The sisterhood is the scriptorium

Claim (verbatim)

Nana Asma'u bint Usman dan Fodio (1793-1864), the great woman scholar of the Sokoto Caliphate, wrote in three languages — Arabic for the scholars, Fulfulde for the jihad community, Hausa for the women of the yan-taru study network she organized under its jaji leaders — and repeatedly issued her own poems in more than one of them; some sixty works survive in the Boyd-Mack collected edition. An institutionalized pedagogy is a copying machine: texts embedded in the yan-taru curriculum were memorized, recited, and recopied for teaching long after occasional pieces died with their occasions. Survival should therefore track function rather than prestige, and language is the tracer: her Hausa versions, the network's working language, should out-survive their Fulfulde twins in the region's collections even though Fulfulde was the Fodio family's own first literary vernacular — while the wider record shows how exceptional the machine was, since the reference bibliography of the whole Central Sudan credits almost no other woman with a surviving corpus at all. Prediction: for Asma'u works transmitted in more than one language, catalogued copies of the Hausa versions will outnumber copies of the Fulfulde versions by at least three to two across the collections aggregated in AMMS and the source registers of the Boyd-Mack edition, and women other than Asma'u will account for under 2% of author entries in ALA II (primary clause: the three-to-two Hausa-over-Fulfulde copy ratio; the verdict follows it). Kill: the per-work manuscript registers in Boyd and Mack, Collected Works of Nana Asma'u, Daughter of Usman dan Fodiyo (Michigan State University Press, 1997), with the AMMS union records (including Northwestern's Falke, Hunwick, and Paden collections) and the author entries of Arabic Literature of Africa II: The Writings of Central Sudanic Africa (Brill 1995); count copies per work per language.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: for Asma'u works transmitted in more than one language, catalogued copies of the Hausa versions will outnumber copies of the Fulfulde versions by at least three to two across the collections aggregated in AMMS and the source registers of the Boyd-Mack edition, and women other than Asma'u will account for under 2% of author entries in ALA II (primary clause: the three-to-two Hausa-over-Fulfulde copy ratio; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the per-work manuscript registers in Boyd and Mack, Collected Works of Nana Asma'u, Daughter of Usman dan Fodiyo (Michigan State University Press, 1997), with the AMMS union records (including Northwestern's Falke, Hunwick, and Paden collections) and the author entries of Arabic Literature of Africa II: The Writings of Central Sudanic Africa (Brill 1995); count copies per work per language.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

Boyd and Mack's edition documents Asma'u's multilingual twin versions and the yan-taru pedagogy as a deliberate transmission machine, and the near-absence of other women authors in the regional record is noted qualitatively; but catalogued-copy counts per work per language, and a women's share of ALA II author entries, have not been computed.

• J. Boyd & B.B. Mack (eds), Collected Works of Nana Asma'u, Daughter of Usman dan Fodiyo (Michigan State University Press, 1997)
• B.B. Mack & J. Boyd, One Woman's Jihad: Nana Asma'u, Scholar and Scribe (Indiana University Press, 2000)
• J.O. Hunwick (ed.), Arabic Literature of Africa II: The Writings of Central Sudanic Africa (Brill, 1995)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.