(En)gendering Gendered Knowledge in Northern Nigeria’s Qur’an Schools: Women and Girls, Present Yet ‘Invisibilised’

Abstract

Northern Nigeria’s Qur’an schools (also known as ‘Almajiri Schools’) have existed for several centuries and remain a key source of education and socialisation for many young boys in rural northern Nigeria. The schools are the subject of often harmful and stigmatising representations and elitist discontent due to the students being seen as ‘out of school’ and ill-educated for the 21st century. The boys can sometimes be seen begging and at the mercy of the streets as the schools fall out of the purview of the state. Importantly, this system of schooling and education is largely understood as male-dominated, from the teachers to the students and the fathers who do the sending. This study therefore explores the historical and contemporary roles of women within northern Nigeria’s Qur’anic system of schooling and Islamic education more widely, paying close attention to the continuities and disruptions. By focusing on women and girls and making apparent their places in a practice regarded primarily as an avenue for educating boys, the exploration reveals ways that women have and still play an integral part especially as co-educators. From prominent women historical figures to the wives of the teachers; present-day scholars to women who act as mother figures within the local communities, women shape and influence Islamic education within northern Nigeria. Making these contributions, their roles, and agency apparent and visible is therefore a key goal, especially in a context where they have always been present yet disregarded (sometimes wilfully, sometimes inadvertently unseen), and subsequently ‘invisiblised’.

1. Introduction

“When we exclude half of humanity from the production of knowledge we lose out on potentially transformative insights.”

Criado Pérez (2019)

“Where are the girls?”, an examiner asks during my PhD viva.

I look at them perplexed, thinking, there are no girls as such within the Almajiranci system of education. “How are the girls educated then?”

I go on to answer the question above as best as I could, and this comes back as one of the corrections I had to make to my thesis. To do this, I add some reflective paragraphs on how girls are typically educated within the wider practice and leave it at that, satisfied that I had addressed the issue. Months later, I go for the African Studies Association annual meeting, and I listen to Professor Ousseina Alidou of Rutgers University in the USA (a prominent African Muslim scholar originally from the Republic of Niger) talk about the issues of women in northern Nigeria through a book titled ‘Habiba’ by Professor Razinat Mohammed, and then it finally occurs to me. Of course! While women are always present in every facet of society, society often chooses not to see them or hear them enough. They become what I now name in this paper as ‘invisiblised’—present but hardly seen, heard or recognised for the key roles they play in holding systems and structures together; often reduced to minor players in the shadows. At that point, I realised that with all my passion for social justice and gender equity, I had also become guilty of doing the same thing to Muslim women in northern Nigeria and their contributions within its Islamic schooling tradition. Since their roles and participation are gendered and spatial, I had failed to see them. I had completed a whole PhD study on the Almajiranci system of northern Nigeria and left women and girls as footnotes and afterthoughts. Not even my original thoughts, but thoughts prompted by someone else as they had barely crossed my mind in the production of knowledge discourse.

This omission, whilst not intentional, is very telling of the dynamics of power and gender in the ways that knowledge is produced. The tripartite subject of knowledge, power and discourse (and, indeed, the intersections of these in the ways that knowledge operates in postcolonial contexts) is integral to my thesis (Abdulrahman 2018), yet I had failed to fully engage with how it can and does function on the postcolonial psyche through its ability to discipline what we are even able to think about a topic, within an existing episteme. Brenner (2001) explains the ‘episteme’ as being something akin to a worldview or as an implicit set of relations that unites the discursive practices of a particular period, adding that the episteme of a time and place shapes discourses. Given the narratives (Abdulrahman 2018) that exist about Qur’an schooling in Nigeria generally and, more specifically, the place and role of women in Muslim societies (Alidou 2005; Idris 2022; Newman 2024), it is not surprising that I had also been subjectified by these discourses.

