The Walking Qur'an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa

Introduction: Islam, the Qur'an School, and the Africans

1 The Qurʾan School Believing Muslims hold that more than fourteen hundred years ago, a chain of recitation was initiated in a cave on Mt. Ḥirāʾ, just outside of Mecca. The Angel Gabriel (Jibrīl) began reciting the Word of God to a man who had been chosen to bear the burden of prophethood. Muḥammad ibn ʿAbdullah heard the command to recite and obeyed. He listened intently to the words that followed and repeated them faithfully as he had heard them. He taught this recitation (Qurʾān) first to his wife, Khadīja, and then to a close circle of people whose hearts were touched by the reading and submitted (islām) themselves to the service of the One God. Central to that service was the ritual prayer (ṣalāt), which soon became the principal way of giving the faith concrete form.This act engaged not only the tongue, the heart, and the intellect but the limbs as well. Muḥammad learned the movements by copying Jibr īl, who sometimes appeared to him in human form.1 He passed this prayer on to those who had submitted to God (Muslims) by reenacting the motions and reciting the words. Nearly a millennium and a half later, small children in West Africa are forged into new living links in this chain of recitation every day. Many suffer hunger, thirst, and corporal punishment to make their fragile young bodies into worthy vessels for God’s verbatim speech. They then mimic their teachers, bending and prostrating those bodies to reproduce the movements of the angel who Muslims believe taught humanity the Word of God and the most perfect form of worship. This book explores one of the institutions most responsible for the transmission of the Qurʾan and its embodiment in lived practice—the Qurʾan school. In Qurʾan schools, children memorize and recite the Holy Book of Islam and learn to read and write the Arabic script. They are also introduced to the basic precepts and practices of the religion. Formal schools of this kind INTRODUCTION ISLAM, THE QURʾAN SCHOOL, AND THE AFRICANS Emulate the blacks, for among them are three lords of the people of Paradise: Luqmān the Sage, the Negus, and Bilāl the Muezzin. —Saying attributed to the Prophet Muḥammad 2 | Introduction may date to the time of Islam’s second caliph, ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb (r. 634– 44), who is sometimes credited with instituting the school’s traditional weekend, which begins on Wednesday after the noon prayer and ends after the noon congregational prayer on Friday. Other reports suggest that children (like adults) memorized verses of the Qurʾan during the lifetime of the Prophet himself (570–632) perhaps with the aid of inscriptions on wooden tablets (alwāḥ) and the wide flat shoulder blades of camels and cattle.2 It is not clear when the Qurʾan school first came to sub-Saharan West Africa, though it likely arrived with the early Muslims who crossed the Sahara in the eighth century. Qurʾan schooling has played a foundational role in building the Muslim societies of the African West for at least a thousand years. Nevertheless , it has been little studied and is often fundamentally misunderstood. When they have drawn attention at all, West African Qurʾan schools have often been maligned. In the past century and a half Muslims and nonMuslims alike have increasingly found fault with them. Qurʾan teachers rarely explain the meaning of verses to children, focusing instead on recitation and memorization, and leading many observers to conclude that such schools are pedagogically backward. In most of these schools, however, instruction has extended beyond the rote memorization of Qurʾan. Practical A Qurʾan school in Dakar, Senegal, from an early twentieth-century French postcard. Introduction | 3 instruction in prayer, ablution, and the other daily elements of the faith has figured prominently. And though reading comprehension was almost never emphasized, developing literacy skills was. Students learn to read and write the Arabic script, even though the vocabulary of Qurʾanic Arabic is foreign to them (as it is even for native speakers of Arabic). Some discursive teaching also takes place in Qurʾan schools, though usually outside of formal hours of study. The Book has long been the sole object of formal study, with other kinds of teaching inscribed in the margins, so to speak. Educational methods...