Privately Empowered

Front matter

Expressing Feminism in Islam in Northern Nigerian Fiction

Privately Empowered

Privately Empowered

Epilogue

Notes vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have started without my husband Ayub’s loving suggestion that I should write it. After trying to find a publisher for a dissertation in French in the United States, and finding none, I rather belatedly realized that our thoughts are imprisoned by language—and language itself by place. So I am forced to write in English. But Ayub’s belief in me has exploded every line that can possibly be drawn by language, religion, or place. The odds that two people from two large minorities in an even larger country defy by living and laughing together on a daily basis are beyond the drama that a Bollywood film can ever hope to capture, and beyond my own linguistic abilities to describe, even in Hindi. On the other hand, I am able to express my deepest gratitude, if insufficiently, for the material ideas in this book that developed with a generous Enhancement Grant for Professional Development (EGPD) at Sam Houston State University (SHSU) in 2007. I am indeed fortunate to benefit from SHSU’s continued support for my research endeavors. Over the years, I was fortunate to present some ideas in this book at the African Literature Association Conferences, the Modern Language Association Conventions, and other venues to capitalize on so many conversations with colleagues across the disciplines—Suman Venkatesh, Gaurav Desai, Anouar Majid, Lynn Ramey, Robert Barsky, and Nouri Gana, in particular, offered much-needed encouragement of my scholarly goals in the early stages of my career. Though not directly connected with this book, Carli Coetzee’s incisive reading skills sharpened my critical thoughts on literature and literary criticism and reminded me to think more and ask more. I am grateful to her for her intellectual engagement and encouragement of my work on African literatures. Gabeba Baderoon and Shaden Tageldin offered me the opportunity to talk about the work in this book, exposing me to invaluable feedback and a community of academics that enriches my work in immeasurable ways. I am lucky to have colleagues at SHSU who have helped me along the way and friends whose work habits and intellectual drive inspire me to continue in my scholarly pursuits. Grateful thanks are due to April Shemak, Shuangyue Zhang, Hiranya Nath, Manuel Triano-Lopez, Sharon Murphy-Manley, Alejandro Latinez, and, more recently, Peter Gachanja. The Interlibrary Loan staff at the Newton Gresham Library at SHSU—Erin Cassidy, Ann Jerabek, Bette vii viii Acknowledgments

Craig, Sammie Phelps—have shown me more patience than I deserve as I feverishly requested books and materials for this project. From the start, Gianna Mosser at Northwestern University Press held my hand throughout the publication process with her enthusiasm and patience, generously offering to read, edit, and comment on the manuscript. I am deeply grateful to the two anonymous reviewers at the press and to Nathan MacBrien and his wonderful team for treating my work with such great care, patience, and efficiency. Warm thanks are also due to Serene Yang for her meticulous copy editing and for polishing and straightening many of my sentences and phrases. Deepest thanks to Steven Moore for his skillful indexing of the book. My friends Norma, Pat, Roxanne, Jill, Tracy, Maritza, and Fatma deserve special mention for tolerating my antisocial ways as I was writing this book. My parents, Lt. Col. (retired) R. B. K. Edwin and Anita Edwin, and my brother, Lt. Col. Sunil Edwin, have had more faith in me since I can remember and have brought me this far—I can’t express here or in words the gratitude I feel for their love and belief in my abilities, for motivating me from even before I understood the purpose of that encouragement. As they wondered why I was typing so much over these past few months, Sana, Shuaib, and Samreen have come to think of me as an “author” and have inquired if I will visit their elementary school to read the stories I’m writing, and when they may borrow them from the local library. But most of all, they have enlivened my writing experience by vastly improving my knowledge of Pokémon over the months. I dedicate this book to my little Jolteon, Bouffalant, and Leafeon. An early version of a small segment of my discussion on African feminism appeared in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, and my discussion of Hauwa Ali’s Destiny is a revised version of a portion of an article that appeared in Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. I am thankful to the University of Nebraska Press and Taylor and Francis for allowing me to use part of these publications here in modified forms.

