatial separation of the sexes has defined a gendered world.6 Today, several degrees of seclusion obtain depending on the form of marriage, and in the rural areas, wealth. For the most part, married Muslim women in Hausa-speaking areas live within female quarters of their husband’s home, going out only with his permission and only for medical, ceremonial, and, in some instances, social visits to friends. The segregated world has its own dynamic, ranging from the busy and complex management of a royal household in Kano7 to the autonomous economic world women generate with the help of children and servants from within their quarters.8 Multiple marriages, and alternatives to second and succeeding marriages available in karuwanci,9 offer opportunities for choice, including the practice of spirit possession, or bori. To married women, bori is an occasion for celebration, music, and dance, albeit within the confines of their own homes. The social support of other women and material gifts given by her husband to one possessed, overcome isolation and permit a woman to negotiate attention. But if bori is liberating of the spirit, it does not create equality of the sexes; in contexts where both male and female adepts practice, they operate in spheres divided by sex, with the male sphere being the more innovative and in control of the more important spirits.10 Perhaps this, too, is an aspect of gender relationships that may expand and contract depending upon historical factors.
Although decried by authorities for its association with the spirits of the pre-Islamic past, bori spirits acquire new names and identities reflective of the culture’s historical experience, including Islam and colonialism. Mounting their adepts in ritualized performances, they fashion a complex symbolism that offers both explanation and commentary on contemporary life. In her recent work on bori, Susan O’Brien has argued that far from being marginal to Hausa society, bori spirits, adepts, and public ceremonies are and have been central to the fashioning of a dynamic equilibrium or tension in the society as a whole.11 Coupled with the official positions sometimes held by women associated with bori and the economic exchanges involved, bori is revealed to have a large public role.
In countries of the Horn, especially Ethiopia, and Sudan, women’s expression of the spirit life found outlets through spirit possession zar and the pious completion of orthodox religious duties. Much recent research has emphasized the dynamic quality of women’s institutional life in the complex cultural society of Sudan.12 Demarcated into a separate, gendered world by physical, social, and religious conventions, women have made of that separation an arena for spiritual expression and for the creation of networks that promote spiritual, psychological, and material support. Although disdained by orthodox leaders and reformists alike for counter-conventional behaviors, zar leaders and practitioners do not participate in its rituals in self-conscious opposition to religion. To a greater extent than in West Africa, membership in zar is ubiquitous, and as some have suggested, may fulfill for women a comparable function to that of the many sufi rituals. Writing of Sinnar, Susan Kenyon has said that “Zar and zikr fulfil similar needs, ritual, emotional, and social, and largely cater to mutually exclusive members. … They differ in methods, organization, and ritual, but not in doctrine or basic belief.”13 As if to remind themselves of their subordination in the midst of these gatherings of women, the leaders of both zar and of spirit healers speak through the predominantly male voices of their spirits.14
In East Africa in the 1870s, missionaries commented upon the material benefits women accrued through gifts necessary to appease the spirit that possessed them.15 Today in Mombasa, the visitation of a spirit, or pepo, upon a person (usually a woman) leads her to find a female or male ritual specialist (mganga) who understands the spirits demand and exorcises it. The sexually divided sphere of spirits seen in bori appears in some East African regions as well. On northern Mafia Island, two types of spirits have been described. The first is associated with land spirits and is the specialty of the Pokomo. The second is open to the Pokomo and others, but is primarily female in membership and bears an affinity with the zar cult of northeastern Africa. On Mafia, women see these as sea spirits that prevent them from having children.16 It is tempting to view this association of sea spirits with sterility as an oblique reframing of women’s experience under Omani rule and its legacy.
Scholars have called attention to similarities in the domain of emotional expressiveness between spirit possession and sufi ritual practices.17 As Islam became more widely adopted by African populations, sufi brotherhoods and ceremonial practices associated with Muslim holy days attracted the participation of women. At the end of the twentieth century, one may point to this phenomenon and at least speculate that, in some Muslim societies, Islamic spiritualism may have begun to erode the utility of the spirit cults.
Muslim Women as Teachers and Spiritual Leaders
Although Islam counsels the value of formal education—an ideal often shared by prophets and Muslim reformers alike—it is also true that in countries of Africa south of the Sahara with substantial Muslim populations, the numbers of girls attending school is significantly lower than elsewhere. The reasons for such a situation are many, but lie largely in the Westernized nature of education, indigenous social roles that assign young girls significant domestic responsibilities, and fears that girls will be rendered unsuitable for marriage by experiences of school life.
Nevertheless, for centuries women have pursued education and roles as teachers within the realm of Quranic education. Because of the gender segregation of many Muslim African societies, the role of women as teachers is critical in the assessment and development of women’s education in both the formal and the nonformal settings. This is particularly true where public schools have become battlegrounds for the expression of conflict between religion and secularism.
