SHAYKHA RUQAYYA & SHAYKHA MARYAM: DAUGHTERS OF IBRĀHĪM NIASSE

Prologue

“Several of Shaykh Ibrāhīm’s daughters went on to found Qurʾānic schools and Islamic institutes and some oversee large daayiras. The best-known of these in Senegal are Sayyida Ruqayya (b. 1930) and Shaykha Maryam (b. 1932), while the daughter with perhaps the largest following overall is Umm al-Khayri, who has lived in Niger since marrying Shaykh Ibrāhīm’s main representative there.” (Joseph Hill) in “Wrapping Authority”

SHAYKHA RUQAYYA BINT SHAYKH IBRĀHĪM NIASSE: BIOGRAPHY & LITERARY WORKS 

A daughter of Shaykh Ibrāhim Niasse, she was born in Kaolack and trained in her father’s house by the Mauritanian Shaykh Rabbānī. She opened a number of Islamic schools in Kaolack, where Islamic training is given to women and children. (Arabic Literature of Africa)

Shaykh Ibrāhīm insisted on his daughters’ Islamic education, having them memorize the Qurʾān and other Islamic texts alongside their brothers. Yet his daughters only studied in Medina Baay under their family’s protection, while their brothers continued their studies at Arab universities abroad, especially Al-Azhar in Cairo. Most of Shaykh Ibrāhīm’s daughters ended their formal studies on marrying, often during their teens. Most married Shaykh Ibrāhīm’s muqaddams outside Kaolack, many of them throughout West Africa. Several of Shaykh Ibrāhīm’s daughters went on to found Qurʾānic schools and Islamic institutes and some oversee large daayiras. The best-known of these in Senegal are Sayyida Ruqayya (b. 1930) and Shaykha Maryam (b. 1932), while the daughter with perhaps the largest following overall is Umm al-Khayri, who has lived in Niger since marrying Shaykh Ibrāhīm’s main representative there. Many interviewees cited these women’s example as evidence that women can do anything men can do and of Shaykh Ibrāhīm’s pioneering support for girls’ education. (Joseph Hill) in “Wrapping Authority”

Her Literary Works include;

1. Tanbīh al-Bint al-Muslima fī ’l-Dīn wa’l-Dunyā [Counsel for the Muslim Girl on Religion and Life] 

Publ: Dakar: Impricap, 1954; trans. extracts in Samb (1972), 236-41; Kano, Northern Maktabat Printing Press, [c. 1980].

2. Ḥaẓẓ al-Marʾa fī ’l-Islām  [The Lot of Woman in Islam] 

Publ. Kano, Mai-Nasara Press, nd. [c 1987] (copy in NU/Hunwick, 404, UB…

3. Path To The Garden: Foundational Knowledge for Believing Women and Men

Published by: Fayda Books

Sources;

✓ Arabic Literature of Africa (Volume 3), General Editor John O. Hunwick, R.S. O’Fahey. 

✓ Wrapping Authority: Women Islamic Leaders in a Sufi Movement in Dakar, Textbook by Professor Joseph Hill (Published at University of Toronto Press, 2018)

SHAYKHA MARYAM BINT IBRĀHĪM NIASSE

By: Professor Joseph Hill

Culled from his Textbook Chapter: “Women Who Are Men: Shaykha Maryam Niasse and the Qur’an in Dakar”

Shaykha Maryam’s Childhood and Education  

Shaykha Maryam was born on 24 December 1932 in the agricultural village of Kossi Mbitéyène (usually  shortened to Kossi), near the regional capital of  Kaolack, to Shaykh Ibrāhīm Niasse and Astu (Āisha). 

Shaykh Ibrāhīm was a junior son of al-Hājj Abd Allāh Niasse (d. 1922), who came from a long line of Qur’an teachers and was the preeminent Islamic leader and Tijānī shaykh in the area. Al-Hājj Abd Allāh had established a religious headquarters (zāwiya) called Léona Niassène near Kaolack’s city centre, yet shortly after his father’s death Shaykh Ibrāhīm began spending most of his time in Kossi teaching while overseeing his father’s fields there. His elders looked on warily from Léona Niassène as a small community of devoted disciples gathered around the young Ibrāhīm in Kossi. However influential his mystical teachings, it is important to remember that, like his daughter Maryam, Shaykh Ibrāhīm first attained wide acclaim by demonstrating mastery of the Qur’an. Through the month of Ramadan in 1926 in Kossi, he delivered an unauthorised public Qur’anic interpretation (tafsīr) that rankled many yet won over the entire village as well as key Islamic scholars from his own family and neighbouring villages. 