SA

TD TS TVW

ABBREVIATIONS

Ali, Hauwa. Destiny. Enugu: Delta Fiction, 1988.

Gimba, Abubakar. Sacred Apples. Ibadan: Evans Brothers, 1994. Also published in the United States as Golden Apples. New York: Vantage Press, 1997. Citations in Privately Empowered refer to the latter edition.

Alkali, Zaynab. The Descendants. Zaria: Tamaza, 2005. Alkali, Zaynab. The Stillborn. Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1984. Alkali, Zaynab. The Virtuous Woman. Ikeja: Longman, 1987.

A NOTE ON TRANSCRIPTION

For romanization of words and phrases in Modern Standard Arabic, I have used the system outlined in the American Library Association- Library of Congress (ALA-LC). For African languages such as Hausa, Swahili, and others, I have italicized the words and parenthetically provided their meanings wherever necessary.

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Introduction coe Conjugating Feminisms

African, Islamic as African-Islamic Discourse

Fiction is an act of willfulness, a deliberate effort to reconcile, to rearrange, to reconstitute nothing short of reality itself. Even among the most reluctant and doubtful of writers, this willingfulness must emerge. Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying, “Listen to me.”

—Jhumpa Lahiri

Islamic feminism is the unwanted child of political Islam. —Ziba Mir-Hosseini

I focus on Arab women’s autobiographies and novels because it is there that one can most clearly see the individual creating alternative realities.

—miriam cooke

In 2001, Amina Lawal, a thirty-one-year-old Muslim peasant from Katsina State in northern Nigeria, was arrested on charges of adultery and sentenced to death-by-stoning, as laid down in the sharia or Islamic law.! She appealed the death sentence for two years before being acquitted by an Islamic appeals court in 2003.7 Lawal’s case was not unique. The previous year, Safiya Husseini, another Muslim woman from Sokoto in northern Nigeria, was convicted on similar charges and condemned to death before being acquitted by an Islamic appeals court. Not unpredictably, details of these cases, especially the death sentence and the method, death-by-stoning, attracted the ire of the international community, from international human rights groups, including women’s rights organizations, to nongovernmental agencies, raining fire and brimstone on the purportedly archaic laws observed by twelve of the thirty-six Nigerian states that have adopted Islamic law.* For years following these cause célébres, European and American media scrutinized them as emblematic of the savagery sanctioned by Islam in northern Nigeria.*

Shortly after the international outcry over Lawal’s and Husseini’s cases, Islam in Nigeria found itself at the center of another storm when protests by conservative Islamic groups erupted against hosting the Miss World pageant in Abuja in 2004, believing the event would corrupt women’s modesty. Famously, Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka not only condemned the “Muslim fanatics” who opposed hosting the pageant on Nigerian soil as “psychopaths of faith” bringing “disrepute to the religion of Islam” by indulging in a “murderous orgy” to stop the beauty pageant, but also burnished his descriptions by calling Muslims “zealots,” “religious stormtroopers,” and “atavists of religion,” among other invectives, who butchered innocents in the name of Islam and Muhammad.’ More recently, in April 2014, Islam in Nigeria took center stage again for the infamous kidnapping of over two hundred schoolgirls from their boarding school in Chibok in northern Nigeria; they had been abducted by the terrorist outfit Boko Haram.‘ Attention to the abduction gained momentum with outpourings of military support and intelligence from international governments—including those of the United States and western European countries—to locate the missing boarders.