Through their poetry and homilies, women scholars have contributed significantly to the intellectual development of the Muslim world in Africa. Jean Boyd and Murray Last first highlighted the role of the daughters of ʿUthman dan Fodio in assimilating the vast numbers of non-Muslim women incorporated into the Sokoto empire. In particular, Nana Asmaʾu, well-known in her own right for her religious writings, founded the Yan Taru movement to extend Muslim education of women out into the rural areas.18 While exceptional, she was not unique for her time: among other female shaykhs, Khadijia of the Ahl-al-Aqil group in Mauritania is said to have taught ʿAbd al-Qadir, the leader of the Torodo revolution.19
Hajiya Iya Isiaku and Hajiya ʿAʾisha Mahmoud, interviewed in Kano in the 1980s, were educated by family members, especially their fathers and successive husbands. Their careers were typical in that they continued the tradition of private education tutoring their students at home. Another woman, Hajiya Maria Mai Tafsiri, the one who knows tafsiri, or exegesis, has bridged both the private and public worlds in her work: taught by her father, she had accomplished advanced religious studies by the time of her marriage at age thirteen. Her scholarly reputation was enhanced by the broadcast of her recitations on local television and radio in Kano. Hajiya Maria also runs an Islamiyya school for married women and children. The education of other scholars, such as Hajiya Yelwa Ina and Hajiya Rabi Wali, combined training at home, in formal Quranic schools, and in government girls schools. There is no apparent pattern to suggest why these women chose to become scholars. Most had begun their studies at a young age and continued them through several marriages; tariqa membership of both Qadiriyya and Tijaniyya as well as no tariqa affiliation were reported; all asserted the importance of encouragement and instruction received from fathers, mothers, and husbands; and Hajiya Rabi in particular was conscious of the tradition of Nana Asmaʾu’s ʾYan Taru.20
The line between women’s activities as educators and as spiritual leaders is rarely distinguished, in part because they often overlap. Thus Boyd and Last noted that an important function of the ʾYan Taru was to extend the baraka of Shehu ʿUthman dan Fodio and organize a cult around it.21 In Nigeria, ʿAʾisha, a muqaddama and hadith expert, and Safiya ʿUmar Falke, also a muqaddama, were well-known women mystics in Kano during the colonial period.22 In contemporary Kano, women leaders in both the Tijaniyya and Qadiriyya tariqas teach women recruits the prayers and rituals associated with their tariqas. Hajiya Laraba Kabara, the highest-ranking Qadiriyya woman, attended Quranic school but did not complete advanced studies. Her several marriages ended in failure and she remained childless. Attracted to the tariqa by a family friend, Hajiya Laraba is not only a prominent personage in Kano celebrations of the birthday of Shaykh ʿAbd al-Qadir, but she has also made the pilgrimage many times, and thus has contacts with the wider Muslim world. Hajiya Hassana Ahmad Sufi, followed her mother into a career that combines mysticism and teaching. Known both as a scholar and mystic, she was the first woman student in the School for Arabic Studies in Kano, and has made a career of teaching advanced Muslim studies in a formal school as well as in an Islamiyya school she built privately at her home.23
Women like Ahmad and the others described above are at the forefront of the expansion of women’s education in Nigeria in formal adult-education schools. These schools teach both Islamic and Western subjects, but emphasize the cultural integrity of Islam. Like other features of Islamic revival, such as adopting the chador, Muslim women see their schools as one further step to ultimate decolonization and cultural assurance.24
In southern Nigeria, Muhammad Jumʿat Imam (1896–1959/60), the founder of the Mahdiyyat movement in Ijebul-Ode in 1941, held as a principal element of his instruction that women be educated and that they should attend mosques together with men. Muslim women were attracted by his teaching that there was no Quranic basis for purdah, and because, according to the recollections of followers, “He was a very religious man and of good character … who directed people in the right way.”25
As late as the 1960s, Senegalese women were observed performing rites associated with pre-Islamic, African religions.26 But recent history has witnessed a larger role for women to play within the context of the Muslim brotherhoods. In Senegal, where seclusion has not been as widespread as in northern Nigeria, many of these activities require public as well as private endeavor. Writing of this phenomenon, Christian Coulon observed that “women participate in their own way in Islam, manipulating it and accommodating it to their needs. They are active Muslims, even if their practices are informal, hidden, parallel, or heterodox; hence it is wrong to relegate the female Muslim universe to this twilight zone where it only appears to belong because of our inability to study it.”27
Although the Muslim hierarchy restricts women to the private sphere, their participation in the worship of saints and ceremonies that engage prayer, singing, and dancing is a visible manifestation in public of women’s spiritual life. Coulon suggests that in Senegal, “the Islam of the brotherhoods and marabouts has become primarily the religion of the women … because by its rational and explanatory nature it is linked, more than either reformist or fundamentalist Islam, to the traditional values transmitted by women.”28 These practices may be encouraged by one further feature of the tariqas. Women relatives of the tariqa leaders have assumed some of the old roles women held during the pre-Islamic period of the Wolof and Serer states. As relatives of the caliphs, they share in the grace of the tariqas and are actively engaged in furthering their health.
