The Intellectual and Scholarly Activities of Sayyida Rahmatullahi: A Tijaniyya Female Scholar, Preacher, Poet and Housewife, 1966-2014

Abstract

Sayyida Rahmatullahi a traditional female Tijaniyya Muslim scholar in Dandume, Katsina State of Northern Nigeria, never attended any Western education but was blessed with encyclopaedic knowledge. She was an amazing and reputed woman intellectual who dedicated her life to dissemination of Islamic knowledge in teaching of married women, teenage girls, widows and divorcee women, by establishing Islamiyya schools for them in the villages and town of Dandume. She committed herself in delivering many lectures aimed at educating women about the religion of Islam. It is against this background that this paper explores and examines the core values of Sayyida's intellectual activities of lectures and the organization of tafsir (Qur'an exegesis) as being one of the first females to organize such kind of male-dominated activities in Dandume. The paper adopted the theory of Gender and Development (GAD), which explains the active participation of Muslim women in revitalising of the Islamic religious teachings, and used a historical methodology which relying on primary and secondary sources. The objective of this paper is to show the relevance of the historical development and emergence of female scholars preaching in a patriarchal society. This paper brings out some of the aspects of Sayyida Rahmatullahi's intellectual scholarly contributions in the field of women Islamic scholarship.