I use these three events as a window into understanding the declensions and revivals in the political and media-driven interest in Islam in Nigeria, which is the most populous country in Africa, with an estimated 170 million people, and also the largest Muslim country in Africa, with Muslims making up roughly half the population. In precisely the undisguised interest in such media-worthy snippets, this book identifies a thematic pattern of the all-too-familiar stance that Islam is oppressive and violent, particularly to Muslim women.’ As a result of this stance, the attention to Islam unstintingly pivots on Islamism, fetishizing its diverse forms— political Islam, Islamic activism, militant Islam, nationalist Islam, legal Islam, among others—in the attempt to proffer a solution on the putative oppression of women sanctioned by the religion. Only infrequently, however, are efforts made to peer into the private lives of Muslims in sub- Saharan Africa, even less so into the lives of Muslim women in West Africa who practice Islam in a myriad of secluded, private, and apolitical ways with no aspiration to participate in public venues in the form of memberships to groups or to engage in activism for legal reform or social change.

Privately Empowered argues that the rampant oversight of the ordinary lives of African Muslim women stems from the inordinate preoccupation with political, public, and organized approaches to the religion. African Muslim women’s personal, private, and individual engagements with Islam are overlooked in Islamic feminist discourse just as Islam is ignored, when not disparaged, in African feminist discourse. To mediate the thematic and regional slippage in both African and Islamic feminist discourses vis-a-vis the African Muslim woman, I propose African-Islamic feminism: a theory, a thematic focus, and a reading practice that three Nigerian novelists who write in English—Zaynab Alkali, Hauwa Ali, and Abubakar Gimba—interpellate in their fiction, illustrating Muslim women’s private, personal, and individual engagements with Islamic habits and rituals. In each of their novels that I examine in detail—Alkali’s The Stillborn, The Virtuous Woman, and The Descendants; Ali’s Destiny; and Gimba’s Sacred Apples—and in their depictions of African Muslim women of various ages and sections of society—teenagers, middle-aged women, grandmothers, and matriarchs; students, professionals, and housewives; and rural and urban women—Alkali, Ali, and Gimba frequently explore repertoires of spiritual practice, including salat, dua, and dhikr, collectively known as “ibaddt or forms of prayer; shahadah or Islamic monotheism; hijāb or veiling; and akhlaq or Islamic virtue, that hold no ambition other than securing personal and private satisfaction. African-Islamic feminism in Privately Empowered thus escorts Islamic feminism out of the Middle East and Arab world not only regionally, as much of the scholarship constellates on Muslim women in that region, into sub-Saharan Africa but also out of its political and public goals thematically into women’s personal modes of spiritual engagement with Islam. Additionally, within the well-honed rubric of African feminist politics that tends to minimize and even deprecate the impact of Islam on African Muslim women, African-Islamic feminism repatriates the African Muslim woman to African feminist discourse. Considered together, the twin aims of African-Islamic feminism tutor a broader and sharper understanding of Muslim women, in general, and of African Muslim women, in particular.

The ineluctable relevance of African-Islamic feminism as it thematizes women’s private and individual engagements with Islamic spiritual habits in northern Nigerian fiction in English can furthermore be evidenced in the fact that Alkali, Ali, and Gimba avowedly write in English in a region—consisting of parts of Nigeria, Chad, Ghana, and Niger—where Hausa is spoken by no less than fifty million people. The dominant literary genre in northern Nigeria is the thriving and immensely popular

Littattfan Soyayya or books of love, part of the ever-growing socio-literary phenomenon of Kano market literature, sold in the markets and streets of major northern Nigerian cities such as Kano, Zaria, Kaduna, and others. Although not of the Soyayya genre per se, nor in Hausa, the language of Soyayya fiction, Alkali’s, Ali’s, and Gimba’s novels in English serve as windows into the Hausa society that is textualized in the more popular but rarely translated Soyayya fiction in Hausa. Indeed, Alkali’s, Ali’s, and Gimba’s novels echo the dominant topoi of Soyayya books— interpersonal relations, romantic love, family, marriage, personal lives, Islam, and private affairs—to announce to a much wider audience of readers than those who read Hausa (written Hausa uses a roman script called boko or an Arabic script known as ajami), namely the English-speaking interlocutors in Nigeria, Africa, and beyond, that African Muslim women are not always politically or even publicly invested in Islam. As a result of this inspiration from an immensely popular genre that reaches out to no less than fifty million users of the Hausa language alone, Alkali, Ali, and Gimba amplify in English, the most widely spoken and official language of Nigeria, African-Islamic feminism as a potent literary canon.’ As fiction from northern Nigeria, their novels, therefore, are not only representative but indeed constitutive of African-Islamic feminism, focusing on African Muslim women’s spiritual engagement with Islam as it yields “blueprints for the future” (to borrow miriam cooke’s visionary expression, albeit in an apolitical sense), while imperatively meeting the challenges of the regular inattention to Islam in sub-Saharan Africa within Islamic feminist theories and Islam’s denigration within African feminist discourse."