Another way in which women’s roles have increased are through the daʾira (or dahird), originally Mouride associations that emerged in urban milieus during the 1950s, but now appear to be common among all brotherhoods and in rural areas as well. Mouride leaders initially discouraged the dairas because their membership included both sexes. However, in time, the resources made available to the brotherhood through its fund-raising projects won over the leaders on economic strength alone. Women contribute significantly to the economic success of these activities, since in the rural areas they are accustomed to gendered associational activities that combine both social and economic functions.29
One example of the spread of such activities beyond the capital city is provided by Leonardo Villalóns richly documented study of tariqa membership in Fatick, Senegal, where the daʾiras accommodate women through women’s sections of the group or by having a présidente de femmes or a responsible cellule féminine.30 Of further interest is that in Fatick there is an all-women’s daaira that was not attached to a particular marabout or tariqa, and whose membership consisted of women with varying tariqa affiliations. In addition to regular meetings, the members organize a major festival once a year and raise monies to support their members’ attendance at the annual celebrations held in the “capital city” of each of the tariqas—Tivaouane, Touba, and Ndiassane, for instance. A famous religious singer from Kaolack, el-Hajj Tidiane Mbodj, is contracted by them for the annual celebration of the daaira precisely because his religious songs acknowledge the importance of all of the famous marabouts in Senegal without favoring any one of the brotherhoods. While such ecumenical activity fails to further the fortunes of any one marabout, the popularity of this festival sustains the importance of tariqa affiliation in general.31
Important to any discussion of Muslim women in Senegal are the women leaders of the Mourides. In the 1960s, Sokna Muslimatou, the sister of the then-reigning caliph of the Mourides, Falilou MBacke, was acknowledged for her spiritual leadership and her disciples. In the 1990s, this role is played by Sokna Magat Diop of Thiès, the daughter of Abdoulaye Iyakhine, a disciple of Shaykh Ibra Fall and Amadu Bamba. Instructed by her father in the duties of leadership, she was appointed by him to be his successor as head of the subgroup he had founded. She was further entwined with the Mouride leadership through a series of marriages—beginning with her first to Shaykh Ibra Fall—to members of the caliph’s or Amadu Bamba’s family. Since 1943, she has exercised the normal powers and duties of the head of an important section of the Mourides, and is widely acknowledged by the caliph for both her piety and organizational skills. Her leadership style is distinctive from that of male spiritual leaders. She never goes to mosques or conducts public prayers: her son does so instead while acknowledging that he is her “arm.” Nor does she conduct marriages or baptisms, although she arranges many of the former and appoints imams to officiate; she is virtually a recluse, going out only on special occasions. She spends her days in prayer before her father’s mausoleum, in study of Amadu Bamba’s qasaid and practice of the khalwa—a severe regimen of fasting that can last up to forty days. Her disciples believe her reclusive, severe lifestyle only enhances the power of her baraka and her holiness.
Sokna Magat Diop’s model has led to the creation of a subsection of her order that is concerned with justifying equality of the sexes in religious life. One of her daughters, NDeye, is the main organizer of a daʾira that contains both women and men (although “for the sake of form” she has a male copresident). Coulon raises the question, “Could it be that mysticism, in erasing or modifying the difference between the sexes, points the way towards acceptance of female authority in Islam?”32 Other scholarship stresses rather the interdependence of women and male members in a daaira for Mame Diarra Bousso, the mother of Amadu Bamba. Men sing the qasaid and help women with the transportation of goods to Mame Diarra Bousso’s tomb. However through their monthly contributions, women are primarily responsible for the alms gifts to the family during the annual magal, or pilgrimage to the tomb.33
In Sudan, religious leadership and the dynamic interplay of sufi orders and the orthodox ʿulamaʾ are located within the male realm, although women’s participation in Islamist movements in recent years may change that. While women and children may belong to the sufi tariqa, they are excluded from religious activities except for occasional participation as dancers, ululators, or praise-singers on the edges of public performances.34 Religious beliefs are elaborated in Sudan outside orthodox Islam through spirits. Kenyon writes: “On the whole, they distinguish several different categories of spiritual beings and would not agree with Trimingham (1949, 172 ff.) that all are basically subcategories of jinn. This spirit world is very real to most women and alongside their daily prayers is a range of other routine practices aimed at conciliating and propitiating the many spiritual entities which can upset the order of their world.”35
Two of the spiritual specialists Kenyon studied use many of the same techniques—especially possession—in their counseling roles. However, one of them, Bitt al-Jamil, operates as a religious teacher, seer, and healer; the other, Soreya, was the leader of a tombura zar in Sinnar. Neither of these women was literate or had received any religious training. Bitt al-Jamil worked through a spirit medium, Bashir Fath al-Rahman, and did not use other spirits in her work. Bitt al-Jamil was acknowledged to be unique because of her grace and spiritual power, unprecedented for a woman anywhere else in Sudan. She fills a unique role as Muslim spiritual leader without portfolio through the advice she administered during her many sessions. She and Soreya, the zar leader, position themselves at the frontier between the orderly canons of formal religion that all aspire to fulfill, and the disorderly realm of the personal spirits. Their wisdom and the faith and material networks of their clients perpetuate a strongly gender-demarcated and segregated world. “This idea of sexual segregation as a social asset and a personal virtue is a positive and moral approach”36 that expresses women’s view of religion and society.