This paper presents an opportunity to begin to atone for and redress this error. Its principal aim is to make apparent the role of Muslim women in the education of northern Nigerian society, to explore both the historical and the contemporary, its continuities and the disruptions, and to make visible what should never have been rendered unseen and invisibilised. The concept of ‘Invisibilisation’, as theorised in this paper, refers to what I now identify as a structural and discursive erasure of women’s roles in knowledge systems. In the context of northern Nigeria’s Islamic education, this can manifest in different ways including spatially, pedagogically and authoritatively, so, not just a lack of physical visibility within the learning spaces, but also an absence in teaching and leadership roles. This process of invisibilisation, far from being accidental, is rooted in patriarchal and colonial onto-epistemologies that privilege male authority in knowledge spaces and public presence. With the ‘onto-epistemological’, the emphasis is on understanding that what exists, what we know, is inseparable from how we come to know it, and the interconnectedness of the ontological and the epistemological.

For this paper, I rely on Professor Ousseina Alidou’s model for engaging with and deconstructing the relationship between gender discourses (oral or material) and power in a way that this is tied to lived experiences (Alidou 2005). In her seminal piece, she challenges dominant narratives that seek to portray African Muslim women as passive victims of religious and cultural oppression by presenting a nuanced account of how Muslim women in postcolonial Niger actively engage with modernity, Islam, and education to assert their agency. This work, though based on Muslim women in the republic of Niger, is especially pertinent for gendering Qur’anic schooling in northern Nigeria due to shared histories and similarities between the two neighbouring contexts.

2. Contextualising Qur’anic Schooling in Northern Nigeria

This system of education and socialisation exists as part of a long history of educating children across Muslim West Africa and represents one of the region’s oldest and most enduring educational traditions (Bano 2009; Baba 2014). It is rooted in Islamic scholarship and a unique form of community-based pedagogy that has evolved over time to respond to changes both religious, sociocultural, economic and political. As far back as the 11th century, when Islam came to what is now known as northern Nigeria though the trans-Saharan trade, places like Kano and Borno became known as centres of excellence in Qur’anic Education and thus evolved these Almajiri schools where boys especially, learnt to read, recite and memorise the Qur’an using wooden tablets known as ‘Allo’ as a key pedagogical tool.

For northern Nigeria’s Qur’an schools, they have always been perceived as male-dominated, both in terms of pedagogy and participation with young boys (from the age of around 7) sent off to study and memorise the Qur’an under the tutelage of a male teacher called a Malam. The practice is known as Almajiranci, and this migration for knowledge is widely practiced especially in rural areas where the possibility of acquiring of knowledge is felt to be either insufficient or inappropriate (Hoechner 2018). In Nigeria particularly, the Almajiranci practice has come under several criticisms as it has failed to find its place within the postcolonial Nigerian education system. It is regarded as retrograde and unable to produce adults suited for the 21st century. The practice is also blamed for several ills and functions within a mainstream discourse of dysfunctionality. It has become politicised within a context where ‘Western schooling’ as inherited through the colonial project is seen as epistemologically superior. Almajirai are regarded as uneducated and illiterate, and many Western-schooled Nigerians see this form of Qur’anic schooling as antithetical to the creation of the modern Nigerian citizen because its curriculum is perceived as too narrow to meet the needs of a modern state (Abdulrahman 2018).

The Almajiranci practice remains the subject of increasing scrutiny due to its association with poverty, child neglect, and social marginalisation, with much of the literature (Aluaigba 2009; Adetoro 2012; Aghedo and Eke 2013; Katami and Teke 2023) theorising it from a deficit and focusing on the socio-economic and political dimensions of the system, often framing it as a problem that can be solved either through eradication or integration with Western-style education. One of the key connections that this paper makes is that this framing can overlook several nuanced dynamics of the practice, including the roles played by women. The belief that Qur’anic schooling is exclusively male has also led to significant gaps in understanding how gender operates within these otherwise traditional educational spaces, and especially how this knowledge can be leveraged within policy and transformational social discourses. It is therefore within these generalised discourses governed by deficit theorisation that this paper attempts to situate women and girls both historically and contemporarily. It seeks to do this within a postcolonial education system already imbricated and mutually interacting with a range of sociocultural, political and economic factors, including modernising forces and government policies that are influenced by discourses determined to misunderstand and misrepresent the Almajiranci practice (Abdulrahman et al. 2021).

Given all the forementioned, situating women and girls both historically and contemporarily therefore becomes an important step towards making their roles, participation and agency visible. The paper achieves this by revisiting data from an earlier study and ongoing engagements and observations, as outlined in the next section.