There is a pervasive scarcity of scholarship on Islamic feminism in Africa, as Ousseina Alidou appositely remarks:

Study after study claiming to look at the experiences of women in the Islamic world was, in fact, confined to the Arabic and Asiatic regions. There is a scarcity of scholarly studies conducted by Muslim scholars or non-Muslim scholars of the West that focus on Muslim women of the so-called “sub-Saharan” African regions."!

Roman Loimeier echoes Alidou when he limns the need for studies of Islam in Africa, given the outsized presence the religion has on the continent. He prescriptively states:

Knowledge of the existence of a multitude of traditions of Islamic learning has so far not been translated into a broader perception of African Muslim societies . . . Islam has, as of today, more than 450 million followers in Africa, constituting one of the largest agglomerations of Muslims on the planet, second perhaps only to the number of Muslims in the Indian subcontinent. Due to their undeniable importance in numerical strength as well as political potential, Muslim societies in Africa deserve a thorough study that does justice to the complexity of Africa’s historical and societal development.”

But the purpose of Privately Empowered is not to simply redress this regional imbalance by adding yet another inquiry to the scant critical iterations on Islam in Africa. Undertaking studies that fill the quantitative void is not likely to tip the scales in favor of Islamic studies on Africa. Instead, I contend that scholarship on Islam and on Islamic feminism in Africa is lopsided insofar as it is conceptually moored to the evolution, articulation, and subsequent dissemination of Islamic feminist discourse itself, the bulk of which remains tenaciously contextualized in the specific histories and events of the Middle Eastern and Arab regions of the Muslim world where the Islamic feminist movement evolved in tandem with the nation-state and derived many of its aims from pronouncements on gender in an Islamic state." In other words, in many Middle Eastern countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, and in the Mediterranean Middle East, as well as in North African countries such as Egypt and Morocco, Islamic feminism evolved from organized and collective (whether or not state-sponsored) efforts to articulate women’s rights and functions.'* The tight embrace between Islam and the methods and aims of feminist movements has rendered the domain of women’s activities irrefragably political and measurably public, indexed in rallies, demonstrations and activism, memberships to social groups, organizations, and legal reforms in virtually all spheres of life. Islamic feminism has thus grown in direct proportion to its politically, legally, and collectively activist labor.

A manifest consequence of this phenomenon that I argue has assumed canonical status is the amplification of the Qur’an as a juridical reference for women’s rights, overshadowing its significance as a spiritual resource. Such an approach disenfranchises the private, personal, and highly individualized dispositions of religious practice in Islam, thus further obscuring forms of Islamic feminism that do not conduce to public activity or roles. Privately Empowered does not aim to discredit activist and political modes of feminist expression in Islam. With renewed critical conviction, it aims at broadening the approach to Islamic feminism so we may no longer remain circumscribed by the conceptual limits to feminism in Islam as imposed by a discourse on Muslim women that is both regionally and thematically narrow in its scope. A capacious African and Islamic feminist discourse is particularly relevant today when we face many dangers to global and cultural tolerance, including religious extremism in the form of Islamophobia. A broader understanding of Islam and of Muslim women in particular, as I address in this book, outside the tenured rubric of feminism as connected to activism, foreign policy, politics, and publicly organized expressions of religion thus presents itself as a potential solution to the cultural impasse confronting us. My choice to examine Northern Nigerian fiction in English is therefore guided by my endeavor at broadening the scope and our understanding of feminism in Islam.

