CHAPTER FIVE “EDUCATION IS EDUCATION”: CONTEMPORARY MUSLIM VIEWS ON MUSLIM WOMEN’S EDUCATION IN NORTHERN NIGERIA Chikas Danfulani Introduction The title of this chapter reflects some of the gender differences in North- ern Nigeria’s approaches to female education, emanating from interviews in 2007 conducted in five states of Northern Nigeria. The starting point of these interviews was a discussion of the statistics from the Ministry of Education that indicate that the northern states of Nigeria are education- ally disadvantaged compared to the southern or eastern states. Accord- ing to a survey by The National Bureau for Statistics conducted in early 2006, the adult female literacy rate in north-western Nigeria is 15.4% as against 31.0% for the adult male literacy rate.1 This is by far the lowest figure for both the adult literacy rate and the female literacy rate for the whole country. Among my interlocutors for the present study were two male scholars of Islamic Studies, responding to the questions: do you agree with the current statistical figure that presents Muslim women in northern Nigeria as the most educationally disadvantaged? They reacted: “What do you mean our women are educationally disadvantaged? What is your yardstick for measuring that?” Other responses were: “You can only talk about being disadvantaged . in relation to western education, otherwise our women are educated”. These responses reveal a resistance to statistical facts and also demonstrate widely-held opinions in Nigeria and even outside the country regarding educational imbalances. They also show the diversities and complexities involved in the conceptualizations of education in a society that puts a high premium on western education as a strategy for the contest of important state and civil resources such as development, employment, and so on. Above all, education is an instru- ment that in complex ways mediates identity and value particularly in a 1 Ketefe, Kayode, ‘Forty-seven Percent of Nigerians are illiterates’, The Punch, Tuesday 20th June 2006, http://www.punchng.com/main/article04 (accessed 20.06.2006). © Chikas Danfulani, 2014 | doi:10.1163/9789004262126_006 Chikas Danfulani - 9789004262126 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NCDownloaded 4.0 license. from Brill.com09/28/2021 03:19:09PM via free access 104 chikas danfulani globalizing and interlinked world. In Nigeria, education and the papers that back it up (qualifications) are an important avenue to the acquisition of social capital such as government jobs. Implicit in the query raised by one of the professors of Islamic studies are more fundamental issues about the meaning of education, its gen- eral purpose(s) and cultural determinants. In order to explore some of these issues, the study investigates the various views of some experts in Islamic education on what they think of and understand by education in Islam. To these experts, both male and female, the following questions were raised: How do Muslims interpret the Islamic teaching on education? Do they agree with the general impression that women in Northern Nigeria are educationally disadvantaged? What are some contemporary factors responsible for such disad- vantages? It is in the light of the above questions that this chapter has emerged. Method of Data Collection This study is based on in-depth interviews conducted in Northern Nigeria with 20 Muslim educators, professionals and policymakers in 2007. The interviewees were drawn from five states in Northern Nigeria namely: Kano, Zamfara, Katsina, Sokoto and Niger; these states are all part of what is now characterized as ‘the sharīʿa states’, meaning those states that expanded sharīʿa, beginning with Zamfara State in 1999.2 There are twelve states in all which fall into this category. The choice of these five states was partly influenced by the re-implementation of sharīʿa and partly by the statistics which indicate that the standard education rate of literacy is lowest among women in these states. The interviewees consisted of 11 males and 9 females. All the interviews were conducted in English, and most of them were recorded and fully transcribed afterwards. The study 2 Ostien, Philip, Jamila M. Nasir & Franz Kogelmann (eds.), Comparative Perspectives on Shari’ah in Nigeria, Ibadan: Spectrum Books Limited, 2005; Danfulani, Umar H. D., The Sharia Issue and Christian-Muslim Relations in Contemporary Nigeria, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wikdsell International, 2005; and Paden, John N., Muslim Civil Cultures and Conflict Res- olution: The Challenge of Democratic Federalism in Nigeria, Washington D.C.: Brookings Institute Press, 2006, pages 157–182. Chikas Danfulani - 9789004262126 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 03:19:09PM via free access “education is education” 105 was originally designed to examine if the re-implementation of sharīʿa had made any appreciable difference to education in the ‘sharīʿa States’ in