3. Reflections upon Data from the PhD Study and Ongoing Engagement with the Practice

For this paper, I adopt a qualitative ethnographic approach to exploring the gendered dimensions of Qur’anic schooling in Northern Nigeria. This methodology is rooted in the recognition that traditional research paradigms often marginalise and overlook the lived and embodied experiences of women, particularly in contexts where their roles are informal, relational and/or culturally embedded. By choosing to centre women and girls as knowledge bearers and agential within the Qur’anic schooling system as I try to do here, the study (re)genders the production and consumption of Islamic educational knowledge through a process that requires making visible, at least discursively, the ways that women have historically participated in and continue to shape spaces that are often perceived as exclusively male.

A lot of the data for this paper has been gathered during my PhD (Abdulrahman 2018) through interviews, informal conversations and observations carried out over a period of 2 years; and other parts of the data through continuing work with the organisation ‘Adopt an Almajiri School Initiative’ over the last 3 years, and especially actively over a 3-week period of observations and informal conversations with the female teachers who are also wives of malamai, female students and community mothers/uwayen daki. The Adopt an Almajiri School Initiative is a community-based project that I came up with off the back of my PhD study, which actively utilises a strategy I label as the Respect, Engage, Reform (RER) approach that strives to work with the ‘knowledge from within’ the Almajiranci practice in a respectful, holistic and ground-up manner in order to reform and address the issues with the practice (Abdulrahman 2022). In the time since my PhD, I have continued to work with the practitioners and my original participants, thereby fulfilling a key maxim of ‘Reciprocal Appropriation’ (Chilisa 2012) in conducting ethical indigenous research and in a way that is useful and also beneficial to the people we theorise from, as well as in such a way that allows me to carry out this study in a respectful and ethical manner. Before starting my initial field work, I carried out a systematic process of online and offline data gathering and observation of the lives of practitioners of Almajiranci within the community. These practitioners include the teachers, students, former almajirai and other community members directly and indirectly connected to the practice.

For this paper particularly, in addition to the initial data gathered, I have used data from 5 informal conversations with students and community mothers, textual analysis, and from 3 semi-structured interviews with wives of teachers who are teachers themselves. All the data was then revisited and re-analysed thematically in light of the new aim of re-gendering women and girls within the practice. The earlier reviewed literature in the PhD on Almajiranci consists of journal articles, all written in English and found using databases including Google Scholar, JSTOR and EBSCOhost. These sites were again used to update the literature for this paper. The ongoing use of observations as a method in this re-gendering process has allowed for the documentation of gendered interactions as well as other pedagogical and spatial dynamics that exist within the Qur’anic schooling learning spaces which were previously not paid attention to.

The use of ‘Informal conversations’ as an initial and ongoing method for collecting data is valid within indigenous research traditions and is one that I have found especially important because it is a conversation conducted with a purpose. In the initial study (Abdulrahman 2018), the conversations conducted with various stakeholders involved in the Almajiranci system provided valuable insight and meaning into its wider practices in a way that a more formal interview would not have enabled. It is through engagement with that data that I was able to clarify hidden cultural meaning. Whilst interviews have long been considered the gold standard method of data collection for qualitative research (Barbour 2008), insights from decolonial indigenous knowledge research provides me with the understanding that this process is not value-free. An understanding of my positionality allows me to reflect upon the ways that, in qualitative research, the researcher remains the key data collection instrument. My involvement in the collection of data, observing behaviours and conducting interviews and informal conversations puts me at the centre of the research, with all the responsibility that this role brings.

As a decolonial researcher, I also recognise that my background affects and shapes this research in many ways. I know that all the interpretations that I subsequently make as a northern Nigerian Muslim woman come from my personal, cultural and historical experiences and are mediated through these. For these reasons, I have tried to pay attention to power dynamics; especially during my interviews and informal conversations but also in the ways that I analyse the data and share the findings. The opening vignette in this paper serves as a reminder of the need to continually reflect upon positionality in research like this and to revisit data, as I have had to do - thus highlighting the blind spots that can occur within research generally. My axiology therefore remains guided by a relational accountability that promotes respectful representation, reciprocity and rights of the researched (Chilisa 2012), with the former particularly highlighted in the next section, where I explore the historical and contemporary roles of women in the northern Nigerian Islamic education landscape.