By choosing a specific region to discuss African-Islamic feminism, namely Northern Nigeria in sub-Saharan Africa, where Islam, as Ousseina Alidou’s and Roman Loimeier’s comments above note, remains scantily studied, I aim to underscore the connections between underappreciated forms of feminist engagement and Muslims in other parts of the world. My choice of fiction in English from Northern Nigeria, where Hausa is also widely spoken, likewise conveys to a larger audience the underexplored aspects about Islam that influence Muslims in this predominantly Muslim region of sub-Saharan Africa. These understudied forms of feminist engagement are amply depicted in the fiction in Hausa. And finally, my choice to examine Islamic feminism in Northern Nigerian fiction in English is motivated by the operative point of the book, that in a region where twelve of the thirty-six Nigerian states have adopted Islamic law or sharia, rendering the legal presence of Islam very similar to politico-legal models in Islamic nation-states as in the Middle East, the lived presence of Islam in Northern Nigeria is in fact also expressed most pervasively by women in apolitical ways in the wildly popular literary genre of Soyayya fiction that stubbornly privileges themes on women’s personal and private lives. In these connections then between the topoi of Soyayya novels in Hausa, whose Islamic and feminist tenor is translated by Northern Nigerian writers into their own novels in English, nests a blueprint for greater cultural and religious understanding.

As most Arab countries (Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Yemen) are also Islamic nation-states, the practice of converging in the religion as the foundation for laws, governance, and personal matters, where Islam is simultaneously a spiritual, legal, and political system, hearkens back to the personhood of Muhammad himself—a rare combination of statesman, spiritual leader, military commander, and adjudicator—and the plural functions of the Qur’an as a legal, spiritual, and political text. With much economy, John L. Esposito summarizes Muhammad’s multifaceted role “as administrator, legislator, judge, and commander-in-chief as well as teacher, preacher, and prayer leader of the Muslim community.” In most Islamic nation-states, then, Islamic feminism has evolved as an extension of, if not in concert with, such systems, thereby institutionalizing its agenda as a public, social, legal, and activist manifestation of women’s engagement with Islam. Most notably, Ziba Mir-Hosseini articulately traces the circumstances of the birth of Islamic feminism as the “unwanted child of ‘political Islam’” to a recuperation not just of the sharia or Islamic law but of practice and interpretation of the law itself, namely of figh or Islamic jurisprudence and tafsir or exegeses of Islamic texts such as the Qur’an that had become saturated with patriarchy. She unequivocally locates the core methods of Islamic feminism in a grammar of justice and activism, calling Islamic feminists “gender activists” who, horrified by the unequal and unjust laws for women, reacted to rectify the patriarchal, literalist, and restrictive interpretations of the Qur’an by Islamists that lacked spiritual or legal sanction:

I believe that Islamic feminism is, in a sense, the unwanted child of “political Islam.” It was “political Islam” that actually politicized the whole issue of gender and Muslim women’s rights . . . Translated into practice, law and public policy, this meant going back to pre-modern interpretations of shariah, with all their restrictive laws about and for women. These gender activists, using Islamic arguments to critique and challenge the Islamists, brought classical fiqh and tafsir texts to public scrutiny and made them a subject of public debate and discussion, articulating alternative, gender-friendly understandings, indeed visions, of Islam. That marked the broadening, in terms of class, of the fledgling Islamic feminist movement. 6

Mona Siddiqui also believes that challenging Islamists by publicly scrutinizing Islamic legal practice can expose the gender-friendly aspects of Islamic society, writing that “one of the methods of exploring the nature of Islamic society can be pursued through the dimension of its legal literature.” Deniz Kandiyoti likewise convincingly locates the history of feminism in a symbiotic relationship between activism, social reform, and Islam in the Middle East in “anti-imperialist and nationalist struggles, a general move towards secularism, a new concern with social reform and modernity.”'* Furthermore, in a country like Iran, as Valentine Moghadem succinctly puts it, “Islam is not a matter of personal spiritual choice but rather a legal and political system” to frame Islamic feminism within a visibly public, political, and activist agenda.’”