general and of women in particular since this is the category whose fate is most often highlighted by current statistics on education in Northern Nigeria. Education in Northern Nigeria Two types of education exist in Northern Nigeria: Islamic Education and Western Education.3 Islamic Education has been in existence since the coming of Islam to Northern Nigeria in the 11th century.4 This system began at a very traditional level known as Qurʾānic education, developing into what is referred to today as Islamic education; the latter, in content and practice, is a modern type of Qurʾānic education. This system adopts the organizational form of Nigeria’s Western Educational system with some fundamental differences in the promotion of a broad Islamic cultural ori- entation and is operated in what are referred to as new Islamic schools.5 This form of education is widely accepted by all Muslims in Northern Nigeria and “[it] exhibit[s] some of the varieties of educational dualism that have been developed in some Muslim countries”.6 Western Educa- tion, on the other hand, is the formal system of education introduced by the British after the British occupation of Northern Nigeria in 1903. For a long time, however, this system was rejected and resisted by Muslims for a variety of reasons which will become clear shortly. Most importantly, western education was viewed by Muslims as synonymous with Christian- ity, since it was popularized by the missionaries and it was believed that if allowed, it may lead to conversion of the pupils attending such schools. When it was eventually accepted, other regions such as the southern parts of the country had already made considerable progress in terms of the establishment of institutions of learning based on the British model as 3 The term ‘Western Education’, as used in this article, is a popular term used in Nigeria to refer to the type of education brought by the British Colonial Authorities in 1900. This type of education differs from Islamic education both in content and curricula. It is also viewed by some Muslims in the north as ‘Christian Education’; this is because the same type of education was taught in missionary schools in Northern Nigeria, thus accounting for the resistance to western education by the north for a very long time. 4 Paden, 2006, page 38. 5 Umar, ‘Profiles of New Islamic Schools in Northern Nigeria’, The Maghreb Review, Vol. 28, 2–3, 2003, page 154. 6 Umar, 2003, page 162. Chikas Danfulani - 9789004262126 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 03:19:09PM via free access 106 chikas danfulani well as in producing significant numbers of a formally-educated middle class. While the north generally was affected by the relative absence of western education, girls were even more affected as they were protected by their parents from attending these schools. This was mainly due to the general belief by most Muslim parents that girls who attended western schools might be exposed to western ways, thereby becoming morally loose and eventually unmarriageable. The two types of education have gradually come to be accepted by Muslims in Northern Nigeria. However there still remains a big majority who reject, or rather resist, western education for various reasons. Sev- eral of these reasons, they claim, are based on the teaching of Islam on education which stipulates religious education as the basic education for every Muslim. This is reflected in the different views expressed and dis- seminated by various experts on education in Northern Nigeria. In order to contextualise these views, it is important to summarise the basic teach- ings of the Islamic holy book, the Qurʾān, on education, as interpreted by some Islamic scholars. Current Interpretations of Islamic Teaching on Education Several interpretations have been given by scholars7 on the importance and place of education in Islam which they agree is made explicit in the Qurʾān and the sunna of the Prophet. The grounding of the role of educa- tion in these sacred texts as interpreted by these scholars further indicates how the issue of education was constructed early in the history of Islam. Understood as acquiring and imparting of knowledge in a systematic and methodical fashion, through teaching and learning, they conclude that education is a central theme in Islam. The Qurʾān, they argue, teaches that Allāh is the source of all knowledge. Accordingly, 50% of our informants agree that the first revelation that came to the prophet was ‘read’. They base their argument on the sūrat al-ʿAlaq (96): 1–5 which says: 7 See Doi, A. R., Woman in Shari’ah, London: Ta Ha publishers, 1996, pages 138–144; Jawad, H. A., The Rights of women in Islam: An Authentic approach, London, Macmillan Press, 1998, pages 16–29; Khalil, Fatima, ‘Women’s Rights Under Sharia’, in A. M. Yakubu, A. M. Kani & M. I. Junaid (eds.), Understanding Shari’ a in Nigeria: proceedings of National seminar on Shari’a, Ibadan: Spectrum Books Limited, 2001, page 71.