Turning to East Africa, in Somalia pastoral ideas of community, strongly patriarchal in the precolonial period, only deepened the dependence and oppression of women as the ideology of clan became the primary expression of identity in the colonial and postcolonial worlds.37 However, along the Benadir coast, the expansion of Islam during the nineteenth century included among the ʿulamaʾ a woman who was both a religious scholar and a mystic. Dada Masiti (1804–24 June 1921), was born into the Al-Ahdal clan of the Asharaf in Brava. As a girl of six, she was kidnapped to Zanzibar. Rescued by family members ten years later, she returned home to devote herself to religious studies and mysticism. A prolific poet, she composed a eulogy, “Shaykhi Chifa Isiloowa,” that is still performed. Copies of it are kept by families in Brava.
Dada Masiti is the only female saint in Somalia whose tomb is honored by an annual ziyara. A eulogy written for her by Sahikh Qasim conveys a poetic persona similar to, yet different from, her counterpart in West Africa, Nana Asmaʾu:
She is noble, she is chaste, she is pious,
And the daughter of noble descendants.38
In contemporary Brava, Quranic classes are taught mainly by women teachers.39 Further research might show whether Dada Masiti’s career provides an East African parallel to Nana Asmaʾu’s ʾYan Taru.
Further south in East Africa, sufism, spirit possession, gender, and class generated a complex range of social and religious forces influencing women.40 The sufi orders came to the Swahili coast in the 1870s, and from the outset their focus challenged “the absence of women and slaves at the core of Islamic life.”41 Both the Qadiriyya, more prevalent in Tanganyika, and the Habib Saleh in Lamu attracted people of low status, including women, and challenged the formal, hierarchical conceptions of the Omani and freeborn upper classes. Women members of the Qadiriyya participated in mosque activities (something the Ahmadiyya, another brotherhood found in Bagamoyo, did not allow). The Qadiriyyas even endorsed female leadership, as witnessed by the story of Sheikh Binti Mtumwa, who founded a branch of the order in Nyasaland that attracted women disciples over a twenty-year period.42
Like the possession cults, tariqa membership enabled women to establish an autonomous sphere of action and some self-determination. Thus, Islam in East Africa has stood for both authority and the state, on the one hand, and innovation and opposition, on the other. It is not surprising that, in the context of Swahili society in the twentieth century, women, former slaves, and other groups of low status have found ways of understanding the religion that makes possible both greater assimilation into the larger world of universal Islam and opposition to the more patriarchal hegemony of the elite.
Historical documentation on Muslim women’s roles as healers, scholars, and teachers, while still meager, has been enriched by recent scholarship that focuses on their particular accomplishments. Spirit possession, long viewed as elements of popular or marginal culture whether practiced by women or men, must now be viewed within a broader conceptualization of Islam that acknowledges it as an important spiritual expression by practicing Muslims. Regional variations occur in the openness of sufi orders to women. The incorporation of women is apparently more profound in West and East Africa than elsewhere. Although the issue merits more systematic comparative analysis, Muslim women in-fluence formal as well as nonformal education more than has often been recognized.
As women have played more visible roles in Islamist revivals, their educational policies become embroiled in larger political debates. This is the subject of the next section.
Associations: Women as Agents of Change
During the twentieth century, women’s membership in religious associations increased due to the decline of older forms of women’s organizational life.43 A heightened awareness of Islamic identity became particularly acute when efforts to improve women’s status were closely identified with outsiders. As economic deterioration threatened the autonomy of states from the mid-1970s on, opposition to the imposition of externally created institutions blended with rejuvenated expressions of cultural allegiance. It is in these situations that Islam as a powerful source of culture has often become the focal point of opposition to external domination.
Furthermore, fundamentalist Muslims often link stricter moral standards for women to cures for broader social and economic ills.44 Therefore, efforts by nationals or outsiders to enlarge the scope of women’s lives are met with opposition by a strong ʿulamaʾ and those supporting the reformist tradition. As women seek to participate in the “democratization” process in Africa, tensions over the correct Islamic interpretation of women’s political potential have expanded. Women embraced distinctive Muslim dress, including the veil, and began to form Muslim women’s political organizations. Sudan, Nigeria, Senegal, Niger, Kenya, and Tanzania offer contrasting cases for study.
A number of scholars have explored recently the relationship of gender to broader issues of identity politics in Africa and elsewhere in the Muslim world. Works like Moghadam’s Identity Politics and Women (1994) and Hale’s Gender Politics in Sudan (1996) formulate important theoretical questions about religion as an instrument of cultural politics and the consequences for women when it becomes the basis of political hegemony. Moreover, Hale’s penetrating analysis of gender and cultural politics in the Sudan adds the important factors of political economy and class/gender competition to those crucial to the rise of Islamist hegemony in that country.