On the other hand, vast populations—in fact, sizable majorities of Muslims—also live in societies that are not Islamic nation-states. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, eighty to ninety percent of the populations in Mali, Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea, and Niger are Muslim. Interestingly, these countries are not politically organized or governed as Islamic nation-states; instead, their governments are modeled on European parliamentary systems and legacies of colonial legal structures. As Esposito and Emad El-Din Shahin put it, Islam is important because it is “an area that enjoys immense academic and policy interest.””° But, as this book argues, the academic interest in Islam is directly proportionate to the policy interest in it. So, Islam is of academic interest because it enjoys policy value. To then study women in such societies only where politics or government and religion coalesce in public activism, legal reform, and collective labor, as in the Middle East (regions of immense policy value to the United States and Europe), glaringly omits those nations that are, like Niger, The Gambia, and Mali, predominantly Muslim but not Islamically governed, and where Muslim women may express their feminism outside the rubric of public activity or the purview of the government.

If feminism is indeed only a function of political sponsorship and activist labor, as has been discoursed by Islamic feminists like Mir-Hosseini, Moghadem, and others, this would most naturally also be the case even in Muslim-majority states in sub-Saharan Africa. However, as Leonardo Villalón observes, only Mauritania is officially an “Islamic Republic.”7! Villalón ponders whether being a country populated by Muslims means that the political system should reflect Islam, and if so, how?” He singles out Nigeria’s example where Islam can play an important role even if it is not officially connected to the governance of a country, which is also the case in other Muslim-majority countries like Senegal, Mali, Guinea, or Niger. Even during the early 1970s and 1980s when the Izala movement, or the Society for the Removal of Innovation and Reestablishment of the Sunna, emerged as the largest reformist movement in Islam in most parts of Africa, Islam remained peripheral to national affairs and governance.”

Three key issues animating this book can be gleaned from these observations on the status of Islam in Muslim-majority states in Africa. First, Islam is politically and socially etched into the lives of Muslims in sub- Saharan Africa but nevertheless falls short of impacting the political governance of even Muslim-majority countries enough to compellingly question the academic and critical climate where, unless Islam in sub- Saharan Africa is of policy interest to the United States and the West as it is in the Middle East, even its demographically overwhelming presence fails to attract academic attention.** Second, the legal and political presence of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa is relegated to religious courts in matters pertaining to family and personal law, family codes, and secularism. The legal system for a majority of issues remains modeled on European civil law (French or British). In such societies, then, where Islam is legally active only in a limited number of areas, Muslims may express their engagement with the religion in means and ends that are different from those espoused by their counterparts elsewhere and are not as strenuously voiced through lobbying, activism, and political change in the sharia as they are in Islamic nation-states, as in the Middle East. Finally, and as mentioned earlier, notwithstanding an overwhelming agglomeration of Muslims in the African continent, Islam is neglected in the vast literature and scholarship on Africa because the methods and aims of gender activism in the Middle East scarcely resonate with expressions of feminism in Islam in sub-Saharan Africa.”