4. Women in Islamic Education, Historical and ‘Other’wise

What is clear from the reviewed literature is how historically, in Muslim northern Nigeria, women have always played important roles within Islamic Education and Qur’anic schooling in particular. The work of Mack and Boyd (1997) documents female scholars and teachers as ‘patrons’ of Islamic learning and highlights how women’s roles in Muslim northern Nigeria have been shaped by Islamic traditions and customs dating back to the earliest introduction of Islam into the region around the 11th century (Mack 2023). The most important figure they wrote about was Nana Asma’u bint Usman ‘dan Fodiyo (1793–1864), a daughter of the renowned Muslim leader Sheikh Usman ‘dan Fodiyo (1754–1817). Boyd and Mack’s corpus of work highlight the ways that Nana Asma’u played a key role in educating women and spreading Islamic knowledge through her network of female scholars known as the ‘Yan-Taru’ (“the Associates”). ‘Yan Taru’ (in Hausa language) was an extension programme of women’s Islamic education (Mack 2023) that was completely women-centred and emphasised accessible learning conducted in homes and community spaces. Trained itinerant women educators called (a) Jaji would travel into villages and hinterlands to educate women and children, thereby empowering them through literacy.

The Yan Taru system took education to women in their homes and communities, expanding educational access whilst respecting the cultural norms and values of the time. Importantly though, Nana Asma’u believed that Islamic knowledge was essential for both men and women and used her writing to argue for women’s education and moral agency, grounded in Islamic principles. The ‘Jaji’ used poetry and oral tradition in local languages to emphasise literacy, memorisation, and moral conduct; the efficacy of the movement was enhanced by its incorporation of Nigerian pre-Islamic women’s authoritative roles and titles (Mack 2023). What this shows is how, in the region now known as northern Nigeria, women were not only recipients of Qur’anic education but also transmitters of knowledge within domestic and communal spaces. These roles, whilst seemingly informal, were integral to the sustenance of Islamic learning traditions.

Both historically and contemporarily, women have played key roles in transmitting Islamic knowledge within the home, especially to their children. Mothers are often the first teachers of Qur’anic recitation and basic religious practices. They are the first set of moral educators in many traditionally organised societies, teaching children Qur’anic verses, prayers and other rituals, instilling values like patience, respect, and adab (good conduct). Women have also participated in informal study circles known as halaqa, often led by older, more knowledgeable women or female scholars; this practice has stayed the same, as there is an ever-growing number of female Islamic scholars and teachers particularly in urban areas who are gaining recognition and authority (Mack 2022). In the data analysed for this study, one of the women teachers explained how they used stories from the Qur’an and Hadith to teach younger children and other women, highlighting how these were not just stories but lessons for life and living. Another malama (female teacher, Hausa) said of their women classes, “Muna maganan haila, wankan janaba da zamantakan aure” (we talk about menstruation, ritual baths and marital issues), to describe how she adapted her teaching of tafsir (Qur’anic exegesis) to include discussions on women’s dignity and rights, drawing on her own education, reflections and community experiences. Within these in-house women’s study circles ran by these female teachers, meanings of verses related to modesty and marriage are explored in ways that allowed these women to assert their own understandings rooted in lived and embodied realities, and in ways that challenged otherwise male-dominated interpretations. These intellectual contributions of women teaching children and fellow women the Qur’an and Tafsir and inscribing other religious teachings on the margins echoes Alidou’s observation of Education being a site of both empowerment and contestation, where Muslim women negotiate their identities and aspirations. This negotiation is evident in how the women leverage their informal teaching roles to gain respect and influence within their communities. It also illustrates how women are not passive recipients of religious knowledge but active contributors to its interpretation and transmission. Their engagement reflects what Shaikh (2007) refers to as “embodied tafsir”, an approach to Qur’anic interpretation grounded in ethical experience and spiritual agency.