What led to irrelarable tensions between Shaykh Ibrāhīm’s followers and those of his father’s oldest son and successor, Muhammad ‘al-Khalīfa’ (‘the Successor’) Niasse, was Shaykh Ibrāhīm’s announcement in 1929 that he was the bringer of the ‘Fayda’ (Flood) of spiritual knowledge, an event predicted by the founder of the Tijānī Sufi order over a century and a half earlier. He announced that anyone who wished to know God must go through him. Thousands in the area, including many descendants and followers of his elders, flocked to him in Kossi during the early 1930s to receive his particular form of tarbiya, which promised to allow any non-specialist to attain direct knowledge of God within a short span. 

The same year, Shaykha Maryam was born. As controversy mounted, Shaykh Ibrāhīm split with Léona Niassène to found a new zāwiya three kilometres to the north. His followers soon nicknamed him ‘Baay’ and his zāwiya came to be known as ‘Medina Baay’. The Fayda movement soon spread through out West Africa, starting with Mauritania and Nigeria, and Shaykh Ibrāhīm soon became the Tijānī Sufi order’s most influential figure worldwide. For several years after founding Medina Baay, Shaykh Ibrāhīm and his family continued to spend most of their time in the more established Kossi. Thus, Maryam moved with Shaykh Ibrāhīm’s family from Kossi to the new zāwiya soon after her birth. 

Among the first things Shaykh Ibrāhīm did upon founding his new religious centre was to open a Qur’anic school (Wolof, daara) inside his home where his children and the children of other disciples would study. He soon brought Ahmad al-Rabbānī, a Mauritanian Arab, to teach his own and his closest disciples’ children the Qur’an in his own home (later in a separate home next door). With a native Arabic-speaking teacher, the children learned to pronounce the Qur’an according to the subtle rules of tajwīd. This emphasis on correct pronunciation was highly uncommon, as the vast majority of Qur’an teachers in Senegal significantly Wolofise Qur’anic pronunciation. Shaykh Ibrāhīm himself and his main deputies reserved time nearly everyday to hold a school majlis; pl. majālis) where they personally taught the Islamic disciplines to students who had finished their Qur’anic studies. They held their lessons at their own homes, usually under an awning (Wolof, mbaar) inside their courtyard or in front of the main entrance, as Shaykh Ibrāhīm is reported to have done. Today, the sons of these deputies (no daughters as far as I know) continue to hold majālis. As the idea of modern schooling took hold, Shaykh Ibrāhīm later established an Islamic institute which, again, brought a large number of native Arabic speakers from Egypt and Mauritania to teach students classical Arabic pronunciation. The institute has since been expanded and moved  to the adjacent Saam neighbourhood, also founded by Shaykh Ibrāhīm’s followers. Thus, Shaykha Maryam was born in an environ ment where Qur’anic and Islamic education were the primary activity and where Islamic knowledge was inseperable from Sufi practice and authority. Unusual among his contemporaries, Shaykh Ibrāhīm required his sons and daughters to study the same curriculum together and had them all memorise first the Qur’an and then other classical texts of Islamic learning in such fields as Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) and Arabic grammar (nahw) with himself and several master teachers he recruited. In 1937, before leaving on his first pilgrim age to Mecca, Shaykh Ibrāhīm ceremonially initiated his five-year-old daughter into her Qur’anic studies, teaching her the first words of the Qur’an: In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful (Bismi’llāhi’l-Rahmāni’l-Rahīm). He then sent her to study along side his other children with Rabbānī. 

It was during this first pilgrim age that, while in the Arabian city of Medina, Shaykh Ibrāhīm met the Emir of Kano and Nigerian Tijānī leaders whose allegiance would ultimately bring tens of millions into the Fayda movement and would pave the way for Shaykha Maryam’s own international connections.