Some of Hale’s key points merit development: The roots of Islamist transformation of gender and cultural identities in Sudan took hold in the 1950s and 1960s as curricular reforms and media images sought to “naturalize”45 the curricula at all instructional levels. Extensive labor migration to the Gulf states by males in the 1970s and 1980s resulted initially in an expanding work arena for women. However, as women began to enter high-level professional and managerial positions, their presence provoked Islamists who reflected the interests of the urban middle class. President Numayri sought to obscure class differences and promoted political unity, bringing former Islamist opponents into his government, giving legitimacy to their concerns. Then, assuming the mantle of religious leader, Numayri, with the Islamists, launched debates in the 1980s about personal laws and appropriate kinds of education and work for women. After 1989, these debates began to produce lower enrollments of women in certain types of medical and technical training and the exclusion of women from high-ranking (and better-salaried) positions.
Women in the Sudan Communist Party’s women’s union supported education for Sudanese women, but they otherwise avoided confrontation on issues they considered “religious and private” vs. “secular and public.” Islamists in Ikhwan and the National Islamic Front were more successful in meeting women’s needs through development designed to strengthen Islamic society in the social welfare, economic, and commercial sectors. Even though many of them abhorred women’s public engagement in politics, the Islamists were the only party to elect women (two) to the people’s assembly. By their activism, creative recruitment, and powerful media, Islamists managed to shift the center and terms of public debates for even those who, in other respects, opposed them.46
The construction of Islamic womanhood in the context of class competition and interests means, in Hale’s view, that there are distinct limits to the emancipatory aspects of Islamist programs. Control of women remains central to the male-dominated state. Hale concludes that greater revolutionary potential lies in indigenous aspects of ongoing women’s culture: economic networks like the sanduq rotating credit and the toumeen consumer cooperatives; and the religious networks seen in zar.47
In Nigeria, royal women held important titles and administrative responsibilities at the Bornouan and Habe courts. While it appears that such titles were lost with the reformist jihad, the role of royal women in the management of the palace, the education and integration of slave women, and the intellectual life of the Sokoto is well known. The biography of Nana Asmaʾu provides a dramatic instance of women’s traditional hegemony of the domestic side of life taking on a public aspect and scale.48
During the colonial period, Muslim women in the north were excluded from public fora. The legacy of colonial constitutions that preserved powerful regional interests and the near-autonomy of the emirates further discouraged women’s entrance into public life.
The political culture of northern Nigeria during the postcolonial period has been relatively consistent insofar as women’s place is concerned. It features two camps. One, representing the legatees of the jihad, supported women’s education, but not the vote: women did not have the franchise in northern Nigeria until 1976. Once the vote was granted, this side worried about the impact of alien feminist ideas on Muslim women and insisted that the legal reforms carried out in 1979 not include personal and family law. The other pole, represented by the teacher and political leader Aminu Kano, emphasized women’s rights, political emancipation, and education. He embraced alternative interpretations of religious texts, but disassociated their reforms from Western ideas—and certainly from feminist ideas.49
Initially, women’s wings of the political parties were consigned to managing ceremonial issues. They drew heavily upon karuwai (see note 9) because of the public nature of their activities. During the Second Republic (1979–83), women’s wings worked to get out the women’s vote, but the party, not the women’s wing leaders, created their agendas. Military rulers have opened the way for greater participation of women in the assemblies, in administrative posts, and constitutional conventions.50 More recently, women’s organizations themselves have come to the fore to develop an agenda for women that the political parties had failed to accomplish.
The first Nigerian women’s group was the National Council of Women’s Societies, founded in the 1950s. After 1965, the Muslim Sisters Organization organized women school graduates around concerns for Muslim women.51 Bolanle Awe chaired a national commission on women in the 1980s that sought to increase the numbers of women as voters and candidates for office. The commission was superseded by Women in Nigeria (WIN) in 1982 and the Federation of Muslim Women’s Associations of Nigeria (FOMWAN) in 1985. These two groups have emerged as important voices for women’s issues in the last decade, WIN’s scope is national and its leaders have encouraged women across ethnic, religious, and class lines to join their efforts, FOMWAN, on the other hand, promotes Islam and interpretations of it designed to improve women’s status. From the outset, FOMWAN shouldered the lead of both politicizing Muslim women and at the same time fashioning an agenda acceptable to those who wished to speak out as Muslim women on national issues. Their initial declaration in 1985 called for the establishment of shariʿa courts, upheld Muslim women’s rights in the workplace, and urged the rejection of the IMF loan then being considered.52 Like Muslim women in other parts of the world, they have argued the need for more women scholars to be involved in the interpretation of the law and the hadith.53
The Muslim male political leadership has endorsed FOMWAN, but has also sought to mobilize them on the behalf of male leaders. Given the turmoil that continues to characterize Nigerian politics, it is not at all clear that women’s issues will be at the center of either constitutional reform or political activism. The question remains: Why should women’s groups not assert their rightful if unfamiliar role in resolving the problems of civil and political life? By bringing together women from all over the country, and by diligently emphasizing women’s needs, they may increase their number to a point where Nigeria’s sorry travail of politics can be transformed.