As far back as 2004, Umar (2004) also noted the increasing number of female Ulama (Islamic scholars) articulating different discourses in gender matters and pursuing careers as religious scholars, a role that was traditionally the preserve of men. He observed that these women were changing these more traditional gender roles, whether their specific views were supportive or subversive of these established gender roles or not. His key argument was that their emergence should be understood as part of a larger transformation of Islamic education in the region. Umar also found that Islamic Reform movements like the JIBWIS (Jama’atul Izalatul Bid’a wa Iqamatus Sunnah), commonly referred to as the Izala movement played a dual (and often paradoxical) role: whilst they appeared to emphasise stricter gender segregation, thereby curtailing women’s public religious roles, their programmes nevertheless opened up spaces for women especially in the late 2000s with JIBWIS initiatives like ‘makarantar matan aure’ (Hausa: meaning ‘schools for married women’).

More recently, Islamiyya schools aimed at integrating Qur’anic and secular education have been created in many urban areas and have opened new spaces for women and girls’ participation, with women and girls attending these schools in their spare time and in the weekends in pursuit of Islamic knowledge. Many of these schools have female teachers and leadership who design and deliver the curriculum in ways that specifically addressed women’s issues. Digital spaces in the form of social media and online platforms have also enabled women to access and disseminate religious knowledge more widely, thereby bypassing traditional gatekeepers. Contemporary women scholars include the likes of Malama Zainab Jaafar Mahmud, Malama Maryam Ahmed Lemu, Malama Khadijah Sakiwa, Malama Juwairiya and Malama Khadijah Gambo Hawajah. Their involvement in formally male-dominated public spheres continues to alter existing and conventional ways of disseminating Islamic knowledge and constructing Islamic authority. However, what some of these forementioned women, especially the first two, have in common is that they are from well-known clerical families and, in that way, already possess a certain proximity to authority and legitimacy. Interestingly, the community female teachers that I had conversations with for this study were also wives of male teachers. Alidou and Hima (2021) highlight how women of clerical lineage and those married to Qur’anic school teachers have played a major role in the propagation of Islamic literacy in precolonial times in the Niger and continue to do so in the postcolonial dispensation. It is clear that the same can be asserted for Nigerian women, both historically and contemporarily. Newman (2024) also found something similar in her study of Senegalese Muslim women and outlined how women from clerical families were often given advanced education, making them respectable scholars and granting them authority and legitimacy. Again at the community level, one of the female teachers who is the wife of a prominent community teacher and leader explained how she ran classes in her home for girls and women between the hours of 10 and 1, teaching them to read and recite the Qur’an and also moral etiquettes, adding that “a wannan lokacin, duk yara sun wuce makaranta kuma an gama aikin gida” (at that time, children have gone to school and we have finished our house work). What these explanations highlight is how relational and embodied practices are navigated by these women in the everyday, thereby asserting their agency. It becomes clear that intellectual and domestic practices intersect in ways that enable the women to engage with and shape their own knowledge production and consumption.

Both historically and contemporarily, women also support the Qur’anic education system through domestic labour, food provision, and financial support in ways that enable the male scholars and students to continue to study full-time. As already highlighted, these women are always present in the background as wives of the malamai (teachers) and act as surrogate mothers to the young almajirai, looking out for all the children in the household as best as they can. The wives of the teachers that I encountered in my study fed the children and looked out for them when they fell ill. Where there are girls, they joined hands in providing care with one saying, “we always help our mothers in cooking and cleaning when we are not learning”. Women in the community also provide food, clothing, and shelter to almajirai, acting as ‘Uwayen Daki’ (community mothers) by offering protection from the vagaries and the everyday harshness of the Almajiranci practice. One such community mother expressed how she has had many almajirai as ‘sons’, and how she feeds and clothes them in return for them helping around the house and running errands for her. Revisiting existing data highlights how quite a few of the almajirai had these female protectors and surrogate mothers within the community. One of the participants from my earlier research stressed that it was because of his uwar daki that he did not feel the full harshness of the practice and was even able to access Western secular schooling alongside being an almajiri. He said “Kamar uwa take gare ni” (She is just like a mother to me). Such practices, whilst missing in more formal accounts, are indispensable to sustaining the educational environment. These informal contributions, though rarely acknowledged, form the basis of the more formal system that claims complete authority over religious education; and also reflect a relational ethic where care work underpins the possibility of learning. It becomes very clear that the wives of the teachers do consider themselves as equally responsible for the boys as much as capacity would permit.

