The role of language in West African Islam

Abstract

Opening Paragraph ‘A translation of the meaning of the Holy Koran into the Hausa language’ – this is the careful wording of the title of the work sponsored by the Jama'atu Nasril Islam (whose President is the Sultan of Sokoto) and signed by Abubakar Mahmoud Gummi, the chairman of its executive committee and former Grand Khadi (Gummi, 1980). It is, in short, as official a Muslim publication as there can be in Nigeria. The Arab text (set in a standard Beirutnaskhtypeface) is on the right of the page, the Hausa, in roman script (boko), on the left; yet colleagues say that the Hausa still reads as if it was simply part of an oral, abbreviated tafsiri transcribed for printing. Though it is nowhere labelled as tafsiri, it has some footnotes and a sentence introducing each sura; and it is a truly vernacular translation – that is, it is not as awkward to read as, say, the books translated by Haliru Binji into what one could best describe as ‘malamanci’. Lastly, the printed text originally was circulated in sections – in part, it is said, to assess people's reactions to a Hausa translation of the Holy Koran being sold in the streets of Nigerian cities. It is a measure of the public's acceptance of this work – which is in reality no more than a printed version of the various oral ‘translations’ one can hear every year in public, on the radio or on tape – that not merely has it now appeared as a single volume but that it has already gone into a second edition; indeed, Alhaji Nasiru Kabara has now almost completed the process of producing his own version.

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