If an Islamic framework made possible the entry of Muslim women into politics in Nigeria, the same has not been true in Senegal. The relatively large scope of women’s religious activities and leadership in the brotherhoods does not carry over into the realm of political campaigns and officeholding, although this may be changing.
Such a history is not surprising, given French colonial policies and the secular nature of the state. Feminist groups, though composed of Muslim women, focus their objectives and strategies outside of and at times in opposition to the religious associations. On the other hand, the activities of the daʾira may include support for political candidates. Thus, women disciples of the Tidjani marabout Shaykh Tidjane Sy, who make up the Dahiratou Khaury waal baraka, collect money for A. Aram Diene, a member of the national assembly.54 Granted the vote in 1956, women were not elected to the national assembly until 1973. By 1991, they constituted about 12 percent of assembly membership. In the 1990s, women entered the ministerial ranks at the national cabinet level and were elected to positions of leadership in urban councils and rural groups in increasing numbers. At the end of the decade, 15 percent of civil servants were women.55
A more problematic challenge for women in the Senegalese political arena has been the increasing prominence of the radical reformist tendency in Islam that advocates an orthodoxy hostile to public roles for women. Over the course of three decades beginning in the 1920s, young intellectuals who identified with radical reformism in the broader Muslim world formed the Muslim Fraternity and the Union Culturelle Musulmane. In the 1970s and 1980s, young men trained abroad in Muslim centers of higher education forged an educated, vocal, and increasingly visible class that supported academic research and newspapers through a variety of associations within the Federation of Islamic Associations of Senegal (FAIS).
The continued success of a shaky alliance between the brotherhoods and the government may determine the political future for women. So long as the brotherhoods remain important political actors, women’s religious and political leadership will continue to thrive within them. The interesting question is: What happens when the two realms of women activists—those in the daʾiras and the feminists acting in the secular realm—meet?56 Men in these associations favor a restricted role for women in politics.
Another example from the francophone countries merits attention: Niger. Until the early 1990s, women’s organizations in Niger were either wings of political parties (before 1974) or the creation of the state. The leadership sprang from the educated political elite, and although members of it were Muslim, policies were framed within the context of secular reform. The Association of Nigerien Women (established in 1975) advocated legal reform from the outset. However, government proposals and drafts of family codes languished in the face of Muslim and chiefly opposition.
The opening up of the political climate in Niger following the national conference in 1991 fostered the explosion of political parties and associations, including women’s associations. Among the several new women’s groups is one representing women’s concerns within a consciously Muslim framework. In 1995, this group called upon the government to promote the teaching of Islam in public schools.57 Women have actively engaged in transforming their relationship to identity and politics in Niger. A mass rally in May 1991 achieved the selection of women in the planning process for the national conference. Even in a conservative Muslim stronghold like Maradi, women have negotiated redefinitions of social categories of respectability that have enabled political alliances to occur that in the past would have been impossible.58
Muslim women in Kenya and Tanzania have participated in politics in recent years as members of the major political parties, but few such parties have had a Muslim mandate. Kenya’s political culture has veered more toward the reconstruction of ethnicity than of religion in the core political debates.
In centuries past, East African Muslim women held important political posts and wielded significant social and economic power. Both oral traditions and early Portuguese accounts noted that, pre-1600, Swahili communities accorded high social status to some women. As queens and women of influence, they played important roles in public affairs in the coastal towns.59
After 1600, however, during the Portuguese and early Omani periods, less is known about women’s activities. Intermarriage between men living in coastal towns and women of the adjacent hinterland, while perhaps not as frequent as it had been in earlier periods, undoubtedly continued. Following the abolition of slavery, former slaves joined the recent immigrants of Hadhramis, Asians, and Comorians as people with little vested interest in coastal social hierarchy. Former slave women with their children formed the nucleus of landless, female-headed households. Many remained in service to their former owners as a matter of both religious belief and a lack of economic alternatives. Slave owners sometimes gave plots of land to former slaves who remained with them, and these were passed down to their children. If, in the early twentieth century, they were driven by economic circumstances to the larger cities like Mombasa, they depended on prostitution, sewing, and food processing for their livelihoods.60
Women in Mombasa, whether freeborn, descendants of slaves, or descendants of Omani, had many experiences in common. This is shown in a study of the life histories of three Muslim women collected by Sarah Mirza and Margaret Strobel in the 1980s. Although differences in ethnicity and social place gave these women different social and material prospects, many features of their lives illuminate and typify women’s situation. All three women married more than once; all three achieved a desired divorce by insisting that their husbands repudiate them; all experienced infertility (common on the coast) and/or suffered the ravages of high infant mortality rates; and all lived in households predominantly female in composition. The latter pattern, while not a majority one, was significant enough to be remarked upon by census takers throughout the twentieth century.61