Within the Qur’anic schooling tradition, there are also mothers of almajirai who have very little say in whether their young sons and now daughters (Idris 2022) are sent away to almajiri schools or not, and it is important that they are also acknowledged within the practice. While there is still a gap in the voices of these mothers within my own personal work, more recently Abubakar Idris in his 2022 PhD thesis titled “Rural Migrant Hausa Girls, a Community Faith-Based School, and Environmental Change in Sokoto, Northwest Nigeria” has tried to address this by exploring the intersection of gender, migration, education, and environmental change in northern Nigeria. He finds that increasingly young girls are now being sent to Qur’an schools farther away from home despite traditional norms that required these girls to stay close to home. He interviewed various mothers in his study and found a mix of emotions from pride at the Qur’anic knowledge that their children are gaining to a sense of loss as they had one less pair of hands to help around the home.

I also found this to be the case in some of the schools I observed, and from conversations, alluding to climate change and insecurity issues as contributing to this contemporary trend. Girls are now being sent to these urban schools not only to gain knowledge but also to keep them safe and alive at a time of increasing banditry in the region and failing crops in parts of rural northern Nigeria. Deeper conversations reveal that these girls are often sent alongside their brothers or other girls from their communities and rarely are sent alone. One of the teachers said of the girls that I observed, “Sun biyo yan’uwan su ne” (they have followed their kin/brothers). This holds true to what I find to be a key essence of the Almajiranci practice, its relational nature (Abdulrahman 2018), where every feature of it is interconnected and set within a broader relational paradigm whereby learning is personalised. Idris adds that Hausa culture emphasises the acquisition of Qur’anic knowledge because Islam makes it an obligation to travel far and wide in search of such knowledge, and specifically, to migrate in search of Qur’anic education. He highlights how the learning of the Qur’an was found to significantly determine a person’s place in traditional rural Hausa society, in which children are expected to be brought up with Islamic values.

The above shows how the survival of the more formal and visible Qur’anic schooling system relies heavily on women’s often unrecognised contributions, yet their role is neither formally acknowledged nor valorised in the same way that the men’s are. A key argument that I make in this paper is that it is because of the ways that these contributions are considered informal, that, informality therefore acts as an invisibilisation tool. An important structural survival mechanism in the form of women’s contributions and engagement is reduced by rendering it informal. This argument is key in this study’s theorisation of the formal vs. informal and what it means for the visibility of women’s roles, as outlined in the next section.

5. Exploring Legitimacy Through the Concept of the Formal and Informal

The key point I make here is that women’s gendered and embodied knowledge and roles within the Qur’anic education knowledge production process is seen as informal, as opposed to the more formalised which is male-dominated, visible, institutionalised and therefore regarded as more legitimate. Women’s knowledge(s) within this system of education often appears rooted in the domestic and therefore is rendered informal and regarded not as important. The re-analysis of the data foregrounds the often-overlooked contributions of women and girls to Qur’anic schooling within two interrelated themes of intellectual and domestic labour, both of which act to sustain the pedagogical and social ecology of the Almajiranci practice.

There therefore appears to be a spatial element to this invisibilisation thesis. Women’s contributions and girls learning can often be hidden in plain sight and since many women and girls in these communities still learn and operate inside the homes, they are rendered physically invisible with their learning spaces not really seen as part of the official Qur’anic school network. Gendered pedagogical practices including teaching and learning practices within Qur’anic schools, as highlighted in previous sections, are shaped by contextual and cultural gender norms. Not only are there differentiated expectations placed upon boys and girls, women and men, but the data shows that while boys often received public instruction, girls were more likely to be taught in domestic or informal settings, reflecting broader societal norms and expectations around gender roles and the spatial organisation of learning. Community makarantun Allo (often neighbourhood Almajiri schools) would also only make room for girls for parts of the day and with less intensity than what is expected of boys. In one case, a female teacher operating within her home explained how she often adapted her teaching spaces and methods to accommodate girls’ domestic responsibilities by offering more flexible hours. This teacher added how she also gathered other women and taught them religious norms around topics such as menstruation and ghusl (ritual baths). Women’s roles extended beyond domestic support to include active participation in the transmission of Islamic knowledge. They acted as ‘informal’ teachers, literacy facilitators, and as moral guides