After Shaykh Ibrāhīm’s break with Léona Niassène to found Medina Baay, many Fayda adherents remained in Léona Niassène, where they maintain a strong presence even today. Shaykha Maryam recounted to me that, as she advanced in her Qur’anic studies, her mother bought a house in Léona Niassène. Despite Maryam’s protests that she wanted to stay behind and study with Rabbānī, she was compelled to move to her mother’s house, where she remained until her mother’s death in 1949. Her father sent a tutor to teach her and the other children in her mother’s house, yet Maryam immediately refused to study with him, telling her father that she was capable of teaching him. She responded similarly to two more tutors before Shaykh Ibrāhīm recognised that Maryam would only be satisfied with Rabbānī. Rather than recall her to Medina Baay, he sent Rabbānī and the children studying with him to live in Léona Niassène. By that time, Shaykh Ibrāhīm’s oldest son and Maryam’s older full brother al-Hājj Abd Allāh had already memorised the Qur’an, yet many of her younger brothers, today prominent leaders, came with Rabbānī to study in Léona Niassène, including Māhī, Shaykh Tijānī, Baaba Lamin, Màkki and Āqibu. After reciting the Qur’an from memory before a jury of experts in 1947, Shaykha Maryam continued to study with Rabbānī in Léona Niassène until her mother’s death. Having memorised the Qur’an, Maryam transitioned from being the senior student to serving as Rabbānī’s teaching assistant. She thus was in a position of moral responsibility from a young age and had an early taste of teaching that is still uncommon for girls. She describes herself as having ‘raised’ (Wolof, yar) her younger siblings while in Léona Niassène, including Baaba Lamin. Her depiction of her ability to draw the family’s principal Qur’anic school into her orbit supports her narrative of being the ‘Servant of the Qur’an’. Furthermore, her emphasis on the fact that she ‘raised’ her younger siblings, a term that is used both to describe upbringing and teaching the Qur’an, suggests an early precedent of her connecting her role of raising children with her role of teaching the Qur’an, roles that are typically seen as separate. In the same year that the sixteen- year-old Maryam moved back to Medina Baay, a wealthy business man and Shaykh Ibrāhīm’s most prominent disciple in Dakar, al-Hājj Omar Kane, ‘presented himself to ask for [her] hand and married [her]’. Yet, she remained in Medina Baay for three more years after her marriage to study the Islamic disciplines (ulūm; Wolof, xam-xam). She learned more or less the same texts studied through out Islamic Africa, first studying several fiqh texts with her father, then studying with Medina Baay’s principal teacher of Arabic grammar and language, Ahmad (Aamadu) Thiam ‘Gine’ (nick named after his village of origin). She continued to study along side many of the same children with whom she had studied the Qur’an in Léona Niassène. Although Shaykh Ibrāhīm insisted that his sons and daughters master the same curriculum up to a point, he arranged for his daughters to marry his prominent muqaddams in Senegal  and other West African countries while he sent his sons to study in Arab universities such as Al-Azhar in Cairo.

Shaykha Maryam Niass: Khādimat al-Qur'ān (Servant of the Qur’an)