Omani and Twelve Tribes women spent much of their lives in seclusion, although there were exceptions. The importance of male authority and guardianship sprang from both Muslim and indigenous African practices. But in reality, women, especially those confronting economic necessity, engaged in a variety of activities and careers at different stages of their lives. The associational life of Muslim women in the first half of the twentieth century was profoundly shaped by the urban experience. Dance associations—especially in the towns like Mombasa—were a major feature of women’s activities and played an important role in women’s cultural expression and social change. Groups recruiting their membership from specific social categories organized major festivals, weddings, and dance competitions. The intensity of the latter often led to violence and they were banned by the colonial government after a time. But through them, women established mutual aid (within the groups); they promoted change in dress and styles through their dances; they developed their organizational skills; and they expressed social criticism, both to reestablish norms and to rebel against the patriarchal practices of home and state.62
Following World War II, dance competitions began to decline, but in their stead, many of the women who had been involved in them became active in “modern associations” that sought to influence politics and social policy. The Muslim Women’s Institute and Muslim Women’s Cultural Association in Mombasa provoked debates about the role of women in Arab society and supported the expansion of Arab Girls’ Schools.63
In Kenya, however, these organizations of the postwar period remained more socially than politically focused. Reflecting the increasing importance of their Muslim identity in the broader context of Kenyan politics, they failed to support legal reforms proposed in the areas of divorce and inheritance or liberalizing measures for women in the mosques.64 In Tanzania in the 1950s, Muslim women of Dar es Salaam created the women’s wing of the Tanganyikan African National Union (Tanu). Through networks built by their dance and cooperative associations, women like Bibi Titi Mohammed used their cultural and organizational skills literally to create nationalism for Tanu, first in Dar es Salaam, then beyond. The testimony of women activists’ life histories shows they were motivated by nationalism and improvement of the condition of women and children, but they did not understand this agenda to be opposed to Islam. Bibi Titi and others were devout Muslims who often paid a high personal price for their political work.65
After independence, Tanzania’s President Nyerere espoused full political rights and participation for women: he replaced Tanu’s women’s wing with Umoja Ya Wanawake Tanzania (UWT—the Tanzanian women’s organization). Under the one-party state, women increased their numbers in the civil service and professions, but their voices diminished as a political force.66 Muslim women continued to be active in political life and founded some of the most important nongovernmental organizations concerned with gender issues. But the secular framework still holds: in a 1993 overview of the status of Tanzanian women, neither religion nor religious organizations appear in the text.67 The reasons for this may lie with the nature of our sources on Tanzanian women, but it also seems likely that historical factors outlined above are important in the relatively muted role religion has played in Tanzania’s political culture: the secular political ideology of the state; the minority status of Muslims; the regionally specific historical and cultural traditions of Islamic orthodoxy and law; and patterns of matriliny and cognatic descent that have accorded women greater equality than is found among Muslim populations elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa.
Islam nevertheless is a factor in the politics of Tanzania because of the dynamic relationship between the two parts of the union: Zanzibar and mainland Tanganyika. During times of strains between the two territories, religious overtones come into the debates. Dissatisfaction with Tanzania’s place in the global economy and the frustration of its citizens with declining services and rising costs have nourished scapegoating of Zanzibaris, the vast majority of whom are Muslim, because of their economic power. Coupled with ethnic and religious reconstruction elsewhere in the Muslim world, and in Africa, in Algeria and Sudan, this has led to heightened attention to women’s morality as the standard-bearers of culture and religion. Such attention often evolves into policies and attitudes that are restrictive of Muslim women’s freedom of speech and action. The evolution of Tanzanian politics will influence the course of women’s political roles, be they victims or shapers of the force of religion in public life.
Risking oversimplification we have teased out some comparative observations about Muslim women in Africa south of the Sahara. The relationship between religion and other aspects of their lives is complex. It is shaped by contextual elements of ideology, social structure, and political economy on the one hand, and by women’s strategies on the other.
Differences of demography, underlying social structures, the age of Islam, and colonial history account for regional differences in women’s experience of Islam to a greater degree than particular features of Muslim ideology. That does not mean, however, that ideology lacks importance. This is particularly visible in the domain of law and the state. The 1990s were not the first time that articulation of Islamic and secular law has been a vehicle for debating state authority and cultural identity. Family law often lies at the frontier of such debates because it touches people close to home. The status of women more than that of men is linked to family law because of their centrality to the biological and cultural reproduction of the system.
The alliance between the state and Islam is dynamic and has consequences for women. Unmenaced, the alliance is tolerant. But if menaced from without or within, it will harden. As with other kinds of cultural politics, Islamists draw inspiration, at least in part, from competition of social classes. In Sudan and Senegal, Islamists are educated, relatively wealthy, urban elites who have developed ties with the larger Muslim world from having studied or worked there. Nigeria’s Islamists, on the other hand, represent a powerful, highly capitalized business class allied to an old aristocracy. The common element among all three is that they are strongly urbanized. How these forces play themselves out in rural Africa is much less clear.