Informal spaces are legitimate and transformative educational arenas and can be very useful for challenging the privileging of the formal in all manners of schooling. They highlight the significance of alternative learning environments as critical sites for knowledge production and showcase acts of adaptation and negotiation that illustrate the everyday forms of agency that Muslim women and girls in these contexts employ to claim space within religious education. This intellectual engagement challenges dominant narratives that position women as peripheral to Qur’anic education. Instead, women’s interventions demonstrate their agency in shaping learning processes and maintaining continuity in instruction. Agency here is as used by Alidou (2005) to explain the capacity of Muslim women to navigate and negotiate multiple systems of power - Islamic, colonial, postcolonial, and patriarchal. She calls this “the intersections of vectors of agency including religion, class and schooling”, stressing that it is not considered as resistance in the Western liberal sense. Alidou’s contention is that agency cannot be apprehended outside the realm of possibilities, material or otherwise, available to individuals or communities in the larger society. She adds that, as a result, it can have various manifestations in both the secular and religious spaces. Newman (2024) supports this and highlights how agency is the socio-culturally mediated capacity to act and stresses the need to embed all discussions within people’s onto-epistemologies such that it does not become another form of secular erasure. Alidou goes on to explore how women’s oral traditions, poetry, and storytelling can also serve as alternative epistemologies, as ways of knowing and transmitting knowledge that are often excluded from formal education and religious institutions. I find this useful for thinking through the concepts of the formal vs. informal, as laid out in this paper.

Theorising the formal and informal as I have tried to do here is not without its bidirectional tensions; this is why I stress that this was never intended as a clear binary. What I try to achieve with this paper is to examine the historical and contemporary roles of women and girls within the educational tradition by thinking through where and how knowledge is produced and consumed, and who has the power to produce what is seen as legitimate knowledge. Revisiting the often-overlooked contributions of women as co-educators, especially highlighting the bi-directional tensions that exist in the categorisations of what counts as formal and informal knowledge, allows us to explore the dynamics of power upon knowledge creation.

There are overlaps and several interactions in these articulations of the formal and informal, but with the informal always somehow underpinning and supporting the formal; and yet, the formal retains the authority to define and even obfuscate the informal. Take the example given of mothers as first educators: while the formal system claims authority over religious education, it nevertheless depends on the moral foundation laid by these mothers and mother surrogates. When we look at the wives of the malamai, themselves teachers or otherwise, Uwayen Daki of almajirai in the community who provide them with food, clothing, shelter and protection, while the malamai are seen as the primary educators and the loci with the apparent survival of the formal system relying upon their validated knowledge; these women support the set-up through their unpaid and unrecognised efforts. It is only because they exist that the students, teachers and entire schooling infrastructure can function in the ways that they do. It appears that while the informal heavily supports the formal, the formal subjugates the contributions of the informal through the lack of acknowledgement of these contributions in ways that ultimately lead to their invisibilisation.

What therefore becomes clear is that this Invisibilisation of women and girls occurs in many ways, including: through structural marginalisation where, despite their presence, women’s contributions are often not documented nor institutionalised, leading to their “invisibilisation” in more formal narratives; through a lack of recognised epistemic authority, where the malamai dominate the production and validation of religious knowledge, thus limiting women’s influence on curriculum and interpretation; and also spatially, where they are physically absent from learning spaces because they operate within their homes, which are not quite conceived as learning spaces in the same way as the visible Qur’anic schools.