While they have of late become profoundly alert to the glaring absence of African Muslim women from mainstream Islamic discourse, Islamic feminists nonetheless view feminism in Africa through an analytic lens programmed to focus exclusively on Muslim women as activists or as potential beneficiaries of political and legal provisions in Islam. A signal instance is a collection of essays on Muslim women in Africa, edited by Margot Badran, titled Gender and Islam in Africa: Rights, Sexuality, and Law. Covering such diverse geographic regions as Morocco, northern Nigeria, Mauritania, and South Africa, the volume dwells on the political and legal ramifications of Islam in Africa. It canvasses topics ranging from women’s political participation and activism, to the codification of hudid laws (laws of crime and punishment) that occupied much media attention through Lawal’s and Husseini’s cases, to African Muslim women’s organizations.” A solitary essay pertaining to the creative arts examines Somali popular songs. On the other hand, Privately Empowered holds the nexus between the state and Islam as responsible for this widespread neglect of Islamic feminism as a personal and private practice, not only thematically but also regionally, and intervenes to rectify it by studying African Muslim women’s personal and not political engagement with Islam in Alkali’s, Alis, and Gimba’s literary textualizations of Hausa society. African-Islamic feminism parries the excessively political, public, and activist articulation of feminism in Islamic feminist theories and the deprecatory tenor of African feminist discourse vis-a-vis Islam. It retools both African and Islamic feminist discourses through a close reading of private and personal engagements with Islam in the practice of Islamic rituals and spiritual habits in literary fiction where women do not aspire to political, public, or collective goals of social justice, legal reform, or even memberships to women’s organizations. African-Islamic feminism establishes such ends as personal happiness and satisfaction, personal success, and personal fulfillment that leaven African and Islamic feminist discourses to seek out new approaches, topoi, and goals for feminism. In other words, African-Islamic feminism is invested in the “biliteracy” of sources, traditions, and theories in that it borrows from both African and Islamic feminist discourses and lends to both as well.

Biliterate Voices: African-Islamic Feminism in Fiction

Zaynab Alkali, Hauwa Ali, and Abubakar Gimba conjugate African and Islamic feminisms by enfranchising personal, individual, and private modes of religious behaviors, observable in an engagement that draws from the Qur’an chiefly as a source for spiritual habits. In so doing, they compellingly reorient the field toward those repertoires of feminist expression that are not organized around activist, collective, or even public activity. Donald Wehrs calls this engagement with multiple levels of discourse, traditions, and sources of inspiration “biliteracy,” where African feminist writers recruit issues and solutions from multifarious modes of inspiration:

African novelists tend to inhabit in addition to two traditions, two modes of modernity as well, one suspicious of traditionalism, and one suspicious of modernity as embodied in the West. For African writers, bilingualism passes into “biliteracy,” being “biliterate” in the values and debates of two cultures. Such biliteracy permits these novelists to apprehend what issues irresolvable within one tradition may be approached through other traditions but it also illuminates for them what issues belong to differences between cultural traditions and what issues belong to differences between traditional and modern ways Of life. 7

For Alkali, Ali, and Gimba, biliteracy lies in interpellating African-Islamic feminism as a diversification of the topoi and aims of Islamic feminism. When the award-winning, yet little-known Alkali insists that she presents women from an “Islamic perspective,” African-Islamic feminism gestures to using the Qur’an as a normative source of all knowledge, more for its spiritual uses for prayer, ritual, and the fulfillment of spiritual habits than as a legal reference for women’s rights or gender equality.”* Following this biliterate approach of drawing from multiple sources toward multiple aims, my analyses of their novels rest on the premise that the practice of Islam for African Muslim women may not be a conscious effort to publicize or organize religious issues in forums or activist platforms. Through personal, private, and highly individualized engagements of Islamic practice—Islamic faith or monotheism or shahadah; forms of prayer salat, dua, and dhikr; Islamic behavior or akhlaq; and veiling or hijab—Alkali’s, Ali’s, and Gimba’s protagonists employ Islamic practice as a conduit for personal satisfaction or as a goal in itself. My analyses focus on the following: the most palpable ways of knowing the materiality of Islam in an African Muslim woman’s quotidian existence; the kinds of Islamic activities African Muslim women engage in besides publicly and socially rallying for change; the reasons for which women approach the Qur’an in addition to as a reference for legal justice; the ways African Muslim women engage Islamic practice to express feminism in the private, personal, and individual performance of rituals and spiritual habits; and, finally, the purpose behind performing rituals and spiritual habits.