ABSTRACT
This study examines the relevance of nineteenth-century Maghrib scholarship models to the transmission of Islamic knowledge and information among communities of American Muslims in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Nana Asma'u 'dan Fodio (1793–1864) – scholar, teacher, poet, and activist – was actively involved in the trials and itinerancy of the Sokoto Jihad (1804–30), in which she was principally involved. Although she never travelled beyond her region (now known as northwestern Nigeria), her scholarly reputation extended throughout the Maghrib during her lifetime. This paper explains how Asma'u's reputation and work was spread from the Maghrib to the USA by American Qadiriyya groups that purposively modelled their own communities on that of the nineteenth-century Fodio family network, developing women's study groups based on Asma'u's model, the 'Yan Taru (The Associates), and using her educational materials in twentieth- and twenty-first-century-technological contexts.