Muslim women select different strategies to negotiate space for self-expression in the face of patriarchal hegemony. Spirit possession is one option that may be attractive especially for those whose social position requires seclusion but whose temperament or opportunity does not draw them to mysticism or teaching. Mysticism is an option that appears to cut across social class lines and cultural region, although the postures of the mystics vary in their relationship to the broader community. Thus, we see contrasts between Nana Asmaʾu and the Hajjiyas of Kano (learned leaders, member of the establishment) and Sokna Magat Diop (illiterate, devout, but able to organize as those in dahira and some zar networks do); and then again between these and challengers of the status quo, as with the East Africans and the Yoruba.
Muslim women in the late twentieth century resided in an era of great promise and great danger: great danger in that authoritarianism, in the hands of agents of military or social class, but justified in the name of religion, will impose greater physical, material, and psychological hardships on women than on men; great promise in that through political groups, ceremonial organizations, and education campaigns, women are finding new, essentially democratic arenas for public engagement and influence in the broader society. Cloaking their work in religion and piety, they offer fresh opportunities to assert community in these times of political alienation and economic duress. While the processes of these developments require further study, these features characterize Islam and Muslim women. If the exercise of condensing such rich and varied experience into so few pages has any merit, it is to broaden our conceptualization of Islam as well as to embrace our understanding of the condition of Muslim women.
Notes
1. Zepp 1992, 172.
2. Imam 1994, 137.
3. Coulon 1988, 115; Kenyon 1991, 31–32.
4. Berger 1976; Echard 1989; Stoller 1989; Lewis 1980.
5. Constantinides 1985; Boddy 1989; Kenyon 1991; O’Brien 1993.
6. Nast 1996.
7. Mack 1988, 1991.
8. Schildkrout 1983; Coles 1991; Frishman 1991.
9. The status of divorced women, karuwai (sing. karuwa), who do not live under the authority of a male guardian. Piault 1971; Barkow 1971; Pittin 1983.
10. Echard 1989.
12. Boddy 1988, 1989, 1992; Kenyon 1991; Hale 1996; Fluehr-Lobban 1994.
13. Kenyon 1991, 42–43.
14. Ibid., chapters 5 and 6.
15. Strobel 1979, 78–90.
16. Caplan 1982, 36.
17. Constantin 1987; Kenyon 1991.
18. Boyd and Last 1985; Boyd 1989; Asma’u 1997.
19. Coulon 1988, 120.
20. Sule and Starratt 1991, 34–40.
21. Cited in Coulon 1988, 123.
22. Paden 1973, 100, cited in Sule and Starratt 1991, 41.
23. Sule and Starratt 1991, 42, 44.
24. Ibid., 47.
25. Clarke 1988, 163–64, 179–80.
26. Falade 1971; Callaway and Creevey 1994, 44.
27. Coulon 1988, 115.
28. Ibid., 117–18.
29. Callaway and Creevey 1994, 48–49.
30. Villalón 1995, 154, 161.
31. Ibid., 162.
32. Coulon 1988, 130–31.
33. Rosander 1997.
34. Hale 1996, 84; Kenyon 1991, 37–38.
35. Kenyon 1991, 39.
36. Ibid., 184–221, 236.
37. Kapteijns 1991; 1994.
38. Kassim 1995, 27.
39. Arab League Educational, Cultural, and Scientific Organization (ALESCO), cited in Kassim 1995, 27.
40. Constantin 1987.
41. Strobel 1979, 77.
42. Constantin 1987, 65; see also Coulon 1988, 120–21.
43. Villalón 1995, 162; Nimtz 1980, 304 cited in Coulon 1988, 124; Le Guennec-Coppens 1983, 61–62.
44. Coulon 1988, 117.
45. Hale 1996, 202.
47. Ibid., 233–48.
48. Boyd 1989; Asma’u 1997.
49. Callaway and Creevey 1994, 144, 146, 149, 153.
50. Ibid., 149–53.
51. For historical analyses of Muslim women’s organizations in Nigeria, see Abdullah 1997; Yusuf 1991.
52. Yusuf 1991, 100.
53. Imam 1994; Callaway and Creevey 1994, 156.
54. Ibid., 166.
55. Ibid., 170–72.
56. Ibid., 174–76; Coulon 1983, 127–41.
57. Dunbar 1991; Dunbar and Djibo 1992; Villalon 1994 Camel Express Télématique, 18 July 1995; Reynolds 1997.
58. Cooper 1995; 1997, chapter 8.
59. Pouwels 1987, 28.
60. Ibid., 93–194; Romero 1988.
61. Mirza and Strobel 1989, 10–12.
62. Strobel 1979; Geiger 1997, chapters 2 and 3.
63. Strobel 1979; Mirza and Strobel 1989.
64. Strobel 1979.
65. Geiger 1997.
67. Tanzania Gender Networking Programme (TGNP) 1993.
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