As a decolonial scholar and as part of my ongoing work to reflect upon my role in the creation of knowledge process, especially with the full acknowledgement of the ways that coloniality works upon my psyche as a postcolonial and western-schooled Nigerian, I also include an introspection and a critique in this section by revisiting Newman (2024), who warns against feminist thoughts which assume that political influence, personal and economic autonomy are contingent on visibility and presence in the public sphere. In theorising ‘Invisibilisation’, as I try to do with this paper, I am not advocating merely for physicality or even presence in the public sphere. Rather, it is part of a (re)gendering process that is pertinent. I argue that women and girls exist and have always existed in this form of schooling, and that what this is really about is recognising them as active agents in the production, transmission and consumption of Islamic knowledge. It is also about documenting their roles not just as learners but as teachers, reformers, and community members, especially in ways that challenge narratives that overlook or seek to minimise women’s intellectual authority and labour.

Another key argument here is that, without the contributions of these women, both informal and otherwise, this educational tradition would not exist as it does within what Newman calls a relationship of hierarchical complementarity, reminding us all that one of the primary forms of agency employed by women is both to observe dominant religious norms within an ontological framework that positions men and women in ways that can appear oppressive to outsiders, whilst finding ways to negotiate subtly within this tradition (Alidou 2005). Integrating Alidou’s insights with the data gathered so far highlights that women’s roles within Qur’anic schooling go beyond the ancillary and are central to the system’s functioning. Their intellectual and domestic contributions constitute a form of agency that is not only relational, but also culturally embedded and educationally significant. Therefore, acknowledging this through discourse is pertinent.

6. Concluding Remarks: (En)Gendering Through Discursive Visibilisation

Ultimately, the key argument that this paper has tried to make is that ‘knowledge’ as it functions in any society is not neutral and often reflects dominant gender ideologies. Not only are certain knowledges rendered invisible (in this case, through the articulation of the formal and the informal), but also in the ways that differences in the embodied realities of women’s experiences due to social roles closely intertwine with other sets of power dynamics within Qur’anic schooling.

Engendering this form of knowledge has required making visible, through discourse, the gendered dimensions of its location, production, dissemination and consumption. What I have tried to do in this paper is to advocate for a re-reading of northern Nigeria’s Qur’anic schooling tradition in a way that centres women’s historical and contemporary experiences and contributions. This approach has required me to challenge my own thinking, both ontologically and epistemologically. It has also required a methodological shift towards ‘seeing’ what has previously been rendered unseen, through informal conversations and observations, and retuning my senses and awareness to what has always existed in front of me by exploring the lived realities of women and girls within the Qur’anic schooling system. This process of (re)gendering has allowed for a reimagining of existing educational narratives in a way that acknowledges the full spectrum of women’s participation and how recognising this role and agency is important for not only for gender equity, but also as an urgent matter of historical accuracy. Therefore, there is a need for grassroots and community strategies to make women’s contributions even more visible and valued, as not everyone would be like me and develop this understanding at an international conference.

These strategies and the strategic ‘return to seeing’ have to be context-sensitive and informed by a relational ethic that emphasises reciprocity, respect and community-driven transformation in a way that centres and enhances existing practices. I am not advocating for the creation of anything new or completely different but rather a case of bringing to the fore practices that already exist by making apparent what these are using Newman’s concept of ‘hierarchical complementarity’. Through collaborations with influential and respected male scholars, these women’s roles as mothers, respected caregivers and teachers can be legitimised through religious framing and drawing upon the Hadith to situate it within accepted theological principles. Again, this aligns with the study’s commitment to relational accountability, respectful representation and decolonial ethics in the way that it is advocating for approaches that emerge from within the community, the RER approach, rather than imposing external models of recognition and validation that the system neither identifies not holds as ideals.

The roles of women in Northern Nigeria’s Qur’anic education system reflect both deep-rooted continuities and emergent disruptions. While historical patterns of marginalisation in the form of Invisibilisation persist, contemporary shifts driven by reform, technology, and advocacy are also reshaping the landscape. This paper is an acknowledgement that documenting women’s contributions is essential for a more inclusive understanding of Islamic education in the region. Since the days of Nana Asma’u, women have self-organised to offer Islamic education to their communities, and her Yan-taru model continues to inspire Islamic women’s education more widely in West Africa and beyond, with modern Muslim women’s organisations such as FOMWAN (Federation of Muslim Woman in Nigeria) tracing their traditions to Nana Asmau’s methods. Clearly, women have and continue to participate in Qur’anic education as students, caregivers, teachers and educators in various spaces, both informal and formal.