In our earlier talks, I introduced the term urban and suggested that urban is an area where people lived in abundance. Abundance is suggested by the rock paintings and other fossils that are signals about prehistoric life. What then are the great things that stimulate upheaval, instead of gradual change? Islam and Christianity have played a role in creating upheaval as well as gradual change.
Religious mysticism or conversion at times leaves behind literacy, contemplation of faith, as well as prayer. A Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Sahil creates questions in the discussion between the elders who are not practicing strictly as orthodox Muslims, who celebrate their male and female sexuality. The sexuality discussed is not Islamic; Sahil’s novel was banned for its openness about sex. “A Handful of Dates” by the same author in The Anchor Book of Modern African Stories and “Her Three Days” in The Anchor Book of Modern African Stories by Sembene Ousmane is much more cryptic inviting the reader to consider the everyday practices, intimate and public in an Islamic area.
The sexuality in Tayeb Sahil’s novel and Sembene’s story cause us to consider the sexuality of Nawal El Sadaawi’s protagonist Firdaus in Woman at Point Zero. The question of female circumcision finds its way among women in Muslim countries. The practice of consuming honey wine finds a parallel in its adoption around trade routes of migration and Arab commercial travel. Commerce, of course, was followed by conversion and Arabic script, which finds some parallel in the Hausa language northern Nigeria, which is predominately Muslim. Islam is regularly gaining ground all over Western Africa and has become the religion of more than 95 % of the Senegalese population. The islamization of the present territory of Senegal began during the XIth century when the Almoravides arrived. People of the Casamance in Senegal resisted Islam, therefore, we expect a strict focus by Sembene because he was from the Casamance. Similarly Nawal El Saadawi has much to say, having undergone the excision of her clitoris in childhood, as many women experience in east, west, and North Africa .
If female circumcision is a cultural practice, is it a part of gendered security, patriarchal security, traditional security? Does it have a spiritual significance? Does it register in our minds as an equation that must have the same operation in order to maintain its balance? Salwa Bakr’s “Thirty-one Beautiful Green Trees,” suggests in a more mystical fashion that her ability to speak causes consternation of such proportions that she removes her tongue in response to metynomic floods that swept away everything beautiful. The protagonist ‘s breasts and her refusal to wear a brassiere to the office is the subject of whether she is decent or indecent. Alifa Rifaat’s “At the Time of Jasmine” suggests a value that has slipped the narrator’s mind. This value of Jasmine is what strikes the narrator’s mind. In both the world of western business accounting and Islam one might dust his palms of mothers and daughters and sisters. Circumcision followed by years of childbirth and childrearing beg the question of human security, from a western world view. I suppose the question needing clarity is how one adapts and how does one place a value on womanhood?
Study Skills
1. When was the Mosque Al Azar built? Where was it built?
2. Where is Khartoum? What is the name of its largest mosque?
3. When was Timbuktu settled?
4. What is the name of the earliest mosque in Timbuktu? In what country does it reside?
5. Where is Timbuktu in relation to Egypt, northern Nigeria, and Senegal? See map.
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