Establishing Herself as the ‘Servant of the Qur’an’ in Dakar, Shaykha Maryam bore her son Ben Omar in Medina Baay in 1951 and, a year later, moved into her husband’s large compound in Dakar. Her new home was near the Corniche on Avenue Malick Sy, which divides Dakar’s city centre and the neighbour hood of Medina, the original ‘native’ Senegalese neighbourhood in this colonial city. Her husband had built a medium-sized, freestanding mosque on the property several years earlier that made the house a neighbourhood meeting place. Like the other houses in the neighbourhood, this house was laid out much like a village house with rooms opening onto a central courtyard, yet with cement blocks and red clay tiles like other colonial buildings of the era. Shaykh Ibrāhīm was reportedly not fond of visiting this colonial city, yet when he did visit he would stay in al-Hājj Omar Kane’s compound, which was well equipped to entertain guests. Almost immediately on arriving as a junior wife in her husband’s house hold, Maryam began teaching the children of the household the Qur’an. She was likely one of the few in the area to emphasise classical Arabic pronunciation and word quickly got out that she was dispensing Qur’anic education of high quality in her home. Families from the neighbourhood began to bring her their children to teach. Then (and today), as both she and others have told me, when she some times found children wasting time in the streets, she would go to their parents to ask permission to raise them in her school. As her reputation grew, many Dakar notables sent her their children, many of whom have gone on to become well-known military, political and religious leaders. As the family and school grew over the years, newly constructed rooms filled in much of the court yard space. Yet she continued to teach primarily from within her own bedroom as she does today, eventually delegating others (primarily men) to teach in other spaces. Shaykh Ibrāhīm’s rising prominence as an international Islamic leader contributed significantly to the international reputation and student body of Shaykha Maryam’s school. In 1960, Maryam accompanied Shaykh Ibrāhīm on her first pilgrimage to Mecca. This extended trip was the first of many she would make through West Africa and the Middle East, first with her father, and after her father and husband died, as the head of her own delegation. During her first pilgrimage, she and her father’s entourage visited disciples in Nigeria and other countries and her father introduced her to political figures such his friend Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s new president. She told me that she brought on this trip her forty-day-old son Muhammad, who now directs her Islamic institute. 

At this time, Shaykh Ibrāhīm was involved in organising the Muslim World League, of which he officially became a founding member at its initial meeting in 1962. In conjunction with the Muslim World League and other international Islamic organisations and disciple communities, Shaykh Ibrāhīm took Maryam with him on several long tours through the Arab world and Muslim West Africa through out the 1960s. On these trips with her father, she visited Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Nigeria, Niger, Mauritania and other coun tries. She brought outstanding students along with her on these tours and had them recite the Qur’an to their hosts, establishing her teaching reputation among influential religious and economic leaders through out the Muslim world. These travels were important both in leading many West African parents to send their children to study with her and in establishing contacts in the Muslim world that would allow her later to act as a diplomatic envoy and to find sponsors for her projects. Consequently, a large proportion of students in her schools come from other countries, including many orphans who know no other parents than her. Because of her many Hausa students from Northern Nigeria and Niger and her many Mauritanian Arab students, Shaykha Maryam speaks fluent Hausa and Mauritanian Arabic. She has also received students from Gambia, Mali, Togo, Ghana, Morocco, Egypt, Palestine, Algeria, the United States and many other countries. 

Shaykha Maryam as a Muqaddama

While visiting Dakar some time in the 1960s, Shaykh Ibrāhīm presented Shaykha Maryam with a written ijāza (authorisation document) appointing her as a muqaddama in the Tijānī Sufi order and bestowing upon her unlimited authority (ijaza al-mutlaq) to use and transmit the litanies and secrets of the (Tijaniyya) order. Shaykh Ibrāhīm instructed his right-hand man Shaykh Alī Cissé to write down a compendium of ‘secrets’, which included instructions on pronouncing or writing verses of the Qur’an for certain effects. She and Ben Omar told me that these secrets were particularly oriented towards protecting the children in her care and helping them learn quickly. She says her father jested that one of these prayers would allow even a donkey to memorise the Qur’an in no time. Shaykh Ibrāhīm bestowed similar authorisation and esoteric knowledge on several other senior daughters. Although far better known for her teaching activities, Shaykha Maryam has initiated many disciples through tarbiya and has appointed her own  muqaddams, although she tells me that out of respect for her husband, she did not exercise the functions of a muqaddam such as initiating disciples during his life time. She told me that this was for a number of reasons: out of her respect for his position as a muqaddam; because she was devoting her life to Qur’an students for whom tarbiya would merely be a distraction from their studies; and because tarbiya creates close relationships, between shaykh and disciple, that may seem improper for a married woman before a certain age. But since her husband’s death, she has initiated many disciples, typicadispensing tarbiya on Fridays, although she normally only initates the process (Wolof, sóob) and delegates further spiritual instruction to others – in her case, her sons – as many male and female leaders do.

Culled from his Textbook Chapter: “Women Who Are Men: Shaykha Maryam Niasse and the Qur’an in Dakar”

By: Professor Joseph Hill